Stephanie Olsen

Emotions and the global politics of childhood

Focusing on emotional shifts in childhood ideals and practices over the past two centuries, this chapter seeks to understand child subjecthood, the instrumentalization of children’s emotions for religious or ideological ends, and children’s importance as agents of change. Because of their assumed malleability, young people were often at the heart of social anxieties and debates about the future of nations and empires. The interrelation of authority figures’ understanding of childhood and children’s own experiences is a principal focus of this book. In this chapter, we explore novel ways to approach the history of childhood and the emotions more broadly by laying out a framework for how to understand these fields in global terms, using the concepts of emotional formations, emotional frontiers and the sentimental/innocent child. Reflecting on the scholarship represented in this volume, which covers a diversity of national and transnational contexts, and bringing to bear our own experience in global histories of childhood and of the emotions, we hope to capitalize on an unprecedented opportunity to start thinking globally about the politics of childhood.

Learning how to feel through play: at the intersection of the histories of play, childhood and the emotions

In this short commentary I shall to make the case for how the intersection of the histories of play, childhood and the emotions could and should be enhanced by viewing them together and by borrowing each other’s methodologies. This special issue of the International Journal of Play contains some impressive examples of how the history of play can open up exciting new questions in the history of childhood. The broad collection of topics here point to the vitality and innovativeness of the history of the field. Some articles focus on objects and consumption, while others focus more widely on imagination and creativity. While it would be easy to argue that the history of play is an offshoot of the history of childhood, it is also part of the history of education, of popular culture and of the broader history of adult experience. Several articles in this special issue are careful to point out that play is not just for children, or perhaps more specifically, that the patterns and materials of play, learned in childhood, can become sought-after activities in adulthood. Other articles in this special issue focus on the important issue for the history of childhood of the politics of play, and the wider effects decisions on play can have in society, policy, medicine and, broadly, children’s lives. Together they point to the fertile ground in which the history of play is developing. Play is rarely ‘just’ play. There is a tension in studying play between its fun and creative worlds and its varying forms of utility and educative power. Is it an escape for children from adult-dominated places and strictures, or is it a serious learning process? Or, of course, it could be a combination of the two. Sites and activities designed for children by adults overlap with child-centred uses and imaginings. Kim Rasmussen (2004) defines this distinction as ‘places for children’ on the one hand and ‘children’s places’ on the other. Taken broadly, the history of play is about the imaginative and creative worlds of the child in a dynamic relationship with the adult. How do emotions play into this? Are children imagining scenarios in order to explore emotions that might be inaccessible in their everyday lives? Or are they performing important emotional work by ‘learning how to feel’ (Frevert et al., 2014) through their imaginative worlds? The history of emotions can open up new questions for the history of childhood, and specifically the history of play. How does the material culture of play – objects, spaces and places – contribute to children’s emotional development? This input could be immediate, or manifest itself much later into adulthood. Much excellent work in the history of play has focused on material culture and on child-centred and child-driven activities. Scholarship focuses on doing rather than on the prescriptions and proscriptions of childhood.

The children’s war: Britain, 1914–1918

developed according to notions of legal patriarchy, with the state assuming control of the child in cases where families were considered inadequate. In Britain and the United States, child welfare was much more patchy and diverse and emphasised the rights of the family. The final essay by Nara Milanich on Latin American childhoods and the concept of modernity takes this further, effectively bookending the volume by responding to the questions about the story of childhood raised by Fass in the introduction. Milanich uncovers the many ways in which Latin American conceptions of childhood complicate notions of modernity. Practices – such as the circulation of children – that might be characterised as ‘pre-modern’ in fact have intensified with the development of the modern industrial economy in Latin America. Similarly, the very differentiated experiences of childhood in a society characterised by extreme inequality give the lie to any idea that childhood in the sense of ‘a distinct stage of life, characterized by dependence and centering on a notion of innocence and freedom from adult concerns’ is the universal experience in the modern world. The Routledge History of Childhood in the Western World provides a valuable corrective to accounts of the history of childhood in the West that might be too influenced by Aries’ compelling narrative and ignore the diversity and complexity of the history of childhood. Inevitably, some essays are stronger than others and the geographical coverage is somewhat patchy, with the US, Britain and France receiving more attention than other regions. However, this is a stimulating collection that both provides a lively introduction to the recent scholarship for students and raises new and important questions about childhood and modernity for more established scholars.

