Part of the utility of the game is how many intersections can be addressed, a Choose Your Own Adventure of lesson planning.

Historians have not only underestimated the sheer number of underage soldiers who fought for the Union, they have also overlooked the significance of the legal, political, and administrative battles these youths provoked.

Understanding puzzles as agents of disorder runs counter to a common interpretation that associates puzzles with the quest for and ultimate affirmation of order.

The Quaker spiritual journey, often invisible due to its silent, humble and individual nature, is illustrated in this map.

Whitman creates a beautiful tension between the images of marauding lovers, armed and fearless, and two boys clutching each other’s fingers and clinging to each other.

In this 1861 story, white society treats a teenaged African American postal rider with dignity and respect.

From Black Girlhood in the Nineteenth Century. Copyright 2016 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Used with permission of the University of Illinois Press.
Winner of the 2018 Children’s Literature Association’s Honor Book Award

The Stewart Children instances passionately held ideas about the common welfare structuring a painting that sought to have a moral and social impact on viewers.

Does the creation of New York’s Colored Orphan Asylum suggest that race was irrelevant to nineteenth-century understandings of childhood?

In 1872, a small group of juvenile inmates challenged the terms of their incarceration, but even their modest success suggests the hazards of imagining children’s rights outside of human rights.

We began with only a rudimentary idea of how to build the wall.

No saga of personal hardship and aristocratic skullduggery so captivated the British public in the eighteenth century as Annesley’s turbulent life.

Sedgwick’s evolving ideas about her children’s natures and her ability to shape them reflected an emerging American skepticism of the perfectibility of the individual and society at large, and an increasing emphasis on the determining power of innate characteristics.

Presented as part of the special issue: “A Cabinet of Curiosities”

“Peter Parker’s pickled paintings
Cause of nausea, chills & faintings”

Penned in 1897 by Julia C. Ferris, a white teacher and local educational leader, the manuscript narrates portions of the life of Jane Clark, an enslaved woman who escaped to Auburn in 1859. This narrative, rich with information about the Underground Railroad, has never been available to scholars, teachers, and lay readers—until now.

Postbellum Teenage Subculture and the Amateur Press

In eighteenth-century America, Christmas gift exchange was marked by a powerful reciprocity: one gave a present and received one back

As opposing groups fight to defend antagonistic beliefs, their accounts take on a life of their own, such that the women’s existence becomes most important not in and of itself but rather as a register of broader cultural struggles.

The growing popularity of dolls had both ideological and pragmatic roots in the emerging middle class.

“At ninety dollars, they’re hardly cheap, and their price tag is part of their appeal. These are not intended to be superficial toys.”

“We aim to represent the range of disability history resources by selecting representative artifacts from the genres where disability history is found: veterans’ pension documents, the circus sideshow, moral literature, postcards of institutions, deaf- and polio- and blind-community newspapers and newsletters, service-club ephemera and meeting minutes.”

Methodical signs are artificial modes of visual communication based on spoken language. To their opponents, the methodical signers were wolves in sheep’s clothing.

Recent scholarship reminds us how eighteenth-century letters were produced and consumed very differently than we might imagine, certainly in the Native communities of New England.

Nazera Sadiq Wright’s Black Girlhood in the Nineteenth Century is an exemplar of well-researched and innovative scholarship, an exciting book for scholars of early African American literature and beyond.

The Common-place Web Library reviews and lists online resources and Websites likely to be of interest to our viewers. Each […]

Corinne T. Field, The Struggle for Equal Adulthood: Gender, Race, Age, and the Fight for Citizenship in Antebellum America. Chapel Hill, N.C.: […]

The presence of educated Native young men who pursued legal action in American courts, addressed American legislative bodies, and created written constitutions did not confirm the success of American acculturation efforts; rather, it threatened American efforts to seize Native land.

Presented as part of the Special Literature Issue

The women of sensibility were expected to feel but not to feel too much.

Was age in early America an objective measure of years, an individual’s self-understanding, or a status imposed by a public official?

When historical novels are presented as works of historical interpretation, they can also serve as tools that help students learn to “read like historians.”

A sophisticated grasp of history is the exception, not the rule.

From the moment we arrived, I could tell I was going to have a hard time making peace with resort culture.

Narrative histories of action make us exceedingly conscious of the sequence of events over time. But time plays hide and seek in these small fragments.

As with any decent varsity athletic program, an imperative of participation coexists alongside one of competition. At its best, History Day is genuinely inclusive.

The Common-place Web Library reviews and lists online resources and Websites likely to be of interest to our viewers. Each […]

Presented as part of the special issue “Early Cities of the Americas.”

“By the late 1870s, guides mentioned a few pastimes as specifically well suited to women and children. Guides began to list carousels, circuses, pantomimes, and magic and marionette shows in conjunction with kids.”

“I always feel that if just one reader stops and thinks for a second, I’ve been successful. I want them to wonder, ‘Did that really happen to Blackbeard when he got caught down in North Carolina?'”

History matters.

“The New England Primer emerged from, in David E. Stannard’s phrase, ‘a world in which the presence of early death was everywhere.'”

Yet, the same ideas that made it difficult for many families to adopt the trappings of modern childhood also spurred reformers to try to “save” dependent, delinquent, and destitute youngsters.

“Young readers travel into the world of books with little or no luggage. They generally don’t have prior knowledge of the times.”

“In about their eighth year, children develop a sense of time and an ability to abstract that connect stories with pasts. They begin, that is, to think historically.”

“Stanford historian Jack Rakove, who serves as consultant, confesses, ‘If you ask from a historian’s vantage point, how does this correspond to contemporary scholarship? Well, probably, not that well. But if you ask, what is it that students of this age ought to be introduced to so that they have a rough idea of the Revolution, it’s actually pretty good.”

My two little boys love the kids’ sections of megabookstores, so a trip to Borders to get out of the […]

“I’m not sure how I made it this far without realizing that I would find Wilder’s books on the fiction shelf.”

[T]his wasn’t a time to be an “objective historian.” This was a time to indulge, for a moment, the warm, vaguely melancholy feeling that comes from connecting to the past and to remember why I became an historian in the first place. And it was time to learn more.

Browse by Subject