1. Cao Xueqin. The Story of the Stone. Translated by David Hawkes. 5 vols. New York: Penguin Classics, 1973.
   A classic novel from 18th-century China that presents the life of an elite family, offering rich detail of daily life and practice, period humor, and dramatic intrigue.
2. Hsiung Ping-chen. A Tender Voyage: Children and Childhood in Late Imperial China. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005.
   A path-breaking work on childhood in late Imperial China – an excellent study that explores the lives of children in relation to the social, material, and philosophical context of the period while raising important historiographic issues for further research.
3. Kinney, Anne Behnke, ed. Chinese Views of Childhood. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1995.
   An edited volume rich in its thematic and temporal coverage of themes related to childhood in Chinese history.
4. Saari, Jon L. Legacies of Childhood: Growing Up Chinese in a Time of Crisis, 1890-1920. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press East Asian Monographs, 1990.
   This text provides an insightful examination of the experience of childhood at a moment of historical transition between the established traditions of family and education and the shifts accompanying the rise of a modern China in the early 20th century.

by Susan Douglass
(Suggested writing time: 50 minutes)

Using the images and texts in the documents provided, write a well-organized essay of at least five paragraphs in response to the following prompt.

• Create a portrait describing childhood in late Imperial China in terms of the roles children were socialized to fulfill, the roles parents were expected to play in providing for and nurturing children at different stages of development, and the cultural objects used in teaching, entertaining, and childrearing. Base your description on analysis of evidence in the documents.

Your essay should:

• have a clear thesis,
• use at least six of the documents to support your thesis,
• how analysis by grouping the documents into at least two groups,
• analyze the point of view of the documents, and
• recognize the limitation of the documents before you by suggesting an additional type of document or source to make your discussion more complete or valid.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following institutions for primary sources:

[Information Coming Soon]

About the Author

Sue Fernsebner is a specialist in the cultural and social history of China during the 19th and 20th centuries. Her interests lie in the shared realms of material culture and social experience, gender, and global encounters. Included among her published works is the study "A People's Playthings: Toys, Childhood, and Chinese Identity, 1909–1933." She is currently finishing a book on China's participation in world's fairs and international expositions. She is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Mary Washington.

About the Lesson Plan Author

Susan Douglass is a doctoral student in history at George Mason University, and also serves as education outreach consultant for the Al-Waleed Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University. Publications include World Eras: Rise and Spread of Islam, 622-1500 (Thompson/Gale, 2002), the study Teaching About Religion in National and State Social Studies Standards (Freedom Forum First Amendment Center and Council on Islamic Education, 2000), and teaching resources, both online and in print, including and the curriculum project World History for Us All, The Indian Ocean in World History, and websites for documentary films such as Cities of Light: the Rise and Fall of Islamic Spain and Muhammad:Legacy of a Prophet.

An exploration of primary sources on childhood in late imperial China (framed broadly as the Song through Qing dynasties, ca. 960-1911 CE) offers a window into lived experience and the diverse ways in which childhood itself could be imagined and articulated. As with other times and places, the historical record presents a variety of perspectives and different takes on childhood, providing a sense of that realm as socially defined, imagined, and experienced.

Chinese family life in the late imperial period was marked by a complex realm of relationships. Children often grew up amidst an extended family of parents and siblings, grandparents, cousins, and, for the wealthier families, a domestic realm that would also include servants, wet-nurses, as well as the various women of a household including a formal wife and (potentially) multiple concubines. Extended families were thus the norm, offering a rich and complex community for the child.

Practices of child-rearing and the life patterns of children were shaped by class and gender. The management of the household was overseen by females as was child-rearing itself. Women would care for the children and, particularly as the late imperial period progressed through the Ming and Qing dynasties, would also be responsible for much of their early education. Youngsters would be guided in their initial acquisition of literacy and numbers through memorization of basic poetry and childhood primers.

Men in a family would also often play a role in children's lives, particularly in shaping decisions about the continued education and training of children (both boys and girls). Many a father or grandfather would also enjoy and celebrate leisure time with kids at play in the domestic quarters.

