http://www.sntc.org.sz/sdphotos/index.asp

Swaziland National Trust Commission

July 2009

Featuring approximately 600 photographs chronicling daily life and politics in Swaziland, the Swaziland Digital Archives provides visual insights into the experiences of childhood and adolescence in southern Africa over the past century. The Swaziland National Trust Commission hosts the website, but it is the work of a Swaziland-based author and photographer who has collected, scanned, and posted historical images drawn from private collections and the Swaziland National Archives.

The photographs are organized into galleries based on decades, and the collection can by searched by title, date, caption, and photographer. There are also brief historical essays linked to each gallery sketching the main events of each decade, which vary in quality. While the first essays dealing with the late 19th century are detailed and fairly sophisticated, the entries covering the later decades of the 20th century are little more than quick blurbs.

Consequently, non-specialists planning on using the website might wish to consult the following sources: Hilda Kuper, Sobhuza II, Ngwenyama and King of Swaziland: The story of an Hereditary Ruler and His country, (New York: Africana Publishing Company, 1978); Alan Booth, Swaziland: Tradition and Change in a Southern African Kingdom, (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1983); Alan Booth, Historical Dictionary of Swaziland, 2nd Edition, (Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, 2000).

Children and adolescents figure prominently in the collection. Using the "caption" search function, which is more productive than searching "title" tags, yields 19 hits for "children," seven for "student," eight for "boy," 11 for "girl," and four for the antique category of "maiden." Both Swazi and European children (from settler and missionary families) are the subjects of these photographs.

Each image has a catalogue number, approximate date, and a caption that can range from highly informative to whimsical. While the website's search feature is reasonably thorough, it is still worthwhile to browse the galleries for more unconventionally tagged child-related pictures.

If properly contextualized, the images in the Swaziland Digital Archives suggest some interesting possibilities for exploring the various and changing meanings of childhood in 20th-century southern Africa. While the Swazi ruling family dates to the 19th century, modern Swaziland was originally a British protectorate that spent much of the last century under the economic and social influence of South Africa.

The series of photographs chronicling the childhood of Swaziland's Paramount Chief (later iNgwenyama, 'King') Sobhuza II, coupled with two related pictures on the Images of Empire website, illustrate how British imperial officials ruled by co-opting local institutions of authority. These images, which show the young Sobhuza with his mother and grandmother (and queen regent), sitting in state council (Images of Empire, Media ID 00007073), inspecting the present of a toy elephant from the wife of a British imperial official (Images of Empire, Media ID 00007077), and as a young recently enthroned ruler, offer students a unique look into a highly politicized form of African childhood.

The numerous photographs of young Swazi girls and "maidens" in varying degrees of dress and undress are equally illuminating but should be used with caution and are probably not for younger students. Western colonial-era male photographers obviously found them a popular subject, but teachers can give these young Swazi women their proper dignity through lesson plans that consider the cultural and political form and function of their clothing styles.

Grouping their portraits with the collection's corresponding images of young Swazi Catholic "communicants" and European girls in Swaziland (Watts family, St Marks Kids, and Holtman family will help students understand how education, religious conversion, and race shaped the experience of gender and childhood in colonial southern African society. The archive's various initiation and marriage images similarly show how these young western and African Swazi women marked the transition to adulthood (e.g., "Miss Krogh's Wedding," "Wedding Smile," "Umcwasho Maiden," "Umcwasho maidens," Dlamini Khumalo wedding, "Dlamini Khumalo wedding," "lamini Khumalo wedding," and "Dlamini Khumalo wedding," "Sobhuza II, King of Swaziland, with toys," [Images of Empire, Media ID 00007077] "Sobhuza II, King of Swaziland, as a child" [Images of Empire, Media ID 00007073]).

Tim Parsons

Washington University

Featuring approximately 600 photographs chronicling daily life and politics in Swaziland, the Swaziland Digital Archives provides visual insights into the experiences of childhood and adolescence in southern Africa over the past century.

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.

A Separate Place: the Schools P.S. DuPont Built (Wilmington, DE: Hagley Museum and Library, 2003) at http://www.hagley.lib.de.us/hagley-separate-place-packet.pdf, pages 24–26 (accessed April 21, 2009).

