Those interested in visual reflections of the daily life of children will find the Hedda Morrison Photographs of China (1933-1946) a useful collection. Morrison (1908-1991), a freelance photographer who lived in Beijing during the years that the collection covers, has left 28 albums, roughly 5,000 photographs, and 10,000 negatives to the archival holdings the Harvard-Yenching Library. All of the photographs from the 28 albums are available for view as are a useful bibliography and a time-line of Hedda Morrison's life.

As organized by Morrison, the albums address specific themes, including religion (particularly Buddhism), architecture and material culture, artwork, social rituals, everyday life, handicrafts, street markets and entertainment, and common people in the midst of their daily labors. Albums can be searched for individual themes and images with search terms "children" and "family" being particularly productive for those exploring the theme of childhood. The images can also be viewed as virtual albums in the same collections assembled by Morrison herself. Indeed, this framework generates a theme worthy of classroom exploration, prompting valuable discussion of how Morrison organized, conceived, and shaped the "China" she was viewing as well as the ways in which images of children helped to define broader frames of meaning in regard to nation, culture, gender, class, and more.

Utilizing the search engine using the keyword "children"returns 123 hits, including candid portraits of children, kids in shared spaces with other family members (both siblings and adults), along with urban and domestic settings (e.g., courtyards, marketplaces, family portraits, scenes of meals and play.) The images offer useful material for a variety of lesson plans and thematic analyses. One example would be an exploration of the material culture of childhood, pursued by students conducting their own visual survey of the items represented, including clothing, toys, furniture, tools and even architecture. These visual surveys of childhood can be usefully tied to investigations of intersecting themes (e.g. childhood and domestic space, children and street culture, children and work or material production). Students could assemble and edit an assembly of images from the collection and accompany their collection with analytical narration.

Another useful line of inquiry regarding this collection and the theme of childhood contained in it is also an exploration of the foci – and the limits – of one subject's view. In other words, what did Hedda Morrison see and what is missing? How is an image of childhood constructed through this collection and how does it compare with other sources and views?

This latter exploration invokes both the strengths and weaknesses of the Hedda Morrison collection. One key limitation is that the collection's scenes are limited largely to the city of Beijing and the surrounding region of North China. As such, it does not capture the variety of material and social practice embodied across China's full range of regional and ethnic diversity. It is, nevertheless, a valuable collection that, matched with other resources, serves explorations of the dual themes of visual culture and childhood in early-to-mid 20th century China.

The Huntington Archive of Buddhist and Related Art offers a rich collection of images of Asian art and architecture. It is based upon the core collection created by John and Susan Huntington, professors of Asian Art History at The Ohio State University who engaged in over 35 years of field work in Asia. Nearly 300,000 images are held in the full collection, representing religious imagery and architecture (both on site and in museums) from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Nepal, Myanmar, Thailand, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, China, and Japan. The historical range begins in 2500 B.C.E. and runs through the present day. Roughly 30,000 black and white images along with a limited number of color ones are accessible through an online "Digital Database Collection." Images are available in multiple sizes, with a zoom feature for more detailed views.

A variety of child-related features are presented at the Huntington site. A collection of links to "Online Exhibitions" currently offers valuable material from China, Japan, India, and Tibet. Exhibition themes include pictography and posters from China, modern art and devotional imagery from India, calligraphy and material arts from Japan, and the material icons and imagery of Tibet. While these collections do not address childhood directly, there are occasional iconographic images of children as well as domestic scenes of religious practice.

Other elements of the exhibit collections can be tied to a culture of childhood as well. For example, the exhibit "Literature in Line: Lianhuanhua Picture Stories from China" offers a collection of drawings from picture stories in popular print during the mid-20th century. One useful collection among these includes illustrations from Zhao Hongben and Qian Xiaodai's Monkey Beats the White-boned Demon (1962), based on the classic tale of Journey to the West. This story (available in an English-language translation by Arthur Waley) has been relished by both adults and children in China and continues to be presented globally as both theater and cinema.

The "Digital Database Collection" is another rich resource for the theme of Buddhism and Asian Art. It consists of nearly 30,000 images collected as documentation of Asian sites and architecture by John and Susan Huntington between the years of 1969-1984. Imagery related to the theme of childhood can be located through simple keyword searches. Images of children largely originate from India and include iconographic figures embracing a child as well as visual presentations of "Buddha life scenes." Such images could be usefully tied to textual sources, Buddhist themes, life-stages, allegory and iconography for research projects. Finally, the projects page at the site offers links and teaching resources related to art history, discussion outlines and presentations, as well as a "Visual Encyclopedia of Buddhist Iconography." Though not directly related to childhood as a major theme, these nevertheless offer valuable resources for those interested in exploring the broader context for the imagery of children and childhood.