Adolescent Empire: Moral Dangers for Boys in Britain and India, c.1880–;1914

This chapter analyses the attempts of the British, through a common consensus about the correct path to civil manhood, to educate and build a moral empire. India in particular, the brightest jewel in the British crown and in many ways a testing ground for British policies in the wider empire as well as at home, is a crucial object of study. It served as a significant site of contestation and negotiation, defining important questions related to morality and gender and class (caste) norms and who was allowed to define them in religiously, socially and ethnically diverse locations, far from the metropole. This was especially true after the Rebellion of 1857, which provoked a rethinking of British social and religious policies in India to prevent further civilian disquiet and to change moral codes, in addition to the more concrete institutional and formal consequences usually cited, such as the termination of the East India Company’s charter and the imposition of direct government of India from London under the Raj (1858–1947)? The more informal and indirect responses to the fallout from the Rebellion have remained rather neglected in comparison and are the focus of this chapter. These changes had a direct role to play in increasing efforts in education, with moral education at the centre. Growing nationalist sentiment among Indians also encouraged the British to emphasize moral education to keep the threat at bay.

Cruelty takes the place of love : A magic lantern slide and the Band of Hope

Ephemera can be real treasure, especially perhaps for the historian of emotions. It can allow us to conceive of the emotive qualities of actors or events in different ways from sources that were meant to be preserved for posterity. This piece of ephemera, fortuitously preserved long after its technology was made obsolete, is a magic lantern slide. The magic lantern was widely used, in an era before the spread of movies and computers, for entertainment, sometimes combined with education. The medium was ubiquitous in the Victorian and Edwardian eras, yet, because of the equipment required, rare enough to be special to viewers. The British Band of Hope movement used this medium widely, and its major unions under which local bands were active had wellorganized lending policies of magic lantern slides and projectors. But what can one dusty slide tell us about the motivations of the adults or the children involved in this movement, and how can it enlighten us as historians of emotion?

Grausamkeit nimmt den Platz der Liebe ein": Laterna Magica und The Band of Hope

Unterhaltungsmedium mit dem oftmals auch erzieherische Botschaften verknüpft wurden. In der Viktorianischen und Edwardianischen Zeit war der Projektor allgegenwärtig. Da es aber spezieller technischer Voraussetzungen bedurfte um die Laterna Magica zu benutzen, war sie auch etwas Besonderes. Die britische Band of Hope-Bewegung machte von diesem Medium umfassend Gebrauch. Seine Hauptverbände, unter denen die lokalen Gruppen organisiert waren, hatten einen sehr gut organisierten Verleih von Lichtbildern und Projektoren. Aber was kann ein staubiges Bild Historikern der Emotionsgeschichte über die Motive der Kinder oder Erwachsenen erzählen, die in dieser Bewegung aktiv waren?

Towards the Modern Man: Edwardian Boyhood in the Juvenile Periodical Press

Gordon Stables, the flamboyant writer on health matters for the Boy’s Own Paper, remarked that Edwardian boys faced dangers that were ‘very, very, real’ (558). He advised that: The very first stepping-stones to good health and success are the giving up of bad habits, whether school vices or smoking and the declaration made to yourself and before Heaven in your own chambers that you will not read sensational or impure literature again. You thus bid fair to purify your minds and bodies also, and remove the most dangerous obstacles to your advancement in life. (558, emphasis added)