Chart title: Proportion of children under five who are underweight, 1990 and 2007 (Percentage). Southern Asia: 1990=54%, 2007=48% Sub-Saharan Africa: 1990=31%, 2007=28% South-Eastern Asia: 1990=37%, 2007=25% Western Asia: 1990=14%, 2007=14% Eastern Asia: 1990=17%, 2007=7% Northern Africa: 1990=11%, 2007=7% Latin America and the Caribbean: 1990=11%, 2007=6% Developing regions: 1990=31%, 2007=26% Note: Prevalence of underweight children is estimated based on the NCHS/WHO/CDC reference population. This chart shows a key indicator for malnutrition—underweight children from birth to five years. In developing regions, the proportion of children under five years old who are undernourished declined from 31 per cent in 1990 to 26 per cent in 2006, but 140 million children in developing countries were recorded as underweight in 2006. Eastern Asia, and China in particular, reduced the percentage of underweight children between 1990 and 2006 by more than half. In Southern Asia, despite progress since 1990, almost half of young children are underweight. In Sub-saharan Africa, there has been insufficient progress, where more than a quarter of the region's children are underweight. Notable in these statistics is the progress recorded for Latin America and the Caribbean, Northern Africa, and parts of Asia. There has been no significant progress in Western Asia, a likely result of the large number of refugees and conflict.

Black and white photo of six children of the Seri indigenous people preparing to slide down a hill using the shells of sea turtles as sleds. The place is Tiburón Island in the Gulf of California, the state of Sonora, Mexico. The photograph was taken in 1924 by Edward H. Davis (1862-1951) who owned a ranch near San Diego, California.

Black and white photo postcard image (taken by Father Alberto Maria De Agostini, a missionary, took this postcard image on Isla Grande, Tierra del Fuego, on the southernmost tip of South America circa 1930). The image shows a man, woman, and two children walking through a clearing surrounded by thickets. The man and boy are carrying bows and arrows, and the younger child walks close to his or her mother, who is carrying bundles on a frame on her back. The family members wear robes made of guanaco hide, a South American animal similar to a llama. The woman and children are barefoot. The man wears shoes of fur-covered hide and a cone-shaped hat.

www.unicef.org

UNICEF

July 2009

UNICEF—the acronym stands for United Nations Children's Fund—got its initials from its former name "United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund." It now focuses on the state of children's welfare in all countries on a permanent basis, not only in emergency situations. Accordingly, UNICEF's website is much more than just an information portal. It is an active part of UNICEF's work, providing data, involving the public, and raising awareness of important global issues affecting children.

First, the site is a mine of data on children's welfare, with portals for aggregate and country-by-country statistics on child welfare indicators regarding birth, nutrition, education, access to sanitation and disease, to name just a few. Tracking progress in achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) is one of the centerpieces of several United Nations organizations, including UNICEF. A good summary portal is the sidebar link to ChildInfo, which highlights UNICEF's flagship publications, The State of the World's Children and Progress for Children, and also provides quick links to individual statistical indicators as well as data collection initiatives such as Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys / MICS3, household surveys in individual countries.

The site offers an excellent combination of comprehensive presentation of data, explanation of that data, and access through easily downloaded reports, data sets, and attractively presented material in multiple formats. For example, the 2009 The State of the World's Children report mentioned above offers: a download of the entire report; demographic information for the whole world as a spreadsheet document or pdf file; beautiful photographs; and individual charts and graphs. Several other studies are available in this way, through multiple links that allow a user to browse the site by interest areas and still reach all of the important information sources. The site also features a well-organized, user-friendly menu bar similar to an FAQ approach, such as "What We Do," "Why We Do It," "UNICEF People," and others. The graphics are colorful but not cluttered.

The most extraordinary aspect of the website is the extent to which children themselves are featured in photographs, videos, interviews and other media. The range of countries and issues represented is extraordinarily diverse, putting faces to child abuse programs, youth with disabilities, and many other ways in which youth are advocating for causes and helping themselves and others in concrete ways. These contributions are not poster children eliciting donations, but calls to action and testimony to individual determination and constructive effort. Voices of Youth is a section of the site where youth can gather information on the important issues, learn about UNICEF initiatives that address them, and participate in discussion forums and activities related to these causes. There are several sections here and in other places on the site for video contests, participation in leadership forums with world leaders, youth reports on local initiatives, and digital diaries, artwork displays, and the like. Teachers will find a lot of material here with which to stimulate discussion, research and create lesson material in a wide variety of disciplines.