The period of U.S. history when thousands of Japanese-Americans were incarcerated in internment camps during World War II is well represented in internet resources for study. One of the richest sites on this topic is the Denshō Website, which documents the lives of internees through text, photographs, maps, and video interviews with survivors. Because today's survivors were children and teens during World War II, their stories reveal the experiences of youth during the incarcerations.

Full access to the Denshō archives, containing "hundreds of hours of video testimony and tens of thousands of historical images," requires free registration; but the site includes a section labeled "From the Archive," which offers highlights from the collection that anyone can explore. One such highlighted feature is titled "Lessons in Democracy," a page using quotations, photographs, and video to explore children's education as "Americans" while living in the camps. In the words of one survivor, "It makes me a little teary-eyed because I think of the irony of learning the Pledge of Allegiance while being behind barbed wire fences."

A teacher could make good use of these materials in a lesson on the contradictions of democracy in U.S. history, and indeed, other parts of the Denshō Website offer resources for augmenting such a lesson. For example, a section of the site named "Sites of Shame" includes an extensive timeline of Asian-American history; it begins with the infamous Naturalization Act of 1790, which stated that only "free white persons" could become citizens, and includes subsequent entries on the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 as well as other undemocratic actions against Asians by the U.S. government. This feature helps students to realize that the incarceration of Japanese Americans was not an isolated event caused merely by World War II, but one that resulted from 150 years of racism toward all Asian immigrants. In this context, the Japanese incarcerations are less about "defending the country" and more an example of the systemic, historic hatred that used to be called "The Yellow Peril," brought to a crisis by a military event.

The "Sites of Shame" section also includes a unique feature that charts the experiences of one particular family, the Yasutakes, as told by four siblings who were children and teens during the incarceration. Unfolding in several different "chapters," with audio interviews and photographs, the Yasutake experience is detailed from the moment when their home was first searched by the FBI through their incarceration, their ultimate release, and the modern-day aftermath they have experienced as adults. One interview clip draws an insightful parallel between past and present: noting how often he's been told to put that "ancient" past behind him, one Yasutake sibling states that the jingoistic response to the 9/11 attacks prove "this 'ancient' history from 60 years ago is just as relevant now as it ever has been."

The "Sites of Shame" section of the Denshō Website further offers an interactive map of the U.S., allowing visitors to click on the locations of numerous detention centers; each click yields statistical data about the camp in question, and many of these pages include brief video interviews with survivors detailing the lives of children and teens in the camps. The page for the Heart Mountain camp in Wyoming includes a video of a woman recalling her group of high-school girls singing Christmas carols to one of the camp's armed guards. Though intended as a subtle, sarcastic act of resistance, the carols had an unexpected effect: the guard, homesick, became choked-up and thanked the teenage girls for what he thought was their kindness. Anecdotes like these make a deep impact on viewers by revealing the complicated emotional experiences behind historical facts.

Details of daily life are further illuminated on the page for the Santa Fe Department of Justice Internment Camp, where a man's video interview describes the educational activities of children and youth: "[W]e had many schools in Santa Fe like drawing, physics, electricity, in shigin and shakuhachi and utai, and of course Japanese language. And then they had the pen shuji -- that's Japanese calligraphy, writing with the regular pen, not the brush. And so our time spent there was never idle. We always did something."

Using these pages along with the Denshō site's resources on "Lessons in Democracy," a teacher can juxtapose the dual, competing cultural lessons—American and Japanese—that framed the lives of incarcerated children. On the Denshō site's main page, one can click the "Learning Center" tab for a wealth of other suggestions designed specifically for high-school and college teachers to build lessons around the site's rich materials.

