Early American historians provided the public and policy-makers with information about US history that provided both entertainment and policy suggestions. As American historians became more professionalised in the early twentieth century, they concentrated more on their own scholarly concerns and less on policy-relevant writings. In recent…

In this article, the author discusses plans that were launched at three consecutive conferences on care for toddlers between 1929 and 1938 in the Netherlands. These plans and their realisation are evaluated in terms of what was seen as the missing link in the supply of institutional care for young children. The author identifies the professional…

Immigrants find themselves in a liminal state of limbo between two societies. In this zone, competing cultural ideas coexist. This essay examines how Latino immigrant family childcare providers in the United States questioned US norms of childrearing and how they engaged in liminal cultural work to produce a bicultural childrearing. They are…

This article considers the possibility that one of the defining characteristics of the New Education, as it related to children in their early years, was its epistemological break with rationalist forms of knowledge and its embrace of empiricism and positivism. It considers, briefly, social theories that identify a similar process at a societal…

Developed by the German pedagogue Friedrich Froebel (1782-1852), the Kindergarten offered a revolutionary educational program for young children. In the mid-nineteenth century, after several decades of limited success in the German states, Froebel's Kindergarten began to be transplanted to other countries, including the USA and England. The…

This article explores the process by which different elements of the material culture of educational settings, including learning tools, classroom design and other aspects of the physical environment that embody a particular educational philosophy, become transmuted when taken over by those with very different pedagogical aims. The article focuses…

In 1946 the well-known Danish educator Sofie Rifbjerg (1886-1991) travelled for six months to the USA. The purpose of her trip was to study American developmental psychology. On her way she spent some time at the Institute of Child Welfare at the University of California, Berkeley. The institute had become famous because of its working on…