In Motion: The African-American Migration Project portrays the history of 13 defining migrations that formed and transformed African Americans from the 16th century to the present. These themes include such central topics as "The Transatlantic Slave Trade" and "Colonization and Emigration" but also include migrations internal to the United States ("The Northern Migration" and "The Great Migration") and more recent (and often overlooked) movements, such as "Return South Migration" and "Haitian Immigration: 20th Century." The selection of topics itself, presents some interesting revisions to conventional notions of both the narrative of African American history and the constitution of today's African American population. While only a relatively narrow portion of the database addresses the history of children and childhood, the unique source materials available here and the excellent supporting documentation collected at the site still make it an attractive option for course adaptation.

Produced by The New York Public Library's Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the database comprises more than 16,500 pages of texts, 8,300 illustrations, and over 60 maps. Substantial contextual information and teaching resources are available for each migration. These include a narrative, about 100 illustrations, from 20 to 40 research resources (essays, books, articles, and manuscripts), maps, and well thought-out lesson plans for teachers. Most of the latter are aimed at the high school level, but could be adapted to other levels. A bibliography and list of related web sites is also supplied for each migration, and a Glossary, located on the Educational Materials page, contains encyclopedic explanations of various key terms in African American history. The site is visually attractive and generally well organized.

Finding material relating specifically to children at this site, however, is not straight forward. The Source Materials "search" function did not work any of the times this reviewer attempted to use it. Searching for "children" using the search function from the site's home page produces a list of those subsections of the site in which the term appears. From there, users can locate "Migration References," "Images" (there are nearly 700 images), "Texts" (over 200, including both primary and secondary sources), "Educational Materials," or "Glossary Terms" involving children, (although with regard to the Texts in particular, it is not always evident where the material addressing children's history is located.) Teachers could also direct students directly to those sections treating family life in particular: "Family Matters" (Return South Migration), "Family Life and the Second Generation" (Haitian Immigration), "Family Life: Continuity and Change" (African Immigration).

Once located, viewers can access materials ranging from tables documenting the proportion of children among enslaved Africans who crossed the Atlantic, to post-Civil war era letters written by former slaves searching for children who had been taken from them, to advertisements for "The Crisis," a periodical edited by W.E. DuBois addressing African-American lives in the early 20th century. As these sources suggest, although the site purports to move the discussion of African-American history beyond an exclusive concentration on the history of slavery, the bulk of the documentation available here does deal with the legacy of the slave trade.

While it is a little challenging to locate material on children at the site, the primary sources and supporting materials sometimes allow students and teachers to see how children themselves changed the course of African American history. Children, for instance, created an important bond between different branches of African American families, northern-born children moved south to be cared for by, and later to care for, their grandparents. Instructors might use the materials available at this site to create exercises dealing with the different migrations treated here. For instance, students could locate and analyze material dealing with children's experiences in two of the different migrations: If they played transformative roles for kin networks during the Great Migration northward and in its aftermath, what was children's comparative impact during Africans' initial migration to America? What factors might explain the differences?

Children's Drawings of the Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939 were produced by children evacuated from the war zones to 'colonies' in other parts of Spain and in southern France. The drawings depict subjects such as the bombing of villages, battle scenes with tanks and planes, events during the evacuations, and daily life in the colonies (or the past). A combined effort by the Spanish Board of Education and the Carnegie Institute of Spain led to the assemblage of a large collection of drawings during the war. Some of these drawings were sent to the United States in 1938 by Joseph A. Weissberger to support a campaign by the American Friends Service Committee to raise funds for further evacuations. The Quaker organization published a collection of 60 of drawings, under the title of And They Still Draw Pictures! (c. 1938), with a prologue by Aldous Huxley. Subsequently the drawings were dispersed among a number of institutions, the majority (609) went to the University of California at San Diego. The 153 drawings accessible on this web site were bequeathed to Columbia University in 1938 by a benefactor who, it is assumed, purchased them at an exhibition earlier that year. They later became part of the collection of the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library. As it happened, a former director of the Library, Angela Giral, was herself an evacuee from the Civil War. In a personal note, she cited Joseph Weissberger's description of the drawings as 'autobiographic pages of un-kept diaries'.

