"The Peckham Experiment" (Innes H. Pearse and Lucy H. Crocker, Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1985) is a book about the Peckham Health Centre (1935-1950), which was a scientific experiment and community centre set up to identify and foster conditions of good health for local working-class families in South London. The book was…

In the late 1930s the Spanish Civil War captured the international imagination to an extraordinary degree. As in other countries British men and women were moved to intervene directly and the memory of the war, and of British participation in it, has held an enduring appeal in the UK. The Civil War was also notable for its use of the visual as a…

Over the past two decades there has been a growing interest in the exploration of "transnational history". This work has focused in general on understanding the "movement, ebb and circulation" of ideas across borders and in particular on the introduction, transmission, reception and appropriation of ideas through the process of…

The article presents evidence of a shift in the conception of childhood towards communication, social intercourse and interaction as central forces in shaping children's identities in Spain during the last decades of the eighteenth century. Following a significant shift of meaning regarding the concept of children's "inclinations", the…

Recent studies on primers from the time of the Third Reich in Germany show surprisingly little evidence of ideologisation. In comparison with other textbooks, national socialist contents were found to be present to a very limited degree. Rather than presenting the ideology, the books encouraged identification of the children with the presented…

The "discovery of childhood" is a tricky notion because childhood is as much a fact of a biological and psychological nature as a cultural notion that through the centuries has been the object of changing perceptions, definitions, and images. Children barely speak in history; virtually everything we know about them is mediated by adults. Then how…

The subject of this paper is the construction of childhood as a time of happiness in different historical periods. It first analyses the construction of childhood as a time of happiness in the German romantic period in the eighteenth century. Secondly, the paper discusses the construction of happy mothers and children in "The Century of Childhood"…

This article examines the reciprocity between children's literature and educational ideals in Dutch rewritings of international literary classics published for children between 1850 and 1950. It analyses the assumed pedagogical power of rewritings of international literary classics for children from the perspective of three theoretical concepts:…

This paper was written as a response to the six main articles that appear in the special issue "Education in Motion: Producing Methodologies for Researching Documentary Film on Education." The afterword first tries to locate the special issue in a wider debate on the reassessment of the relationship between film, children and education. The…

In this article, the authors examine policies and interventions concerning special children in the United States and Europe from 1900 to 1960. They focus on concerns about, and interventions on, children defined as having "special needs". They explore interventions, both in the form of words and practices, and examine their effects on children and…

American attitudes and policies toward children with disabilities changed significantly between the 1920s and the 1950s. Drawn from a larger study of the history of child protection in the United States, I argue that a redefinition of disabled children occurred in this era. Earlier fears that feeble-minded children posed a menace to American…

The present article examines the development of a diagnostic and therapeutic technique named The Sandtray at the Erica Foundation, a privately-run child counselling service in Stockholm. Originally it was called The World, developed by the British paediatrician and child psychiatrist Margaret Lowenfeld. In the 1930s it was imported to Sweden,…

This article is an attempt to shed some further light on the people and the processes involved in the identification of mental deficiency in children and young people. In order to do this, it turns away from the themes that have been most prominent in the historiography to date: elite and professional ideas, parliamentary and public debates and…

British child guidance was a form of psychiatric, preventive medicine for children and young people and centred, at least in principle, on specialist clinics led by psychiatrists. From small beginnings in the aftermath of the First World War, child guidance expanded steadily, in terms of both numbers of patients and numbers of clinics, and came to…

In recent years sensory history has emerged as a research topic of growing interest to historians and has been accompanied by a call to incorporate the senses into our understanding of the past. Under modernity, social direction and control were built into the infrastructure of modern life as specialist institutions emerged and multiplied in the…