Childhood Studies

Led by Patricia Crain

What does it mean to be a child reader in pre-1900 America? This seminar, hosted by the Program in the History of the Book in American Culture at the American Antiquarian Society, will guide inquiries into the question: What does it mean to be a child reader in pre-1900 America?

The holdings of the AAS in artifacts of childhood number over 26,000 objects, and thus provide a unique laboratory for thinking about the changing ideas of childhood and the child reader from the seventeenth through the nineteenth century.

This two-day hybrid Historic Children’s Voices symposium convened fifteen emerging and established scholars whose work amplifies the voices of some nineteenth-century American children or explores the archival silences of underrepresented children.

In 1995, The American Antiquarian Society acquired one of the two earliest known copies of the New England Primer. Considered a staple text of Puritan childhood that taught letters, reading, and religion, the first edition of the New England Primer was most likely printed between 1683 and 1690, either in London or Boston. Early printings of the text, such as the AAS copy that was printed in 1727, are extremely scarce because of heavy use by generations of children and families.

Originating as a broadside ballad in the sixteenth century, "Babes in the Wood" had a long afterlife in the United States as a staple of the nineteenth-century juvenile literature market in poetry, in prose, and in a range of printed formats. This lecture explores the striking resilience of this text and its illustrations in order to reflect on the role of "the death in childhood" in the creation of modern children's literature.