One can browse the collection in three ways: via the whole collection; the children's names; or the provinces where they resided as evacuees. This is helpful for family members trying to trace the work of relatives, but a thematic classification might have been more useful for teachers and researchers. The click of a mouse allows the browser to see a reasonably large version of each drawing, with the detail visible and the colors of the crayons used by the children vividly reproduced. There is also a caption giving the name and (where known) the age of the child, the colony to which they had been moved, and a brief description of the content in Spanish and English. Thus No. 22 explains: "This scene shows the day of the evacuation when, as we were about to climb into the train, we saw an airplane that was already firing and we had to go to a shelter nearby." Drawn by children between the ages of seven and fourteen, the pictures exhibited a considerable disparity between the untutored style of the majority, and the relatively sophisticated technique of a minority. No. 107, 'War Scene', for example, shows a woman grieving over her dead husband in a composition heavily indebted to The Angelus by Jean-François Millet.

There is a short section entitled "About the Collection," which contains little more information on the drawings beyond that summarized above. Hence we are given no help in understanding the context in which the drawings emerged, or the link between the drawings, the circumstances of the war, and the mindset of the children. Nevertheless, one might, for example, pose questions on the children's reactions to bombing, how they were evacuated, their new experiences in the colonies – and differences in the way boys and girls perceived the war. By way of comparison, scholars may find it useful to consult the more in-depth studies of children's drawings in wartime by the specialist in the Nazi occupation of Europe, Nicholas Stargardt. 1 At least the They Still Draw Pictures site gives the link to the web site for the San Diego collection. The latter reproduces the very up-beat introduction by Aldous Huxley. He notes the artistic talent of the younger children, free from what he sees as the dead hand of adult teaching. He also deplores the sad introduction the children received to one of the wonders of the modern age, the aeroplane, as bombs rained down on them from above.

In short, this is a potentially interesting collection that gives a child's perspective on the war, but from a teacher's point of view, there is very little help in ways of deploying it in the classroom.

Children in Urban America (CUAP), focuses on children and childhood primarily in the greater Milwaukee area from 1850 to 2000. The site is organized around five sections. Four are "central experiences in children's lives": Work, Play and Leisure, Schooling, and Health and Welfare. A final section, entitled "Through Children's Eyes", offers stories, oral histories, and memoirs of children who grew up in Milwaukee.

Each section offers a brief introduction, a gallery of images, and a series of "Special Topics" combining a background essay and relevant primary sources. Topics range from the Socialist Party, religion, and newsboys to polio and "Milwaukee's Most Famous Teenager." They bring together relevant primary sources, frame the topic, and offer suggested keywords and search terms for locating additional resources.

An introduction to the site as a whole provides an overview of the goals of the project, background on Milwaukee, and a brief overview of the history of children in early America.

The archive offers more than 4,000 resources, including newspaper stories, photographs, quantitative data, oral histories, personal narratives, and summaries of various topics and time periods. At first glance, it is not apparent that the site offers such a wealth of resources and the search page, is the key for accessing many of these. The search is accessible by clicking on the purple kite in the top, right corner labeled "Search CUAP" or the "Search CUAP" link in the left navigation bar.

Once you reach the search page, you can easily search for a word or phrase or can select one of the predefined "keywords," such as addiction, adoption, dance, or protest. You can narrow the search by selecting more than one keyword, limiting the search results to one of the five sections of the site (i.e., "Health and Welfare"), selecting one of 10 neighborhoods, or choosing a decade. A search on "curriculum" returns close to 200 results, but "curriculum" and "sexuality" narrows it to six.

Another useful feature is a list of research topics and tips. Questions are grouped into middle school, high school, and college and cover a host of subjects, from games to newspaper coverage to the impact of technology on the lives of children.

The rich sources available here are relevant to teaching a range of topics, from child labor to commercial leisure, from race relations in a northern city to life as a student during the cold war. The section called "Boys at Work: The Newsboys of Milwaukee" offers a glimpse into the lives of "newsboys" in the early 20th century that resembles but differs from the commonly told stories of newsies in New York City. A search on "prom" returns 28 matches, from a 1921 class history to a 1940 letter describing a high school prom to a news account of an African American prom queen in1972, allowing for an interesting look at the meaning and definition of proms throughout the 20th century.

CUAP offers a compelling look at children in one geographic region during an important time in the history of childhood. It also provides a model for the many kinds of sources available for the study of children and youth and for the many topics to be examined.

While many students may have an interest in Southeast Asia, locating primary sources on the region's history can often seem a challenging task. This online collection contributes nicely to projects on the region as it offers over 350 written works in English and French that provide first-hand accounts of travel in Southeast Asia, as well as roughly 1,000 images of the region, including photographs, drawings, prints, and maps. The time-frame for these texts is also rich in its breadth as the collection includes works composed between 1550 and the 1920s.