Children themselves would share together the joys and endeavors of early childhood through to an age of seven or eight years, at which point gendered divisions would be more clearly defined in their own activities and in their own spaces of learning. Growing girls would learn from other women in the household the essential skills associated with the feminine, including embroidery, sewing, cooking, and, particularly for elite girls, reading and calligraphy.

Elite boys, having shared an early training and playful realm with little girls, would then move to their own education, building up a literacy and experience with the canon of Confucian classics in preparation for the imperial state's civil service exams that could bring true success to their family and lineage. Boys who were not from elite classes, but who were raised in peasant households or by working class families, would also begin to engage in more strenuous work in the fields or perhaps new duties in the shops and artisan studios of an urban center.

Social relationships, meanwhile, were shaped by and articulated through a rich culture of philosophy and practice associated with the family. Confucian classics such as The Book of Rites (Liji) set forth an ideal vision of the proper child and the mandated aims of child-rearing. Here, as in the many instructional texts that circulated amidst China's booming print industry of the late imperial period, an emphasis was placed upon a moral training for the child in appropriate forms of behavior and in a recognition of the value of social relationships.

Moral teachings included the inculcation of a respect for elders and the encouragement of a child's true expressions of filial piety. This latter ideal was one celebrated as the foundation of a good family and of society itself. In ideal examples, children were honored for displaying a heartfelt sense of obligation, gratitude, and loyalty to their family as well as their dedication, throughout life, in caring for their elders.

Actual practice, naturally, was more complex. Reaching beyond the texts devoted to the ideal and exemplary, one also discovers more varied depictions of children's lives. Sources found in literature, poetry, biography and family records as well as in visual images from the time reveal the variety of experiences, emotions, challenges, and playful intrigue found in (or represented through) the experience of childhood.

The collection of primary sources offered here presents a view of both the normative prescriptions for the proper child as well as alternate perspectives on a culture of childhood in late imperial China.

The texts presented here offer a broad range of perspectives on childhood in late Imperial china. They include historical tales for children that paint the stories of heroes and villains, period literature, images, and folklore collections that offer a view toward the daily life and amusements of children, as well as the rhymed primers intended to train the child not only in literacy but also in a social and moral sensibility.

The sources cover a broad time frame as well as diverse aspects of childhood in late imperial China. They speak to a number of related themes and issues including ideal notions of the child and a child's place in the family, practices of play and amusement, and the complexities of latter-day efforts (and, indeed, those of adults themselves) to recapture and understand childhood as its own realm.

One aspect for students to explore through their readings of this material is the moral instruction and dissemination of values that historical children would have encountered in their own exploration of these texts and stories. Students may read and compare the Meng Ch'iu and San Tzu Ching texts in regard to this issue. These two texts also provide for a view towards a comparison over time as the Meng Ch'iu text was critiqued and later faded from use (see source introductions for more detail).

Useful questions to ask here would include:

• What moral instructions might children have found in these texts?
• What were the idealized social roles that were presented?
• What might adults who shared these texts have hoped that their children would have learned from them?

Students might also explore the visions presented of the relationship between an individual and the social world that they inhabited, sometimes subtly and often less so, in these texts. In exploring these questions, students may discover the closely tied (at least in an idealized realm) relationship between children and parents and the celebrated role of the family as the center of an ordered Chinese society.

A second line of exploration for students lies in a comparative exploration of notions of amusement. Here we may compare pedagogical texts, particularly the San Tzu Ching, with images and impressions gained from literature (Story of the Stone), rhymes (Headland's collections), and images of childhood play.

• How does the evidence offered in these diverse sources complicate a vision of childhood discipline as presented in pedagogical texts?
• What did "fun" mean to different children of the time?
• How did these sources' own presentation of childhood amusement offer evidence towards more complex visions of personal identity, life-paths, and social relationships?

Here one may explore articulations of family relationships, marriage, and education, among other topics, that are revealed in these texts and images.

Finally, Isaac Taylor Headland's study of childhood rhymes and amusements sheds light upon a culture of play shared by children outside the elite class as represented in Hong Lou Meng. His collections introduce their own complexities, however, as material presented by a foreign observer of Chinese life in an era of high imperialism. As such, it offers a valuable opportunity for students to explore the complex nature of a cross-cultural encounter at a particular moment, one defined by a new economy and culture of global exchange, competition, and colonialism.

