The Historical Archaeology of American Childhood
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.24885/sab.v31i2.598Keywords:
United States, Childhood, 18th-20th CenturiesAbstract
The United States is a relatively young nation, having been established less than 250 years ago, but in this brief time the country has undergone dramatic growth and significant transformation. Children always have been central in American culture, and historical and popular sources acknowledge the power and importance of children in families, communities, and the nation as well as their substantial role in influencing intergenerational change. Archaeological work focusing on children is becoming increasingly common and illustrates how children shaped and reflected values and ideals within families and the nation as a whole. Domestic sites, institutions for children, and mortuary studies are prominent areas of current work and future prospects in the archaeology of childhood in the United States.
Downloads
References
BARRETT, Autumn R., and BLAKEY, Michael L. 2011. Life Histories of Enslaved Africans in Colonial New York: A Bioarchaeological Study of the New York African Burial Ground. In AGARWAL, S. and GLENNCROSS, B.A. (Eds.), Social Bioarchaeology. Blackwell Studies in Global Archaeology 14. Chichester, Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 212–251.
BAUGHER, S. 2001. Visible Charity: The Archaeology, Material Culture, and Landscape Design of New York City’s Municipal Almshouse Complex, 1736-1797. International Journal of Historical Archaeology 5(2):175-202.
BAUGHER, S. and VEIT, R.F. 2014. The Archaeology of American Cemeteries and Gravemarkers. Gainesville, University Press of Florida.
BAXTER, Jane Eva. 2000. An Archaeology of Childhood: Children and Material Culture in 19th Century America. PhD Dissertation, Department of Anthropology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
BAXTER, Jane Eva. 2013. Status, Sentimentality, and Structuration: An Examination of “Intellectual Spaces” for Children in the Study of America’s Historic Cemeteries. Childhood in the Past 6(2):106-122.
BAXTER, Jane Eva. 2019. The Archaeology of American Childhood and Adolescence. Gainesville, University of Florida Press.
BEISAW, April. 2009. Constructing Institution-Specific Site Formation Models. In BEISAW, A. and GIBB, J. (Eds.), The Archaeology of Institutional Life. Tuscaloosa, University of Alabama Press. pp. 49-68.
BEISAW, April and BAXTER, Jane Eva. 2017. America’s One Room Schools: Sites of Regional Authority and Symbols of Local Resistance. International Journal of Historical Archaeology 21:1-21.
BERROL, Selma C. 1992. Immigrant Children at School 1880-1940. In WEST, E. and PETRIK, P. (Eds.), Small Worlds: Children and Adolescents in America 1850-1950. Lawrence, University of Kansas Press, pp. 41-60.
BLAKEY, Michael L. 1998. The New York African Burial Ground Project: An Examination of Enslaved Lives, a Construction of Ancestral Ties. Transforming Anthropology 7(1):53–58.
BUNOW, Miriam Jennie. 2009. The Archaeology of Childhood: Toys in 19th Century Upstate New York. Master’s Thesis, Department of Anthropology, State University of New York at Binghamton.
CALVERT, Karin. 1992. Children in the House: The Material Culture of Early Childhood, 1600-1900. Boston, Northeastern University Press.
CASELLA, Eleanor Conlin. 2009. On the Enigma of Incarceration: Philosophical Approaches to Confinement in the Modern Era. In BEISAW, A. and GIBB, J. (Eds.), The Archaeology of Institutional Life. Tuscaloosa, University of Alabama Press, pp. 17-32.
CHUDACOFF, Howard P. 2007. Children at Play: An American History. New York, New York University Press.
CRIST, Thomas A. 2005. Babies in the Privy: Prostitution, Infanticide, and Abortion in New York City’s Five Points District. Historical Archaeology 39(1):19-46.
CROSS, Gary. 2004. The Cute and The Cool: Wondrous Innocence and Modern American Children’s Culture. Oxford, Oxford University Press.
DECUNZO, Lu Ann. 2004. A Historical Archaeology of Delaware: People, Contexts and the Cultures of Agriculture. University of Tennessee Press, Knoxville.
DECUNZO, Lu Ann. 2006. Exploring the Institution: Reform, Confinement, Social Change. In HALL, M. and SILLIMAN, S.W. (Eds.), Historical Archaeology. Malden, Blackwell, pp. 167-189.
DOZIER, Crystal A. 2016. Finding Children without Toys: The Archaeology of Children at Shabbona Grove, Illinois. Childhood in the Past 9(1):58-74.
ELLIS, Meredith. 2014. A Disciplined Childhood: A Social Bioarchaeology of the Subadults at the Spring Street Presbyterian Church. In THOMPSON, J.L., ALFONSO_DURRUTY, M.P., and CRANDALL, J.J. (Eds.). Tracing Childhood: Bioarchaeological Investigations of Early Lives in Antiquity. Gainesville, University Press of Florida, pp. 139-158.
FASS, Paula. 2016. The End of American Childhood: A History of Parenting from Life on the Frontier to the Managed Child. Princeton, Princeton University Press.
