The history of childhood depends, to some extent, on understanding the history of home- and family-life, the primary context in which childhood occurs. In the U.S., the rise of the field known as "home economics" had an enormous impact on popular conceptions of children and what kind of care they require. The impressive HEARTH website offers the most comprehensive online collection of primary sources in the field of home economics from 1850 through 1950; a few sources, such as full-text articles from the Journal of Home Economics, are inclusive through 1980. Introductory material addresses the importance of home economics to women's history and children's history as well as its broad impact on American culture.

Materials are arranged into 11 broadly-defined topics; each is introduced with a short essay, an image, and a substantial bibliography of influential texts on that topic, in PDF format. The history of home economics is a relatively young discipline, so these bibliographies provide an especially valuable service. While only one of the site's self-designed subject headings (Care, Human Development, and Family Studies) appears at first glance to be relevant for historians of childhood and youth, in fact, the entire site has valuable resources to offer.

The field of Home Economics grew in concert with the popularity of the "scientific" approach to child-development. This approach influenced the systematization of public education, children's medical and psychological care, and the social studies of juvenile delinquency, among other topics. Indeed, Home Economics became one of the primary disciplinary venues through which child-study developed. Consequently, many subject bibliographies contain material relevant to the health, psychology, moral development, and education of children. Home economics was also a subject taught to young women in high schools and colleges for many decades, so a good share of the material on this site was read by female youths as part of their education.

To find material specific to the history of children and/or youth, start with the Browse page. This presents a list—fairly short now, but still growing—of available full-text journals. Clicking on the title of a journal leads to a list of all volumes and issue numbers for each year of publication; these, too, appear as hyperlinks, which lead to full-text articles. All issues of the journal Children, produced by the U.S. Government Publication Office from 1954 to 1971, for example, are reproduced in their entirety. One can scan the tables of contents for each issue and discover articles with intriguing titles such as "What Makes a Good Parent?" and "Mental Retardation in the Soviet Union".

The "Browse" page also indexes HEARTH's full-text holdings (journals and books) alphabetically by author or title. Unfortunately, the books are not categorized beyond this. A reader who does not already know specific titles or authors will find it time-consuming to scan these alphabetized lists—it is like searching for a book in a library by wandering through the stacks and gazing hopefully at the shelves.

The sole example of subject-categorization lies in the PDF subject-bibliographies. Alas, the PDF format is a poor choice. It prevents titles from appearing as hyperlinks, meaning that viewers cannot look at a bibliography and know which entries, if any, are available in full-text on the website.

The full-text books and journals at HEARTH can be used to explore a range of topics when teaching the institutional history of childhood, such as how various institutions like the government, public schools, hospitals, and social services, influenced American ideologies of home, family, and children. Students raised in late 20th century schools may find it remarkable, for example, that turn-of-the-century educators considered a child's moral development to be an imperative duty of schoolteachers. Felix Adler's The Moral Instruction of Children (1912), which can be read in full-text on the site, includes chapters on children's moral responsibilities, like "The Duties Toward All Men (Justice and Charity)" and "The Elements of Civic Duty." Adler also offers chapters on how to instill morals in children by using fables, fairy tales, and even Homer's Odyssey. This emphasis on character, duty, and citizenship bears only a scant resemblance to the modern-day emphasis on building students' "self-esteem" in K-12 teaching. A history teacher might use this text to prompt students to think about change over time in America's concepts of children's roles in society, and what children "need" to fulfill those roles.

Categories or strategies for searching would make these materials more user friendly for teachers and students, but barring that, the topics listed on the Subjects page or in the background essays provide a good starting point.

In 1958, Dr. John Nietz, an emeritus professor of Education at the University of Pittsburgh, donated 9,000 old textbooks from his personal collection to the Pitt library. 19th Century Schoolbooks offers full-text access to 140 of these volumes as well as two surveys of historic schoolbooks created by Nietz. The books are available as page images as well as searchable text. An index of the collection provides bibliographic records for all 16,000 volumes in Nietz's collection.

The collection focuses on standardized textbooks on general subject matters (most often reading, spelling, geography, arithmetic, and history), published or circulated between 1800 and 1899 for use in K-12 schools. The site allows for several types of searches: basic, boolean, proximity, and bibliographic searches, for those seeking a specific search-term, and a helpful browsing feature for those who simply want to see a sampling of what the collection offers. Clicking on a letter of the alphabet will allow you to browse all titles that begin with that letter.

This site will be most immediately useful to those studying the history of U.S. education, but other historians can find much here that could be of use in their classes. One intriguing aspect of the site is its revelations about the social values of a bygone time. The proliferation of textbooks on elocution and oratory, for example, attests to the earnest emphasis on spoken words in the 19th century: how to pronounce them, how to voice them clearly and "correctly"; how to emote words for dramatic recitations.

Texts like Dr. Scudder's Tales for Little Readers, About the Heathen vividly demonstrate the condescending curiosity in 19th-century Orientalism. Chapter Two, "The Colors and Ornaments of the Hindoos," explains to the child-reader that some heathens are red, some are black, and many of them are beautiful, especially the "children of Brahmins and others, who are delicately brought up."

