Fears about the impact of movies on youth led to the Payne Fund research project, which brought together 19 social scientists and resulted in 11 published reports. One of the most fascinating of the studies was carried out by Herbert Blumer, a young… [more]

From the rocky soil of Vermont's hill towns, many young men and women in the 19th century went looking for new opportunities. Often they made a series of moves between farm, factory, and city. Their leave-taking pitted the responsibilities of… [more]

Fears about the impact of movies on youth led to the Payne Fund research project, which brought together 19 social scientists and resulted in 11 published reports. One of the most fascinating of the studies was carried out by Herbert Blumer, a young… [more]

The material culture of early childhood in the 21st century is characterized by an emphasis on biological age and related levels of cognitive and motor skill development. All types of objects, including diapers, toys, food products, and clothing, are… [more]

The material culture of early childhood in the 21st century is characterized by an emphasis on biological age and related levels of cognitive and motor skill development. All types of objects, including diapers, toys, food products, and clothing, are… [more]

The children of various ages shown bursting through the doorway of the stone school building in Calgary, Alberta, have just been released for their summer vacation. These elementary school children photographed in 1956 represent the post-World War II… [more]

Motivated by wartime hysteria and racial sentiments following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 that ordered the removal of Japanese Americans on the West Coast to… [more]

Theodore de Bry included this colorful engraving in his publication of Hariot's, A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (1590). It was based on a watercolor by John White (fig. 2) painted five or six years earlier. Despite their… [more]

Published around 1853, Little Eva, The Flower of the South is an anonymously written children's story based on Eva, the enormously popular character in Harriet Beecher Stowe's anti-slavery novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852). Aiming to thwart the spread… [more]

This oil on canvas painting by an unknown American folk artist was painted around 1840. It depicts two siblings at play. While their mother is absent from the picture, she presided over the "private sphere" of the home as prescribed by the ideology… [more]