A few examples show how the site supports UNICEF's focus on engaging children directly. The "Child-Friendly Report" Have Fun, Be Safe is about everyday safety and injury prevention, addressing standards of living involving rural cooking over open fires, congested cities where children walk and ride bikes in traffic, addressing the full range of human economic and social conditions. The document's chapters on topics such as burns, falls, traffic safety, and poisoning are available separately in five languages that include comic strips, games and illustrated text—perfect for language instruction that provides more than practice texts. The second example is the Unite for Child Survival, Radio Drama Contest, which emphasizes the wide access of radio over other media and engages children's creativity to reinforce messages about children's health and welfare. Digital Diaries on the Voices of Youth section of the UNICEF site include input from children who would otherwise be unheard and invisible, such as Yemetu youth speak out on water and sanitation.

Teachers of modern history and regional or world geography will find a wealth of primary sources on this site that can contribute to filling in a realistic picture of children's situations and the economic, public health, scientific, social, cultural, and political issues that affect them, as well as initiatives of remarkable creativity that are currently being employed to address them. There is much material to use here for comparison with earlier global development efforts, historical situations that helped create these complex challenges, and much to draw upon for engaging discussion and inviting participation.

Susan Douglass

George Mason University

UNICEF’s website is much more than just an information portal. It is an active part of UNICEF’s work, providing data, involving the public, and raising awareness of important global issues affecting children.

http://worldart.sjsu.edu

California State University

April 2009

The World Images site, a project of California State University, is designed for simplicity of use if not aesthetic elegance. It is a utilitarian database well suited to teachers, professors, or students looking for presentation images licensed for educational use on a comprehensive range of subjects including photography, painting, illustration, and material culture with global geographic representation.

The image collections are arranged as thumbnail panes on the home page, each hyperlinked to a list of portfolios that indicate how many images each contains. The site holds an archive of 72,000 images organized into 867 portfolios, and a tutorial shows how to create Community Portfolios. Users can browse the collection using keywords, artists, topics, titles, regions, or periods in quick or advanced search modes. Search results can be viewed as titles with hyperlinked acquisition numbers, as thumbnail images with titles, or as small or zoomable images with their metadata.

Categories include institutional collections in the database, faculty collections, course materials, and a collection of image portfolios correlated to required history topics in the California Educational Standards for grades 4–10. Since these curricular requirements are fairly common across the U.S., and in world history beyond the U.S., this is a valuable resource for teachers.

World Images is rich in images related to children and youth. The "People and Portraits" portfolio contains three sub-categories on children with a total of 1,094 images, some overlapping. They include Children to 1500 (234), Children 1500-2000 (544), and Children of the World (316).

The first is fairly inclusive geographically, but includes many images from Western traditions. The second is almost entirely European and American, and the third includes North and South American, African, Asian, and European children's photos and a few artworks and artifacts. Much of the third collection is the work of photographer Kathleen Cohen.

The following search terms returned images on children and youth: "children" (1000), "childhood" (80), "girl" (382), "boy" (555 items), "infant" (119), and "family" (858). The metadata provided with each image includes title, artist or maker, historical period, region or country of origin, copyright holder of the image, and/or museum holding the object. The individual object view also shows what other collections include the object, and links to other objects by the same artist or unknown generic maker from that culture. The photographs are labeled with title, year, location, and photographer, but nothing further, though some of the titles are very descriptive.

The information associated with World Images is thus limited, providing no further contextualization, nor are there links to descriptive information on museum sites where some are housed, for example. For this reason, the works of art found through this website are starting points for research about children in history rather than destinations. Some images, however interesting, remain mysterious.

Teachers wanting to illustrate already researched lectures or activities with licensed images will find this site a rich resource, especially if the lack of detailed information on the images is not a problem. Interesting objects from the collection can stimulate fruitful discoveries of available research on the web or from books and articles. For example, an image of an ancient baby bottle led to a trove of online information about infant feeding through the centuries.

Teachers can also create thematic collections that can be used for primary source investigations. A number of art images show punishment of children's misbehavior, for example, and children at play, as well as infant equipment from various times and places. These images can be used as exercises in examining primary sources as if they were "found objects" at a site or in an archive.