Worthwhile questions of exploration include:

• How does I.T. Headland describe or define "Chinese" in this discussion?
• What are the points he seeks to make?
• Who might he have imagined as his audience?
• In what ways do our Chinese sources coincide with – or complicate – the depiction and analysis he offers?

Discussion Questions

Sources 1 and 2: Meng Ch'iu, Empress Ma in coarse-woven silk. . . and K'uang Heng bores a hole in the wall Sun Ching shuts his door [Literary Excerpts]

• Are these visions of success or achievement? What makes a good husband, wife, son or daughter? How are the relationships between people in these roles celebrated?
• What are the values that are celebrated here?
• How is friendship or companionship characterized or depicted?
• How does emotion, as shown in these stories, related to moral value(s) or to idealized social roles?

Source 3: Three-Character Classic [Literary Excerpt]

• What are the core social roles presented here?
• What kinds of mutual obligations and responsibilities are encouraged or mandated by these verses?
• How does memorization as a way of learning shape knowledge, and the individual? Is this a practice still known in our own day?

Source 4: The Story of the Stone [Literary Excerpt]

• What constitutes joy (or the opposite) for the elite children depicted in this text?
• What are the visions of talent and success as seen here? What skills do these youngsters celebrate for themselves?
• In what ways does this text complicate our vision of society as seen in the text of the children's primer?

Source 5: "Joyous Celebration at the New Year" [Image]

• What objects do the children in these images make use of? How do they appear, how are they handled or used, and what life do they seem to hold for the little ones who possess them? Students are encouraged to explore the visual depictions of the toys and objects themselves, and to imagine the games and play they might suggest.
• What kinds of social relationships within an elite household are represented in this image, both in the arrangement of domestic space and its uses? How does this visual depiction reveal an ideal vision of relationships within the family and between generations, genders, and classes?
• How does this visual image compare to the textual expressions of domestic ideals and relationships? (e.g. a child's feelings of respect and filial piety towards their parents, the joys of play and creative diversions, engagement in productive work in the household?)

Source 6: The Chinese Boy and Girl, Preface [Literary Excerpt]

• How does Isaac Taylor Headland describe or define "Chinese" in his discussion? What are the terms he uses? Points he seeks to make? Who might he imagine as his audience?
• In what ways do the Chinese rhymes and discussion he shares depict Chinese childhood and family life? What perspectives are offered on family roles, gender, socio-economic class? In what ways does Headland invoke discourses of nation and culture?
• How do these sources compare with others, translated from Chinese, that we have seen?

Source 7: Chinese Mother Goose Rhymes [Literary Excerpts]

• What can we learn about specific social values as defined by a role in the family – mother, son, daughter, father, others? How do these rhymes reflect and/or complicate understandings of a traditional family system in imperial China?
• In what way does the humor presented in these rhymes also shed light upon an individual's expectations, hopes, or view of their life-path at that moment in history?

Source 8: "Yin Yu Tang: A Chinese Home" [Online Exhibit]

• How did families organize their domestic space in the late imperial period as seen in this exhibit? What are the ways in which the space is arranged, utilized, and imagined?
• Imagine yourself as a child growing up in this house. Where, in this household setting, did the children fit in? How does it seem that children may have used or experienced this space?
• What objects, in this family home, were designed for children? What were their practical purposes or uses? What might have been the personal value or symbolic meanings attached to them?

Sources 9 and 10: Children and Toys and Selling Toys [Selections]

• Describe, in detail, the toys that we see depicted in these photographs of street scenes in China. Of what materials where they constructed and who made them? Who sold them? Who are the consumers depicted here?
• What attractions might these toys have held for children? What sorts of figures or imagery do they present? What stories, games, or visions of make-believe might they have inspired?

Lesson Plan: Children in Late Imperial China

by Susan Douglass

Time Estimated: three to four 50-minute classes

Objectives

1. Students will make inferences from primary sources about expectations for instruction and roles of children in late Imperial China, 10th to 20th century.
2. Students will differentiate between roles and attributes of boys and girls in China during the period.
3. Students will explain how expectations for child raising changed over time in late Imperial China.
4. Students will explore what a household reveals about ways of life for family members through examination of the Yin Yu Tang house virtual exhibition.