The website is well framed with a multi-page section ("About the Collection") that provides valuable detail on its online holdings and the region that it covers. Useful information on the area's history, geography, on the significance of the travel accounts (and, importantly, the selection criteria for their inclusion), as well as downloadable bibliographies of works in the collection already sorted by the country or author's name are all available here.

The search engine for the site is quite flexible. Users can search for terms in full-text, author, and title fields along with related options for limiting and focusing the search (a subject-heading search would, of course, improve this even further.) A search for "child" in the full-text field results in 297 records, with each providing the number of text matches found for the term within each source. These textual matches can be seen by clicking a "Results Details" link that provides a textual excerpt in which the search term has been located and a link to the digital scan of the exact page itself. Links to the each of the related works' own table of contents and first page are also provided.

Another profitable way to explore the resource is also via the "Browse" page for images and their related keywords, which, with some digging, provide a good number of images related to children. Key topics and themes for exploration here might include costume, dwellings, religion, class and gender, among others.

This collection can be nicely utilized in a study of the ways in which images of the child figure within (and help to convey) the broader themes of European and American writings on a colonized space. For example, one can find a good number of works written on the Philippines via the "Browse" page for images, which include listings under letter "C" for children. A student might explore both the images and the texts in which they are situated, comparing the visual compositions associated with children to the language and meanings conveyed by the written account itself.

In sum, the strengths of this site lie in its depth as a primary source collection, particularly in the temporal range of its assembled works and in its rich assembly of accompanying images as well as their ready availability as a digital resource.

Wahawi ya wahawi
iyyahah
Ruht ya Sha'ban
Gayt ya Ramadan
iyyahah
Bint is-Sultan
Labsah al-guftan
iyyahah
Yallah al-Gaffar
Idduna al-idiyah
Yallah al-Gaffar
(Ramadan song, Arabic transliteration)

Wahawi, ya wahawi
iyyahah
You have gone, O Sha'ban,
You have come, O Ramadan,
iyyahah
The daughter of the Sultan
is wearing her caftan,
iyyahah
For God the forgiver
Give us this season's gift.
(Ramadan song, English translation)

Birthdays are of little account in Samoa. But for the birth itself of the baby of high rank, a great feast will be held, and much property given away. The first baby must always be born in the mother's village and if she has gone to live in the village of her husband, she must go home for the occasion. For several months before the birth of the child the father's relatives have brought gifts of food to the prospective mother, while the mother's female relatives have been busy making pure white bark cloth for baby clothes and weaving dozens of tiny pandanus mats which form the layette. The expectant mother goes home laden with food gifts and when she returns to her husband's family, her family provides her with the exact equivalent in mats and bark cloth as a gift to them. At the birth itself the father's mother or sister must be present to care for the new-born baby while the midwife and the relatives of the mother care for her. There is no privacy about a birth. Convention dictates that the mother should neither writhe, nor cry out, nor inveigh against the presence of twenty or thirty people in the house who sit up all night if need be, laughing, joking, and playing games. The midwife cuts the cord with a fresh bamboo knife and then all wait eagerly for the cord to fall off, the signal for a feast. It the baby is a girl, the cord is buried under a paper mulberry tree (the tree from which bark cloth is made) to ensure her growing up to be industrious at household tasks; for a boy it is thrown into the sea that he may be a skilled fisherman, or planted under a taro plant to give him industry in farming. Then the visitors go home, the mother rises and goes about her daily tasks, and the new baby ceases to be of much interest to any one. The day, the month in which it was born, is forgotten. Its first steps or first words are remarked without exuberant comment, without ceremony. . .

Babies are always nursed, and in the few cases where the mother's milk fails her, a wet nurse is sought among the kinsfolk. From the first week they are also given other food, papaya, cocoanut milk, sugar-cane juice; the food is either masticated by the mother and then put into the baby's mouth on her finger, or if it is liquid, a piece of bark cloth is dipped into it and the child allowed to suck it, as shepherds feed orphaned lambs. The babies are nursed whenever they cry and there is no attempt at regularity. Unless a woman expects another child, she will nurse a baby until it is two or three years old, as the simplest device for pacifying its crying. Babies sleep with their mothers as long as they are at the breast; after weaning they are usually handed over to the care of some younger girl in the household. They are bathed frequently with the juice of a wild orange and rubbed with cocoanut oil until their skins glisten.