Honorable Pierre S. du Pont
1116 du Pont Building
Wilmington, Delaware

Dear Sir:

     Our Teacher has asked us to write you a letter to day, for we all know that you were the one that gave us our New School. Our School is as good as it was when we first came into it. We would like for you to come down, for we have all wishes to see you. We all appreciate our New School Building. In our School we have two wall clocks, an organ, graphonola, pencil sharpner, oil stove for hot lunches, two maps--one of South America, and one of the United States. We have five graduates at State College Dover Delaware--three boys and two girls--Christina Maull, Levata Williams, Cyrus Sparrow, Arthur Ward, Charles Norwood. I am in the Seventh Grade. We have Community Civics, Hygiene, Arithmetic, Geography, History, Language, Reader, Spelling and Industrial Artwork. In Industrial Artwork, we draw, make crepe paper flowers, baskets, etc. I like all of my studies very much and I am proud of all of my books.
     I attended school eight days in September, three in October. I am sorry to say that I have been working to the packing house all summer, but I started to school for good now. I was very sorry that I couldn’t get to School those days I was absent. I hope I wont have have to miss any more days this year. Our teacher is back this year. This makes the fourth year that she has taught our school. Her name is Mrs. Virginia H. Jones. The Primary Room has a new teacher, Miss Laurencetta M. Hicks. We all love both of the teachers.
     We are celebrating (du Pont Day) to night, and have invited all of the Parents. We will have, cake, and ice cream to night.
     We wish that you might live many more years to see what the Delaware Children might accomplish.

http://images.wellcome.ac.uk/

Wellcome Library

April 2009

A remarkable collection of historical images focused on biomedical and other scientific topics, the Wellcome Images website is a treasure trove for educators and students. Although there is not an emphasis on children’s and youth history, creative use of the site’s search engine allows scholars and students of the history of childhood some fascinating glimpses into changing presentations of children in various historical locations and eras. Moreover, there are many resources to facilitate education, particularly in the realms of medicine, biology, and the changing nature of scientific knowledge over time. This makes the Wellcome Images website a welcome addition to any educator’s toolbox for teaching.

Scholars of childhood histories will find that the site's built-in search function easy to use, and, by plugging in keywords such as "boy," "girl," and "child," a plethora of images will emerge that depict a variety of historical representations of children. Many European images depicting methods of child health care, ranging from the medieval to modern eras, are available on the site. There are also scores of 20th-century promotional posters available that reveal (mainly) British public health education efforts promoting preferred methods of child rearing and health care. Moreover, there are tens of advertisements from the past 200 years, depicting children as promotional tools for selling hygiene products. There is a wealth of photographs and manuscripts from the medieval and modern eras from India that illustrate changing attitudes toward children and health care.

The Wellcome Images website is easy to navigate, and all images are free for personal and academic use under Creative Commons sharing rules. The site has divided its collections into five categories: "Illness and Wellness," "Life," "Culture," "Nature," and "War." Each image may be downloaded in a low-resolution format that is acceptable for websites, multi-media presentations, and other educational presentation needs. Users who wish to purchase high-resolution scans and physical prints may do so, for a price. Moreover, users who register (for free) with the website may save images to a "Lightbox," in order to compile, organize, and view their collections at any time. This is a welcome addition to the website and allows users to collect a variety of images at once, then sort and organize them later.

A useful section of the website is the "Life" section. Curated with an emphasis on human body parts and historically shifting notions of human anatomy, images from this group would be excellent sources for educators who wish to illustrate the changing conceptions of biology throughout the ages. Images of x-rays and microscopic cell photography sit side-by-side with Victorian "cure-all" advertisements and early modern anatomical illustrations. Like the rest of the site, the user must select his or her own images and place them within a larger historical context. However, given the proper supplementary information, this section in particular would be a wonderful basis for illustrating historical trends in understanding human biology. Comparing and contrasting images of children and adults would allow scholars of childhood histories the opportunity to discern changing attitudes about the nature of children and their anatomies over time and space.

Educators may want to keep a couple of caveats in mind when using this site. First of all, the collection is not comprehensive, nor it is chronologically organized. It is a marvelous resource for image finding, but not a starting point for obtaining information about any subject matter. Second, there are some rather graphic depictions of warfare, medical procedures, and biological functions shown in some of the images. Adults may want to preview the site before having younger children conduct research. That being said, the Wellcome Images website is a wonderful resource for educators and students who are looking for some fascinating historical images of scientific understanding of youth across cultures and eras.

Nancy L. Stockdale

University of North Texas

A remarkable collection of historical images focused on biomedical and other scientific topics, the Wellcome Images website is a treasure trove for educators and students.

http://www.imagescanada.ca/index-e.html

Library and Archives Canada

February 2009

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).

Nora E. Jaffary

Concordia University

The site includes thousands of images featuring children in Canadian history that instructors might potentially utilize for class discussions and course assignments.

http://www.metmuseum.org

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

February 10, 2009

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.

Susan Douglass

George Mason University

Educators will find many ways to place childhood in historical context using this website.