Editor's Introduction

Abstract

Editor's Introduction Linda Mahood As this issue goes to press, the 2023 biennial conference of the Society for the History of Children and Youth, held at the University of Guelph, Canada, has concluded. Two hundred hybrid panels, roundtables, plenaries, and keynote addresses were presented. As always, the Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth welcomes submissions on the history of childhood and youth from any period or location. Many articles in this issue focus on letters from children and young people and examine how scholars engage with them to understand how children have negotiated their place in the adult word. This issue opens with articles by Mona Gleason and Mashid Mayar. Both authors deploy theory to examine how childhood has been the currency of, and at stake in, the archival record. Here, and elsewhere in her influential scholarship, Gleason argues that child's history is a field open to new theory and scholarly practice. In "Children Obviously Don't Make History": Historical Significance and Children's Modalities of Power," Gleason adopts a "modalities of power" framework to show how children do, indeed, make history. Using examples from elementary school correspondence in British Columbia between 1919 and the late 1950s, Gleason develops the concept of "negotiated malleability" to highlight the way young people manipulate and negotiate predicaments with the adults who populate their daily lives. Mayar's "Playes Print the Letter": American Child(hoods) as Archival Present/ce" sees similarity in the notions of nostalgia, desire, fantasy, and power that bind Childhood Studies to Archival Studies. Examining letters that children sent to the juvenile periodical St. Nicholas in the 1890s, Mayar says the conflict at the center of the inaccessibility of childhood archival material is about the types of knowledge it promises to produce. Moving to the 1970s, Emily Gallagher's "Hidden in Plain Sight: Child-authored Material in Australian Museums and Archives" argues that historians have expressed frustration over the difficulties of locating children's voices in archives. By examining holdings of child art and writing in Australian collections, Gallagher show how children's documentary records [End Page 339] are far more voluminous than many scholars have previously acknowledged, comprising a surprisingly large array of children's art, writing, and audiovisual and material culture. If the archival record involves privileging certain pieces of evidence over others, it is a project that highlights normative sex, gender, and racial inequalities. Christina Burr's article about girl's leisure, fashion, and subculture also analyzes young people's writing. In "They Are Just Girls": Clara Bow's Star Persona, Female Adolescence, and the Flapper Youth Spectator," Burr argues that in the 1920s, a new confrontational type of adolescent femininity emerged—the flapper. The flapper may have been inspired by Hollywood movies; however, fan letters and testimonials show how girl moviegoers' reconstructed their own adolescent identities vis-à-vis the Hollywood ideal, as embodied by controversial silver screen icon, Clare Bow. Bow was the "it" girl who brought a dynamic, vivacious, impulsive, and sexualized appeal to the performance a new post–World War I feminine ideal. Shifting from sex and gender to political movements and educational socialization, Wayne Riggs' article focuses on World War I youth movements. In 1914, Britain had neither a conscript army nor any bureaucratic mechanism for implementing conscription. In "Church Brigades and Battlefields: Militarizing British Boys prior to World War I," Riggs contextualizes the intersection of youth, religion, and militarism in relation to Britain's successful recruitment efforts. Riggs says that boys' brigades fused military discipline and training with religious teaching that ensured that well over 50 percent of British boys received a form of military training. Consequently, by 1916, Britain had the world's largest volunteer army. Barbara Turk Niskač looks at print media and political education. In "The Ambiguous Nature of Children's Work in Socialist Yugoslavia: An Analysis based on Children's Magazine Pionirski list," the author analyzes the portrayal of work, play, and leisure in a children's magazine in socialist Yugoslavia. After breaking with the USSR, Yugoslavia embraced worker self-management as a socalled third way to socialism. Children's magazine Pionirski list built on Marxist notion of the ethos of the agricultural society's...