There has been increased critical interest in the child as a rich and varied site of cultural inscription. Scholars from a wide range of disciplines have turned their attention to the child in order to interrogate how it comes to represent, and often codify, the prevailing ideologies of a given culture or historical period. Noting that narratives of U. S. national identity are persistently configured in the language of childhood and family, this collection of essays addresses matters of race, gender, sexuality, class, and kinship to chart the ways that representations of the child structure historical periods and ideas. The essays investigate childhood from diverse methodological perspectives and approaches, and draw heavily on various disciplines, making clear that literary representations of children and childhood are not isolated aesthetic artifacts but cultural productions that in turn affect the social climates around them. Following an introduction, the essays are as follows: (1) "Child's Play" (Gillian Brown); (2) "Playing at Class" (Karen Sanchez-Eppler); (3) "The Miniaturizing of Girlhood: Nineteenth-Century Playtime and Gendered Theories of Development" (Melanie Dawson); (4) "Of Babies, Beasts, and Bondage: Slavery and the Question of Citizenship in Antebellum American Children's Literature" (Lesley Ginsberg); (5) "Betsy and the Canon" (Kelly Hager), on the role of literature in the "Betsy and Tacy" series of children's books; (6) "Traumatic Realism and the Wounded Child" (Jane F. Thraikill); (7) "Constructing the Psychoanalytic Child: Freud's 'From the History of an Infantile Neurosis'" (Michelle A. Masse); (8) "Black Babies, White Hysteria: The Dark Child in African-American Literature of the Harlem Renaissance" (Laura Dawkins); (9) "Lewis Hine's Family Romance" (Richard S. Lowry); (10) "On Boyhood and Public Swimming: Sidney Kingsley's 'Dead End' and Representations of Underclass Street Kids in American Cultural Production" (Jeffrey Turner); (11) "The Pedagogy of the Popular Front: 'Progressive Parenting' for a New Generation, 1918-1945" (Julia Mickenberg); (12) "'Please Let Me Come Home': Homesickness and Family Ties at Early-Twentieth-Century Summer Camps" (Leslie Paris); (13) "Transformative Terrains: Korean Adoptees and the Social Constructions of an American Childhood" (Catherine Ceniza Choy and Gregory Paul Choy); and (14)"Reel Origins: Multiculturalism, History, and the American Children's Movie" (Manuel M. Martin-Rodriguez). Each essay contains notes. (HTH)