The chief nurse-maid is usually a child of six or seven who is not strong enough to lift a baby over six month sold, but who can carry the child straddling the left hip, or on the small of the back. A child of six or seven months of age will assume this straddling position naturally when it is picked up. Their diminutive nurses do not encourage children to walk, as babies who can walk about are more complicated charges. They walk before they talk, but it is impossible to give the age of walking with any exactness, though I saw two babies walk whom I knew to be only nine months old, and my impression is that the average age is about a year. The life on the floor, for all activities within a Samoan house are conducted on the floor, encourages crawling, and children under three or four years of age optionally crawl or walk. . .

The weight of the punishment usually falls upon the next oldest child, who learns to shout, “Come out of the sun,” before she has fully appreciated the necessity of doing so herself. By the time Samoan girls and boys have reached sixteen or seventeen years of age these perpetual admonitions to the younger ones have become an inseparable part of their conversation, a monotonous, irritated undercurrent to all their comments. I have known them to intersperse their remarks every two or three minutes with, “Keep still,” “Sit still,” “Keep your mouth shut,” “Stop that noise,” uttered quite mechanically although all of the little ones present may have been behaving as quietly as a row of intimidated mice. On the whole, this last requirement of silence is continually mentioned and never enforced. The little nurses are more interested in peace than in forming the characters of their small charges and when a child begins to howl, it is simply dragged out of earshot of its elders. No mother will ever exert herself to discipline a younger child if an older one can be made responsible. . . .

This fear of the disagreeable consequences resulting from a child's crying, is so firmly fixed in the minds of the older children that long after there is any need for it, they succumb to some little tyrant's threat of making a scene, and five-year-olds bully their way into expeditions on which they will have to be carried, into weaving parties where they will tangle the strands, and cook houses where they will tear up the cooking leaves or get thoroughly smudged with the soot and have to be washed—all because an older boy or girl has become so accustomed to yielding any point to stop an outcry.

The Japanese Old Photographs of the Bakumastu-Meiji Periods collection housed at the Nagasaki University Library offers a rich assembly of images of Japan, most of which were taken in the latter half of the 19th century. The collection currently holds approximately 6,000 photographs from that period, many of which are hand-tinted. The collection runs rich in its themes and subject matter with a broad assembly of images of landscapes, architecture, religious sites, city and work-site scenes, as well as individual and group portraits of people of all ages.

The site offers a variety of methods by which to search and explore its content. The two most profitable ways to do so are via the "Defining Your Search" tab or via the "Category or Keyword" tab. "Category or Keyword" offers 77 different keywords within broader categories (e.g. "Person," "Urban Facilities," "Manners and Customs"). The keyword of "child" is also offered here and leads to 126 photographs.

"Defining Your Search" can also be useful as it allows one to enter a word that might appear in a photograph's own description. While those texts are somewhat limited, generally running just a few lines to describe a scene and not necessarily accompanying each photo, searches using this method can prove profitable.

For example, while the keywords of "toy" and "game" are not offered on the provided "Category or Keyword" page, a search within the "Defining Your Search" mode produces 52 hits for "toy" and 24 for "game." The search engine thus has a fair amount of flexibility that, with some creativity in approach, can be quite usefully employed.

One may also view each of the 14 photographers’ collections individually. The contingent of photographers whose work resides in the collection includes a majority of Japanese photographers as well as others from England, the U.S., Austria, and the Netherlands. Finally, searches can also be conducted by location, with provided listings not only in Japan but also, to a limited degree, in China, Thailand, and Singapore.

The content of the images related to children is quite useful. While some photographs are more formal in their posed composition than others, a fair number offer a view towards household scenes and daily life. Suzuki Shin-ichi’s image of a "Girl Playing with a Baby" presents a domestic image of a baby being cared for by an older girl, surrounded by a number of toys which she appears to be employing in an effort to entertain the infant (who, it would also appear, may actually have been more interested in the photographer beyond the frame). While this would appear to be a posed studio image, others can be found of children in the fields, city streets, in country schools and the like.

This collection of images can be utilized in explorations of a diverse range of themes. Students might explore the presentations of domestic ideals related to the child in posed scenes such as "A Woman Putting her Child to Bed" and the "Girl Playing with Baby" noted above, as well as others like these that can be found in the collection.

Other lines of exploration might include the elements of material culture, particularly clothing and toys, that can be seen here (see, for example, "Country Children"), as well as the photographs of game-playing and work itself – indeed, sometimes the two seem to overlap (see "Children Playing in a Flume" for fishing as fun).

Limitations to the site do exist. The descriptions often lack dates, locations, and other identifying information. The images themselves are generally small in size and limited in their clarity for powerpoint (or other) reproduction. These limitations do not hamper constructive use of the collection, however, which can be usefully mined in a student’s own survey of the material and further compared with other collections on the topic.