World History Sources at the Center for History and New Media has extensive lessons, exercises, and scholarly models for analyzing primary sources, including photographs, that could provide tools for working with the rich sources available on this website. A feature called "You be the Historian" could be adapted to interrogating the images from the World Images collections, and would reveal much about childhood by investigating questions to ask, and suggesting how to find answers.

Susan Douglass

George Mason University

World Images is rich in images related to children and youth.

http://www.metmuseum.org

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

February 10, 2009

The vast collection of the Metropolitan Museum is effectively arranged and integrated on the www.metmuseum.org website. Navigation of the site is straightforward, enabling efficient browsing or research. Although no specific essays or exhibits on children and youth are found on the site, several hundred artworks relevant to the topic can be located by searching the Collection Database or the Timeline of Art History (TOAH)—more than sites dedicated to the subject.

The Collection Database of 129,022 objects can be searched as a whole, by subject, by curatorial department, or by exhibit. The collection database search is comprehensive, and returned 3629 entries under "children." Childe Hassam is a distracter in this keyword search, but the search "Children NOT Childe" reduced the return to 319 items. "Boy" returned many distracters, but "girl" returned 954 items, and "infant" returned 252 items. "Toys" returned only 21 items, indicating a limitation of the museum's collection in that area. "Youth" returned 186 works and "young" 1741 items. The biggest drawback of the collection search was that many of the works are associated with placeholder images, although the metadata may help locate images elsewhere. As digitization of the collection proceeds, this may improve.

The TOAH is an unmatched resource for educators. The 6,000 included artworks are organized by three integrated elements: maps, timelines, and thematic essays. World and regional maps correlate artwork to eleven world eras and locate it in ten world regions. Timelines place the artworks in historical context, and include key events, political, stylistic and technological periodization. Eight hundred thematic essays provide historical context for groups of artwork and discuss characteristics, techniques, and significance. The essays reveal connections among civilizations and regions, and provide material for comparative study.

Educators searching for information on children in art can locate artworks featuring children and youth by a search of the TOAH, which seems more rewarding than the database search because all of the works are associated with images, and they are easily placed in context by TOAH's features. The searches are conveniently shown by category, so the user can bring up all relevant artworks, essays, timelines or other occurrences with one click.

A TOAH search of "children" found the term in 23 timelines, 153 thematic essays, and 396 works of art. "Figure, Child" in the Subject Index returned 21 essays and 80 works of art, each shown as a thumbnail image with titles. On the subject of childbirth, 15 artworks can be viewed. Terms such as "girl" (97 works), "boy" (9) and "young" or "youth" (4) returned artworks from across the globe and the eras.

An activity using the 97 artworks under "girl" might compare the relative age connoted by the term in various cultures and periods. Some depict small children, while others are clearly young women. A selection of western European drawings and paintings could focus on the changing definition of girlhood over time or explore symbols and objects associated with girlhood. Some of the artworks show girls in active social roles, playing sports and games, fulfilling ritual roles, or being mourned in funerary works. Some of the works are expressions of girls' work in various societies, such as needlework, preparation of trousseaus, or manual labor at home. In short, the collection can be used to gather ideas about girlhood over time and across cultures. Similar explorations about youth and boys could be made. Educators will find many ways to place childhood in historical context using this website.

Susan Douglass

George Mason University

Educators will find many ways to place childhood in historical context using this website.

Why I Taught the Source

The story of colonialism in the early modern era is generally told as one of adults—and primarily adult men—exploring, conquering, and transporting goods and ideas. Historians of women have made it increasingly clear that women are also important actors in this story, but children and adolescents have received little attention. They were also involved, although primarily as members of families, so it is difficult to find much information about them. Orphans were a different story, and they offer an unusual opportunity to see how children fit into the plans and realities of colonial expansion.

The source included here is a suggestion for handling orphans, devised in 1655 by Manoel Severim de Faria, an official for the bishop of Evora in Portugal. In this source he speaks specifically about the role orphaned children could and should play in the Portuguese empire. The source links to many issues in the early modern world, including maritime expansion, gender norms, and changing patterns of poverty, and through these to contemporary issues as well. It provides insight into attitudes toward one particular group of children in an era of competition for wealth and dominance among European powers.

