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.

"Who is the lady of Lofty mein
Who walks about with the air of a queen
And movement as steady as a Ford machine
Why sonny that's our matron

Who is busy as a big bumble bee
Getting us up promptly at reveille
And calling us down in a stinging hey
Why laddie that's our matron

Who is high mistress of this whole works
Sees that no loafer his duty shirks
And about the place no deadly germ lurks
You're right lad that's our matron

Who sends us out to do the chores
And makes us stop to close the doors
And downs our necks the castor oil flows
Why sure son that's our matron.

Who carries the worry of the whole red race
written in lines of care on her face
And smooths out troubles in every place
Right my son that's our matron

Merry Christmas 1917, Dedicated to Mrs. G by One of the Boys"

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.

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http://images.google.com/hosted/life

LIFE

July 2009

Imagine walking down a hallway lined with photographs. Now imagine walking through a labyrinth of hallways with 10 million photographs and drawings, the approximate number of images available in the LIFE photo archive, hosted by Google.

On one wall, a black-and-white photograph shows a white baby perched on the edge of a sink holding a toothbrush in its mouth. On another, an African American toddler sits snuggled in a blanket on a shelter chair during a flood in Louisville, Kentucky. Still other images show two daughters of Czar Nicholas II of Russia on an outdoor patio, school children in Ecuador waving flags during a visit by U.S. President Richard Nixon, uniform-clad boys in the Nazi Youth Movement marching in formation, or an 11-year-old Amish girl shooting marbles in the U.S. national girls' tournament.

This remarkable collection is a visual goldmine. Teachers and students of an almost endless number of topics related to children and youth in American and world history can explore for hours, searching photographs and drawings from the 1750s to the present, most of which are seen publicly for the first time on this website. The majority of the images come from the 20th century, showcasing the work of famous photographers, such as Gordon Park, Alfred Eisenstaedt, and Margaret Bourke-White, among many others.

Exploring this archive, however, is at once fascinating, rewarding, and incredibly frustrating. Search results are capped at a maximum of 200 images, meaning that a search on "children" returns only a tiny fraction of the possible matches. Some images are presented with basic source information, such as title, location, date, photographer, and image size while others provide no information at all, leaving the viewer with many unanswered questions.

Some images are part of collections, such as the hundreds of "Gibson Girls" drawings or the "Circus Girl" photographs taken in 1952. In the right column, "related images" sometimes appear and many of the images are tagged with "labels" that offer pathways through the mass of images. An image of a baby, for example, might lead to a tag for "baby carriage," "children at play," "blind children," or "child care," all of which lead down other paths or abruptly end. Or an image might link to no other images, sending you back to the beginning to find another path.

Photographs appear in three sizes: small, medium, and large. Images are presented at 300 dpi and even the medium-sized images are of decent size for classroom use, roughly 400 x 600 pixels. The larger scans contain a LIFE watermark and while all images are available at no cost for personal and research purposes, the archive also offers each image for sale, framed, at a cost of $79.99 and up.

The photographs as a whole depict a range of childhood experiences, from famous young people in formal settings (Shirley Temple on her 11th birthday "wearing her first long dress, a fluffy frock of marquisette trimmed with a dubonnet ribbon") to ordinary children engaged in everyday activities, such as the children at a Turkish tobacco factory daycare "where working moms drop their kids during their day shift."

Spanning several centuries and many borders, this collection provides a glimpse into many different experiences of childhood and youth. Students could examine a range of customs across time and culture, exploring, for example, the material culture of childhood from swaddling to cribs or the role of institutions, such as schools, hospitals, orphanages, in the lives of young people. Even more revealing, however, would be an assignment exploring what the words and images found within this archive tell us about the society that produced and consumed Life magazine—the photographers, editors, writers, and subscribers who interacted with these images and created meaning from them day to day.

The caption next to the young girl in the shelter, for example, reads, "Lonely little African-American baby sucking her thumb." Next to a 1938 photograph from Romania is the caption, "A Gypsy lighting the small oven while holding her dirty child." White children are rarely described as "lonely" or "dirty," even when collected under the label "poverty."

The subjects selected are equally telling. Several photographs of African mothers nursing their newborns focus on the women's breasts and nipples. Other women from Myanmar, Vietnam, Finland, Albania, Pakistan, and Israel are also shown nursing. Compare this to images of white women with their young, fully dressed and often, in the mid-20th century, with a bottle. What does this say about perceptions of motherhood, gender, and child rearing? About gender, race, and nationality?

This rich archive can provide primary source material on a host of national and international topics, from dress, play, education, and health to national identity and international relations. Whether looking for something specific, such as images from a 1951 hearing on comic books, or broad, such as high school, you will likely find many images worth exploring. The images are high enough quality to print and use easily for research or class assignments. Keep in mind, however, that despite the powerful Google search engine, in some ways you are left to wander through the labyrinth unguided, without a map that might provide a sense of how images fit into the collection as a whole. It is hard to know exactly what a given search term will return and with the limit on search results, it is impossible to see the full range of images on many topics. It is, however, a worthwhile adventure if you begin with patience and creativity.

Kelly Schrum

George Mason University

This rich archive can provide primary source material on a host of national and international topics, from dress, play, education, and health to national identity and international relations.

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.

Robert W. Sexty

June 2009

Captain of Industry

Butch wants a bicycle! Lots of lawn and lemonade and baby-sitting lie between Butch and that bike, but we’re betting on the boy. He has energy, vision, and our national habit of working hard for what he wants. He’s American business – in miniature.

There are many names for Butch’s philosophy. You can call it Free Enterprise, Opportunity, Democracy, or Capitalism, if you want.

But whatever the name, America owes it much. For our most valuable natural resource lies in the ambition and initiative of Americans like Butch.

As great publications have grown from the dreams of young men with old hand-presses – the electric industry had small beginnings, too. A few men with vision strung the first short lines. People with faith risked their savings. Better and better service, at lower and lower cost, created more and more jobs – and carried the benefits of electric living to more and more people.

Free enterprise—and hard work—will bring Butch and his bike together. They are what built America and the American way of life. No nation on earth has found a satisfactory substitute for that combination.”

Listen to the New Electric Hour – the HOUR OF CHARM. Sundays, 4:30 P.M., EDT, CBS.

America’s business-managed, tax-paying
ELECTRIC LIGHT AND POWER COMPANIES.

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.