Materials

• Printouts of primary sources sufficient for each student to have a full set of the texts and images in the Late Imperial China Teaching Module. 1
• Computer(s) with internet connection to view the Peabody Museum online exhibit Yin Yu Tang house (lab, projection, assignment, or smartboard for viewing)
• Writing materials, notebooks, pads & pencils for sketching

Strategies

Hook
Think of a favorite children's book of yours, and describe its storyline in a short paragraph or narrative. Explain what moral or ethical message may be inherent in that story, and what it says about the contemporary culture of childhood (or the culture of the period in which it was written) and what expectations for the upbringing of children it reveals. Then, think of a favorite toy and sketch or describe it, explaining how you played with it, and why you enjoyed it. Did the toy have gender-specific attributes? What did it say about childhood in contemporary culture? Was it handmade or mass-produced, generic or a famous brand-name?

Toys and Celebrations
Using the images "Joyous Celebration at the New Year," and the photographic collections "Children and Toys" and "Selling Toys," students can make sketches of the toys and play activities shown. The annotations to the primary sources give some explanations of the images, and sketching the toys shown may help give clues as to their play value—what did they do that was attractive to children as play (e.g., movement, making sounds, humorous animals, whirligigs, fireworks, dolls or puppets, etc.) ? A high-resolution image of Joyous Celebration at the New Year, shows much greater detail for the individual figures and groups. Discuss continuity and change over time between the painting and the photographs, as well as universal aspects of play across cultures. Which toys and activities seem gender-specific? What activities in the images do not rely on toys (e.g. putting pine branches in the fireplace in the painting, children playing with each other, etc.), and how are children in the painting and photographs involved in helping, serving adults, etc.

Children's Literature
Building from the hook activity on children's literature, read the selections in the module such as the Three-Character Classic, The Story of the Stone, Chinese Mother Goose Rhymes and the more biographical Meng Ch'iu, Empress Ma in coarse-woven silk and Meng Ch'iu, K'uang Heng bores a hole in the wall Sun Ching shuts his door. Make a list of citations from the excerpts that indicate normative behavior. Mark them with sticky-notes, highlight, or copy the citations. Make a two-column chart with the headings: Qualities of the ideal boy and Qualities of the ideal girl. Using the citations, list the personal and moral qualities the stories instill about proper behavior and moral actions of boys and girls in Chinese society. (Extension: for comparison, the same activity can be done with examples of didactic literature either from other Children & Youth in History primary sources or from historical children's literature for examples).

Exploring the Yin Yu Tang House
Introduce the activity by asking students to quickly sketch the layout of their own house, describe their sleeping space, and list the members of their household. They should use this material to think about how the house relates to the neighboring homes, how the common spaces of the house are shared by family members, and how this shared space reflects rules about adults' and children's roles in the family. What does your bedroom convey about the importance given to individual space and expectations about raising children, or child development? What values does the difference in decoration in common and private spaces say about the culture and how the family is constituted? Share ideas and differences among members of the class in discussion.

Yin Yu Tang House, cont.
Building from the ideas shared about the students' own homes and lives, view the exhibit. Students may be assigned to view the exhibit as homework if this is practical. Pay particular attention to the layout of the house and conventions for who occupied which spaces in the house, who slept in which rooms with whom, and how other spaces in the house were used. In the Yin Yu Tang house, there were also spaces created or reserved for absent persons, and for reverence toward other figures. These figures changed over time (e.g., Buddhist objects of worship, ancestor images, lists of past family members, and later images of Mao).

Optional Activity
The letters reproduced in the exhibit provide considerable evidence concerning lasting expectations and relations between adult children and their parents. Inquiries about health, concern for the raising of children from afar by absent fathers, duties concerning marriage of siblings and others, requests for goods from the city, formulas of politeness required in addressing family members, all make for interesting inferences about the nature of family life and the results of traditional upbringing of children.