How I Introduce the Source

I have used this source in several different courses: world history, European history, and the history of women and gender. I provide students with guidance and pose a series of questions as we read the source together. It is important that students have the source in front of them, so that every time they answer a question they can point to the specific part of text from which they are drawing information. It is sometimes helpful to have students read the source sentence by sentence until they become more familiar with the official bureaucratese in which it is written. I have found that this can be a useful technique any time a class—even an advanced undergraduate or graduate class—is stuck interpreting materials, for it allows the group to work together as it puzzles through difficult passages.

Students showed better understanding of the source if they were first provided with some background about the way orphans were handled in early modern Europe, which I did orally in some cases and through a written introduction to the source in others. I began by noting that many children in early modern Europe lost one or both parents while they were still young. Most children whose parents had died were taken into the home of a relative, but for some this was not a possibility, and they were placed in a public or church orphanage. Occasionally children who had lost only one parent were placed in orphanages when the surviving spouse determined he or she could not care for them. Children were also left anonymously at the doors of convents or orphanages; most of these foundlings were probably born out of wedlock to poor mothers who could not care for a child while they worked as servants or day-laborers. Many students have heard about children abandoned at church doors and a few have read novels or seen movies about foundlings, so it is useful to discuss the generally dismal circumstances for most children born out of wedlock, and dispel the students' sometimes romantic notions.

Students gain from knowing a bit about the institutional context surrounding orphans, although this does not have to be extensive. The earliest public orphanages in European cities opened in the 14th century, sometimes as parts of city hospitals, and sometimes as independent institutions. Orphanages were supported by church donations, private endowments, and public funds, but the funds provided were often not sufficient to cover all expenses. Thus Severim de Faria's proposal includes much discussion of how to provide financial support for his plans.

Historical background about orphanages can tie into other themes of a course. Not surprisingly, the number of children in orphanages grew dramatically during times of plague or other epidemic diseases, a common topic in world history courses. Orphanages also swelled during times of war. Textbooks often present religious conflicts in early modern Europe in rather abstract terms, as ideas battling ideas, and a focus on what happened to children allows students to better understand the actual impact of religious violence. (This can also be linked with contemporary examples of religious violence.) The same goes for discussions of inflation and other economic dislocations of the 16th century; helping students think about the impact of rapidly-increasing prices for food and land on children makes economic statistics less dry, and also helps them connect the economic issues of the early modern period with those with which they are familiar in their own lives.

Reading the Source

I begin the actual reading of this source with my students by noting that Monoel Severim de Faria sees orphans within the context of social problems and their solutions. We identify these as we work carefully through the text. What are the problems he identifies? We discover a series of these: the lack of "cabin-boys. . .swabbers. . .and sailors" for the Portuguese fleet; poor training for those sailors, so that ships wreck and cargo is lost; vagabonds and people who Severim de Faria thinks are pretending to be poor. (Here you may wish to discuss why he thinks this is so, and link the issue with more recent examples of rhetoric about those taking advantage of social support systems, such as the notion of "welfare queens.") Severim also returns several times to his worries that Portugal is underpopulated. In discussing why he worried about this, we look at maps and at charts about relative European populations in the 16th century.

Once we have identified the problems he cites, we examine the solutions he proposes. Students see right away that the solutions are gender specific: boys are to work on ships and learn how to sail them better, girls are to get married and have more children. This often leads to a broader discussion of gender differences, and I bring in additional information. I note that in terms of gender differences in their life experiences, orphans were not distinct from other children in early modern Europe. In both families and orphanages, children were trained in gender-specific tasks: boys learned to care for animals and make simple items, girls to cook and care for clothing and laundry. When they were old enough, which meant somewhere between seven and 14, children in both families and orphanages often left their parents and moved in with a master or employer, with whom they lived for most of their adolescence. Boys were apprenticed to artisans to learn a trade, while girls worked as servants and gained more domestic skills.

Girls were expected to provide a dowry upon marriage, an issue that students can easily see in the source in Severim de Faria's examples of the way cities such as Milan and Seville "solved" their orphan problem. I have found that my female students of European background are often outraged by the practice of dowry, seeing it—much as Jane Austen did—as "buying a husband." This can lead to a broader discussion of marriage as a means of retaining and transferring wealth, a topic that is often lost in world history classes where the emphasis is generally on less personal economic institutions such as wage labor and commercial exchanges. Based on their reading of any textbook, your students will not be surprised that Severim de Faria connects Seville's growth and prosperity to "commerce with the Indies." Your discussion of marriage can help them see why he links these to "the marriages that take place every year" in Seville as well.

