Childhood Studies
| The Story of A: The Alphabetization of America from the New England Primer to the Scarlet Letter | ||
| Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights | ||
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Historic Children's Voices Symposium | 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. |
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The New England Primer | 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. |
| Babes in the Wood: Print, Orality, and Children's Literature in the Nineteenth-Century United States | 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. |