FEISTER, Lois. 2009. The Orphanage at Schuyler Mansion. In BEISAW, A. and GIBB, J. (Eds.), The Archaeology of Institutional Life. Tuscaloosa, University of Alabama Press, pp. 105-116.
FITTS, R. 1999. The Archaeology of Middle-Class Domesticity and Gentility in Victorian Brooklyn. Historical Archaeology 33(1):39-62.
GRIGG, H. J. 1999. GO CUIRE DIA RATH BLATH ORT (God Grant That You Prosper and Flourish): Social and Economic Mobility among the Irish in 19th Century New York City. Historical Archaeology 33(1):81-101.
HELTON, Emily G. 2010. Education and Gender in New Philadelphia. Historical Archaeology 44(1):112-124.
LINDAUER, Owen. 2009. Individual Struggles and Institutional Goals: Small Voices from the Phoenix Indian School Tract Site. In BEISAW, A. and GIBB, J. (Eds.), The Archaeology of Institutional Life. Tuscaloosa, University of Alabama Press, pp. 86-102.
MATTHEWS, C.N. 2010. The Archaeology of American Capitalism. Gainesville, University Press of Florida.
MAYS, Simon, GOWLAND, HALCROW, Siân Halcrow, and MURPHY, Eileen. 2017. Child Bioarchaeology: Perspectives on the Last Ten Years. Childhood in the Past 10(1): 38-56.
MCCARTHY, John P. 2001. Value and Identity in the “Working Class’ Worlds of Late Nineteenth Century Minneapolis.” In MAYNE, A. and MURRAY, T. (Eds.). The Archaeology of Urban Landscapes: Explorations in Slumland. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, pp. 145-153.
MCKILLOP, Heather. 1995. Recognizing Children's Graves in Nineteenth-Century Cemeteries: Excavations in St. Thomas Anglican Churchyard, Belleville, Ontario, Canada. Historical Archaeology 29(2):77-99.
MINTZ, Steven. 2004. Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood. Cambridge, The Belknap Press.
MOORE, Summer. 2007. Working Parents and the Material Culture of Victorianism: Children’ Toys at the Ludlow Tent Colony. In MCGUIRE, R. and LARKIN, K. (Eds.). The Archaeology of Class War. Boulder, University of Colorado Press, pp. 285-310.
MULLER, Jennifer L. 2017. Rendered Unfit: “Defective” Children in the Erie County Poorhouse. In BYRNES, J.F. and MULLER, J.L. (Eds.), Bioarchaeology of Impairment and Disability: Theoretical, Ethnohistorical, and Methodological Perspectives. New York, Springer, pp. 119-138.
MURPHY, Eileen, MCKEAN, Dave McKean and MCKERR, Lynne. 2015. ‘The cherub hastened to its native home’ – Memorials for Irish Immigrant Children in Early Nineteenth-Century Lowell, Massachusetts. Paper presented at the Society for the Study of Childhood in the Past Annual Meeting, Chicago, IL.
PRZYSTUPA, Paulina F. 2018 Nineteenth Century Institutional “Education”: A Spatial Approach to Assimilation and Resistance at Hoopa Valley Indian School. In BAXTER, J. and ELLIS, M. (Eds.), Nineteenth Century Childhoods in Interdisciplinary and International Perspectives. Oxbow Press, Oxford, pp. 166-180.
RINEY-KHERBERG, Pamela. 2014. The Nature of Childhood: An Environmental History of Growing Up in America since 1865. Lawrence, University Press of Kansas.
SCHULTZ, Jaclyn N. 2018. “He Knows a Good Thing When He Sees It”: Advertising to Children in the U.S., 1850-1900. In BAXTER, J. and ELLIS, M. (Eds.), Nineteenth Century Childhoods in Interdisciplinary and International Perspectives. Oxbow Press, Oxford, pp. 91-106.
SURFACE-EVANS, Sarah L. 2016. A Landscape of Assimilation and Resistance: The Mount Pleasant Indian Industrial Boarding School. International Journal of Historical Archaeology 20:574-588.
TUTTLE, William M. 1993. “Daddy’s Gone to War.”: The Second World War in the Lives of America’s Children. Oxford University Press, New York.
WILKIE, Laurie. 2000. Not Merely Child’s Play: Creating a Historical Archaeology of Children and Childhood. In SOFAER-DEREVENSKI, J. (Ed.), Children and Material Culture. New York, Routledge. pp. 100-114.
YAMIN, Rebecca. 2002. Children’s Strikes, Parent’s Rights: Paterson and Five Points. International Journal of Historical Archaeology 6(2):113-127.
YENTSCH, Anne Elizabeth. 2009. Tracing Immigrant Women and Their Household Possessions in 19th Century San Francisco. In PRAETZELLIS, A. and M. PRAETZELLIS (Eds.), South of Market: Historical Archaeology of 3 San Francisco Neighborhoods: The San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridgepp. Prepared for the California Department of Transportation District 4 by the Anthropological Studies Center, Sonoma State Rohnert Park, CA. pp. 134-187.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2018 Jane Eva Baxter
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