Severim de Faria's proposal is just that—a plan, not a reality. Nevertheless, several early modern governments and private companies established policies based on proposals such as Faria's.This could provide a springboard for student research projects on such public measures as: sending orphans and Jewish children from Portugal to Goa, Brazil, and west Africa; "company daughters" sent by the Dutch East India Company to the East Indies; the filles du roi sent to New France; orphans and other poor children taken off the streets of London and sent as indentured servants to Virginia. Coerced migration is a central part of world history, and involved young people as well as adults.

Reflections

Reading Severim de Faria's proposal allows students to see one way that children were integrated into plans for colonization, and trace ways in which European class and gender patterns were carried around the world. Students gain skill in interpreting official language from an earlier period, and in assessing the underlying assumptions of the author, both of which are important tools of historical analysis. They recognize that Severim de Faria was a member of Portugal's upper classes, concerned about economic growth and deeply suspicious of the poor. Comparisons with contemporary opinion on the part of wealthy and middle-class Americans are easy to draw. How to handle orphans and children whose parents cannot or will not take care of them are important challenges today, both close to home and globally, and this source leads easily to discussions of contemporary parallels in the situation of children as well. This source could thus easily be combined with other documents about poor, abandoned, or otherwise marginalized children from different eras.

Students initially think of Severim de Faria as positive toward women (because he wanted, in their words, to "help" them), but on closer reading they come to see the values underlying his calls for protection and the provision of dowries. This helps students learn that first readings are not always accurate, and that close attention to the tone as well as the exact language of a document is important.

Merry Wiesner-Hanks

University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

59

Francisco Ferreyra versus Don Pedro Sueldo about reclaims. Córdoba, May 12th, 1853. In Villa de Rosario [Córdoba province] on May 17th, 1852, witnesses testified that Sueldo had escaped to Santa Fe [province] to avoid prosecution, and they did not know if the animals that he took belonged specifically to Vicente Ferreyra. Francisco Ferreyra on June 3rd, 1852 accused Sueldo of taking his family's estancia during the 1840s. He stated that the order came specifically from the government. One witness saw the Ferreyra family's brand mark on one cow. He also brought witnesses who worked for Sueldo.

For all of the declarations that have been brought, Señor Mayor, Sueldo disposed of our property as if he was the owner of all our property. . . The most serious measures were taken [against our family] for the security and tranquility of the province. . . [in the 1840s] Don Vicente Ferreyra found out somewhere that it was said that Colonel Salas would march to the province of Córdoba with force, but in fact, he had escaped with various soldiers at his command to Santa Fe, Don Ferreyra having been one among them. . . Ferreyra also drove toward Sante Fe, and he and others emigrated after being ordered to do so. . .

On July 29th, 1852, it is the order of this court, considering first that the estancia was taken with public authority without which had been proven and that [Sueldo] was given permission to its particular uses; second, that Sueldo had used the embargoed property in Calchín; third, that the same [Sueldo] took the [Ferreyras'] furniture; and fourth, that Sueldo took all of the animals out of the province for Santa Fe. . . Don Pedro Sueldo would be absolved of the first three charges; [however,] he is ordered to pay in money or value the attached appraisal of 27 sheep, 70 goats, 21 bushels of wheat, 15 milking cows, etc with more than 200 pesos multiplied by the private interest which accrued during the course of eleven years. . . Tomás Garzón.

[Pedro Sueldo was not satisfied with the verdict and appealed. Daniel, Francisco's brother, responded to one of Sueldo's appeal.]

In the name of the offended, justice commands silence to those, like Sueldo, who have the audacity to say that they served the Patria, [and] who invoke a reputation [and] a good name that they never had received [in the first place]. They talk about their services to the state! These [services] are evident in Villa [de Rosario], a place once full of respectable families before and now depopulated [and] in ruins. They refer to their work for the Patria, but those like [Sueldo] only served as instruments of tyranny to tie the hands and feet [of the Country], sending it to the monster that devours it!!! Oh! No, it is better that Sueldo remain silent. Daniel Ferreyra