These two photographs show before and after pictures of Blocksom's School in Sussex County in rural Delaware. The first photo (taken in 1917) shows the pupils standing outside the original one-room schoolhouse made of wood. In addition to an outhouse… [more]

This module traces the shifting ways that age of consent laws have been defined, debated and deployed worldwide and from the Middle Ages to the present, and explores how such laws figure in debates over the nature of childhood, adolescence, and adulthood, in campaigns against prostitution and child marriage, and teenage pregnancy, as well as struggles to achieve gender and sexual equality.

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These two images from the Later Han dynasty (2nd century CE) depict the most famous child in early Chinese literature, Xiang Tuo (pronounced She-Ang Too-o). In both stone carvings, which decorated the outer walls of shrines or funerary monuments, the… [more]

This illustration depicts a scene from the Traditions of Exemplary Women (Lienü zhuan) of Liu Xiang (ca. 77-6 BCE), one of China's first didactic texts on feminine morality. The text to this story is provided below the illustration. The story… [more]

The primary sources in this module lay out the historical conditions that made children important topics of intellectual engagement during Han times and explore themes such as nature vs nurture, separation of the sexes and gender differentiation, the concept of the child as an embodiment of cosmic process and heavenly order, and issues surrounding the status of the child in the family, the state and gerontocratic Chinese culture. [more]

Daguerreotypes were the first commercially viable photographic process. Developed by French chemist Louis Daguerre in 1839, the technique quickly made its way to the US in the 1840s, the beginning of what some historians characterize as the "golden… [more]

Born in present-day Ghana, young Ottobah Cugoano was kidnapped and sold into slavery at the young age of 13. Cugoano worked in the sugar fields of a Grenadan plantation until 1773. That year, Cugoano traveled to England with his owner where he… [more]

This image is of an advertisement for a nearly equal number of adults and children from Sierra Leone at a Charleston Auction. This image is important for several reasons, namely because one should see what an auction advertisement looks like, but… [more]