War and Childhood in the Era of the Two World Wars

Description

The histories of modern war and childhood were the result of competing urgencies. According to ideals of childhood widely accepted throughout the world by 1900, children should have been protected, even hidden, from conflict and danger. Yet at a time when modern ways of childhood became increasingly possible for economic, social, and political reasons, it became less possible to fully protect them in the face of massive industrialized warfare driven by geopolitical rivalries and expansionist policies. Taking a global perspective, the chapters in this book examine a wide range of experiences and places. In addition to showing how the engagement of children and youth with war differed according to geography, technology, class, age, race, gender, and the nature of the state, they reveal how children acquired agency during the twentieth century's greatest conflicts.

Mischa Honeck teaches US and transatlantic history at the Humboldt University of Berlin. He was a research fellow at the German Historical Institute in Washington, DC, and is the author of Our Frontier Is the World: The Boy Scouts in the Age of American Ascendancy (2018). James Marten was one of the founders of the Society for the History of Children and Youth and its president from 2013 to 2015. He edited the Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth from 2013 to 2018. His book The Children's Civil War (1998) was named an Outstanding Academic Title by Choice.

'This outstanding volume of essays addresses a central issue of twentieth-century warfare of why children who, in theory, should be shielded from involvement in war are instead continuously mobilized physically, emotionally, and imaginatively into war. It is a major contribution to our understanding of the history of children and childhood.' David M. Rosen, Fairleigh Dickinson University