Optional Activity
The sections of the exhibit on Ornamentation and Belongings are very revealing of change over time, as traditional carving and invocation of legends, lore, and protective decoration give way to the use of industrially produced decorative elements such as wallpaper, newspapers, and nationalist iconography such as Mao images vs. images and writing related to ancestors and religious imagery.

DBQ

Writing the essay as a culminating activity can be done as a timed writing or as a homework assignment (see: Document Based Question).

Differentiation

Advanced Students
Students may explore the objects and layout of the house in further detail, reporting on clothing, furnishings, and other aspects of interest. They may also explore additional passages from the literature excerpted in this module and evaluate these sources in terms of their use as evidence in explaining childrearing and education in late Imperial China.

Less Advanced Students
Students can work with a limited number of documents, focusing their writing on one or more of the following three choices:

1. comparison between their own family home and the Yin Yu Tang house;
2. comparing toys in contemporary society with the toys and games shown; or
3. a familiar didactic work of children's literature may also provide a concrete foil for comparison with some of the examples given in this module.

Use one or more of these three possibilities to compose a concluding essay that utilizes evidence from the two sets of sources.

The "Images Canada" site showcases thousands of photographs (interspersed with occasional cartoons) found in the collections of 15 Canadian cultural establishments, including the Canada Science and Technology Museum, the University of Toronto Library, and the Glenbow Library and Archives, an institution focusing on the history of the Canadian West. The site includes thousands of images featuring children in Canadian history that instructors might potentially utilize for class discussions and course assignments. However, instructors and students should note that they will likely need to do additional research and reading in order to make effective use of the resources found on this site.

The images in the collection include both formal portraits and candid shots and focus particularly on the period from the 1880s to the 1950s. Children are featured in photographs dealing with an eclectic range of topics, but are prominent in the themes of native history, immigration, schools, church, and family life. Photos dealing with these topics might be fruitfully adapted to classroom use. Focusing on family portraits, for example, instructors might ask students to study what the changing conventions of portraiture across time reveal about changing dynamics of family life and children's position in it. Or they might compare portrait conventions among different immigrant communities or examine what the staging of boys' and girls' portraits reveals about attitudes toward gender.

The database is searchable by key word. A search of "children" upturns over 6,000 hits, so researchers will likely want to narrow their searches down by doing boolean searches; "children Inuit" hits a more manageable 217 images and "children school" 833. However, the search function is a little too rigid and teachers should therefore instruct their students to spend some time browsing though the site rather than dismissing unfruitful key word searches. For example, while "children illness" yields no results, "children polio" does turn up 6 images.

Furthermore, some of the interesting descriptors of images on the site are not indexed, and so would unfortunately not be retrieved in a search. For instance, a search of "childcare" turns up no hits. However, the photograph "First Crop, Teepee Ranch" reveals one: "A.M. Bezanson and his son on a horse-drawn mower, cutting the first crop on Teepee Ranch in 1909." The infant is perched on his father's lap while the latter performs this no doubt taxing physical task. This snapshot and others like it, including "Mrs. Roy Benson (Verna) and children with chicks, Benson homestead, Munson, Alberta" document how early 20th-century Canadians adapted children—and the responsibility of their care—into their everyday working lives.

The site's "Educational Resources" section has some promising lesson plan ideas, but most of them are aimed at younger students. Other elements of this site include "Image trails" and "Photo Essays" – groups of images organized around 29 themes dealing mainly with geography, modes of transportation, and select historical topics. Most of these will not be especially useful to those interested in children's history, although the Calgary in the 1950s photo essay does feature a number of images of children in its "family" link. Instructors might use this group of photos as well as information from the "family values" introductory essay by asking students to consider what idealizations of family life—and its possible disruptions—the images document.

However, in this collection, as in other portions of the website collections, teachers may be frustrated by the insufficient background information available about each image. For instance, the last photo in this section pictures an adolescent female wearing jeans and reading on a couch. The caption reads: "Blue jeans: acceptable at home but not school in 1955." But no further information about the image—or its caption—is provided. So instructors will have to prepare students (or require that they prepare themselves) with both relevant contextual information and an appreciation of how to approach the interpretation of such photographs as sources. On the latter issue, instructors might find useful an essay available at: http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/education/008-3080-e.html (another website focusing on Canadian photographic history).