Several other internet sites, though less comprehensive, offer useful materials on the subject of children's lives in the camps. The Denshō site's information about the daily experiences of children can be fruitfully paired with "Ansel Adams's Photographs of Japanese-American Internment at Manzanar," an online collection hosted at the Library of Congress's massive American Memory website. Though limited to only one detention camp, Manzanar, Adams' beautiful photographs illuminate many of the experiences of daily life that were common among internees at several camps. By searching the collection for "child," "family," "boys," and "girls," visitors will find stunning high-resolution images of the contexts of children's lives: interiors of living quarters, schoolrooms, gardens, hospitals, and camp stores where families shopped. These photographs provide a haunting glimpse of the bizarre contradictions of camp life: the relative appearance of "normality" (children living with their parents, going to Sunday School, playing games, shopping) in the starkly depressing context of broken-down barracks and barren desert surroundings, with barbed-wire borders.

Another resource for study can be found on the PBS website for the documentary, Children of the Camps. The most useful of the ancillary materials is a timeline of events that is briefer and more specific to WWII than the Asian-American timeline at the Denshō site. This timeline would be useful to students who are gaining their first sustained exposure to the topic.

In a section of the site called "Historical Documents," one can find a full-text copy of Franklin D. Roosevelt's infamous Executive Order 9066, that mandated the evacuation and imprisonment of Japanese American families, as well as subsequent government documents that attempted to repair the damage: the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, mandating reparations and apologies to the survivors, and a copy of President Clinton's formal letter of apology on behalf of the nation.

As a helpful prompt to further study, Children of the Camps has assembled an extensive list of links to websites that offer more detailed histories of the camps themselves, their locations, and other aspects of Japanese-American history in the aftermath of the incarcerations. This page of links does not seem well-maintained, as a few of the links are currently dead. The active ones, however, are well worth exploring. They offer innumerable helpful materials to any teacher or student seeking to study the Japanese-American experience during and after World War II.

The Adoption History Project is a superb resource for scholars and students alike. Not only does it offer a broad and consistently high-quality range of historical information, the site itself was designed with user accessibility in mind—it is easy to navigate and welcoming for students.

The home page introduces the five major categories. Of these, one that might appeal most immediately to students is the Timeline, which gives a concise, one-page overview of major developments in adoption history from 1851 to 2000. Other categories include: major people and organizations; explanations of adoption studies and adoption science; general topics in adoption history; and a rich collection of primary-source documents that, in itself, offers hours of compelling reading. See, for example, the illustrated excerpts from The Dangerous Classes of New York and Twenty Years' Work Among Them [1872] by Charles Loring Brace, a leading figure in 19th century social reform and child-rescue.

Shorter primary sources appear in full-text form; longer ones are efficiently excerpted for easy reading, with full citations provided. Further Reading offers references to many useful texts. One of the site's nicest design features is that much of this information is cross-indexed, so that visitors can find the same pages easily through a variety of different paths. To make navigation even simpler, a Site Index provides a clear and cogent list of topics.

Written in a clear and engaging style, the site offers quick access to major issues that shape the field of adoption history. For example, Adoption Studies/Adoption Science leads to a paragraph that neatly explains: "Adoption has been the subject of four major types of empirical research: field studies, outcome studies, nature-nurture studies, and psychopathology studies." Each term is hyperlinked to chronological lists of studies in the relevant area. The page also provides descriptions of particular studies and excerpts, making it relatively simple for someone new to the field to quickly grasp the general shape of the discourse of adoption history.

The overall content reflects the impact of Cultural Studies and multiculturalism on the field of adoption history. Pages on transracial adoptions, African-American adoptions, and the Indian Adoption Project complement those devoted to the more traditionally visible history of white orphans, white social workers, and white adoptive parents.

One small critique of the biographies of major figures: the pages devoted to female figures (such as Pearl S. Buck and Anna Freud) mention their marital and/or parental status, often in the very first paragraph, presenting the impression that a woman's personal relationships are the most necessary and relevant facts of her life. Meanwhile, the male figures are discussed solely for their professional importance, with little or no mention of their family life.

Feminist historians will find this irritating, especially in the case of Anna Freud, who is described reductively as an apparent victim of an Elektra complex: "She made her father's profession her own . . . . Anna Freud never married or had children. She was her father's constant companion, his colleague, and his nurse during the final years of his life." Especially because it appears in the first paragraph, this is an inappropriately condescending description of someone who deserves to have her professional accomplishments foregrounded. That flaw, however, could easily be turned into a good teaching opportunity with students who are old enough to grasp the concept of gender bias in historiography.

Overall, the Adoption History Project is among the best-designed and most succinctly comprehensive historical websites currently available. It is useful for students and scholars at all levels of academic proficiency.

Child with purple plastic doll near Kumasi, Ghana