Entries such as The Ladies' Reader: designed for the use of schools and family reading circles, are valuable for exploring gender. This reader contains selections from famous literary works deemed appropriate for female sensibilities.

Teachers of early American history might find it useful to examine the New England Primer, a valuable resource reproduced in its entirety. The New England Primer was a standard reader used for over two centuries, making it one of the foremost influential pedagogical texts in U.S. history. Examining each page of the Primer, visitors can study its juxtapositions of Puritan theology with elemental reading lessons, as in its famous Rhymed Alphabet (Letter J: "Job feels the Rod / Yet blesses God").

The full texts of two treatises written by Nietz on textbooks are also useful resources: Old Textbooks (1961) and The Evolution of American Secondary-School Textbooks (1966). These texts provide a good historical overview and introduction to the subject matter, as well as providing insight into the approach to analyzing textbooks in the 1960s.

Additional reference materials include Using Textbooks as a Research Resource: A Bibliography, which offers an annotated list of scholarly works that utilize children's textbooks as primary sources. The bibliography includes works from as early as 1908, providing a rare longitudinal glimpse of the field of education-history. One limitation in this bibliography is that it contains no works more recent than the 1990s.

A resource page provides links to related websites, such as the American Antiquarian Society's Pedagogical Juvenile Books collection. The entries are representative (not comprehensive) of special collections and rare-book rooms in U.S., British, and Canadian libraries. Some links are out of date. Overall, this website offers much that is useful in studying the history of American children's education.

One of a pair of woodblock prints from Japan's Tokugawa Period (1600–1868) depicting popular children's games for girls.

Age Limit in Age of Consent Laws in Selected Countries

The New York Public Library Digital Collections is a vast database of material primarily, but not exclusively, documents 19th- and 20th-century life in the U.S. The collections are principally visual sources, and include digitized versions of such material as rare prints and photographs, scanned images from books, sound files, and moving images.

Several collections are especially useful to historians of children and childhood, including the Mid-Manhattan Library Picture Collection Online. This collection contains 30,000 digitized images from books, magazines, and newspapers as well as original photographs, prints, and postcards, mostly created before 1923. A keyword search for children in this collection, for instance, connects users to 85 images, while girl links to 48 different images.

Also useful to historians is the NYPL Digital Gallery, which provides access to over 550,000 images digitized from primary sources and printed rarities, including illuminated manuscripts, vintage posters, illustrated books, and printed ephemera. The subject index lists nearly 300 subject headings related to children that demonstrate enormous spatial, temporal, and subject breadth. Entries vary from Children — Africa and Children — Soviet Union to Child labor and Children — Clothing & dress — England — 1860-1869.

One interesting collection includes two groups of 50 cigarette cards. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, tobacco manufacturers issued these trade cards to stiffen cigarette packaging and advertise brands. This collection includes several subsets depicting children, such as Children with rosy cheeks and Children of all nations. In the latter, we see national stereotypes crystallized. England is a blonde youth in a school-boy uniform, while Mexico is a peasant. Canada is not present at all!

The cigarette card images illustrate one of the fascinating ways in which instructors and students could use material from the New York Public Library Digital site. In his 1962 publication, Centuries of Childhood, Philippe Ariès presented the provocative claim that childhood was an invention of the post-medieval world. Historians studying children and childhood continue to debate this idea and larger notions of how parents and broader social institutions treated children and conceived of childhood across time. Our own era recoils at the association of children and childhood with the tobacco industry, yet tobacco manufactures in the past century promoted an association of their product with children and childhood with no hesitation.

In other cases, we see advertisers depicting children as small adults, rather than emphasizing a particularly distinctive era of childhood. See, for example, this Easter trade card from L. Prang & Co.

Instructors and students could study the use of children in advertising across time and by various industries. In addition to the cigarette cards, a subject search within the Digital Gallery of children and advertising yields a further 333 illustrations. These and other images available in the Digital Gallery can be used to examine the changing associations that Western (and world) societies have created with childhood in different periods, and to what different purposes they have used these associations.1

Instructors might wish to consider the limitations of the sources pertaining to childhood available at this website. Common to most sources treating this topic, is the fact that children are perhaps the most voiceless of all possible historical subjects. (The sources children generated to depict their realities are all but non-existent.) We are always dealing with outsiders' views, looking in at (or more often, literally down upon) them. In all of these sources, what we almost always witness is a viewer's construction of children and childhood. In the images contained in this site, however, the degree to which this construction occurs ranges from the blatant, as in this 1874 Children’s Aid Society advertisement to the more subtle Some typical Cuban faces - Santiago, Cuba 1899.

This latter photograph illustrates another shortcoming of many of these sources: the absence of expansive information about the context in which they were created or which they depict. Often, we know no more than the date on which an image was generated. Therefore, history teachers would likely wish to preview the sources they select for students to use and to present relevant background information about production and purpose of the source whenever possible.