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.

The Byron Collection at the Museum of the City of New York is an archive of 22,000 photographs taken by The Byron Company—a prominent New York photography studio—between 1890 and 1942. The Byron photographers took as its subjects all manner of social life in and around New York; the collection includes private subjects (family portraits and home photographs), but the bulk of the collection documents public life and public institutions, many of which directly involved children. The photographs here portray the lives of children from all social classes – at play, at work, in hospitals, churches, schools, and many other contexts.

While the collection extends to 1942, the majority of images are from the turn of the last century, between the 1890s and the 1910s. The finely detailed visual quality of silver gelatin prints lends a hauntingly "real" quality to the images, which does justice to the frames crowded with numerous people and objects; in their enlarged state, especially if screened in a classroom, these photos not only attract attention, they almost demand it.

By searching for "children," "boys," and "girls," one will find thousands of photographs pertinent to the study of youth history. Children's recreational activities are well represented here; one can see boys and girls playing in the water at Coney Island, Atlantic City, Rockaway Beach, and other seaside spots; ice skating in Central Park; and racing or playing ball in various New York public playgrounds. Indeed, a teacher could use these photographs to good effect in a lesson about the rise of the public playground as a social institution that has evolved over the decades. In this photograph a child dangles from the sort of equipment that was later banished from playgrounds (like monkey bars) for being "too dangerous."

Children's homes are depicted in a wide variety of photographs from both the wealthy and poor positions in the social spectrum. A lesson on the daily lives of children from different economic classes could juxtapose "Social functions; children's party," in which a number of well-dressed children sit at the splendidly appointed dining table of a wealthy home, with "Slum interior, 1896." The collection boasts numerous images of wealthy children posed in and around their homes; a smaller number show children from the lower classes playing on street corners throughout New York City, from the Lower East Side up to Harlem.

One of this collection's strengths is its documentation of institutions created during the Progressive Era to serve children. An abundance of photographs portray scenes at the Children's Aid Society, the Emanuel Lehman Foundation for crippled children, the New York Foundling Hospital, the New York Association for the Blind, and various other schools, hospitals, and orphanages. Viewers can see interior images demonstrating the daily activities of the children in these institutions. Even the titles of these organizations are sometimes worthy tools in the study of history: "The School For Feeble-Minded Children" is a noteworthy relic of a time before Americans became concerned with sensitive language.

Another strength of the Byron Collection is its images of children at a variety of schools – exercising, studying, performing in theatrical events, and going on field trips. These photos include religious as well as secular schools. Besides the many neatly-posed photos of Sunday School classes from both Catholic and Protestant churches, there are some more candid photos that attest to the role of churches in teaching life skills; one photo, for example, shows children practicing sewing at St. Thomas' Chapel. Students of youth history will find much in these photographs to prompt considerations about the history of American education.

Unfortunately, the site's navigation system leaves a lot to be desired. Viewers have the option of searching the collection for "keywords," or of browsing a pre-selected sampling of subjects categorized by the museum (each subject, in that browsing function, includes a scant 20-30 pictures). More results will surface in the search function, but there is no index or site-map to show, at a glance, all the categories of available images. This lack of an index is one factor that makes the Byron Collection far less user-friendly than the Library of Congress's photograph collections.

Nor does the Byron Collection's search function reliably include words from the titles of the photographs. One can search only by keywords, not titles. This will pose problems for a teacher who locates an image he likes and then tries to access it later, in a classroom. Such images must be bookmarked when you find them – or else you will need to conduct the general search all over again, and wade through hundreds of hits. For example, photos from the aforementioned "The School For Feeble-Minded Children" can only be found in a general search for "school." Typing "feeble-minded" into the search box – or even just "feeble" – will yield nothing, because "school" is a subject keyword, but "feeble" isn't. A feeble-minded site design, indeed.

Despite these navigational headaches, the Byron Collection – with its wealth of photos of children of all social classes in a wide variety of circumstances and activities – is a valuable resource for studying the history of childhood in one of the most dynamic times and places of modern U.S. history. With enough preparation (and bookmarking), teachers can adapt this extensive resource to any lesson on American childhood in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

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.