War and Childhood in the Era of the Two World Wars

This innovative book reveals children's experiences and how they became victims and actors during the twentieth century's biggest conflicts.

Mischa Honeck (Edited by), James Marten (Edited by)

9781108478533, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 21 February 2019

310 pages, 18 b/w illus.
23.5 x 15.8 x 1.8 cm, 0.63 kg

'Its success lies in the profound way in which it analyzes the impact of modern warfare on childhood, filling the gap in historiography and laying the foundation for further research.' Hannah Tomlin, H-Net: Humanities and Social Science Reviews Online

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.

Introduction: more than victims: framing the history of modern childhood and war Mischa Honeck and James Marten
Part I. Inspiring and Mobilizing: 1. Patriotic fun: toys and mobilization in China from the Republican to the Communist era Valentina Boretti
2. Forging a patriotic youth: penny dreadfuls and military censorship in WWI Germany Kara Ritzheimer
3. Recruiting Japanese boys for the pioneer youth corps of Mongolia and Manchuria L. Halliday Piel
4. Defining the ideal Soviet childhood: reportage about child evacuees from Spain as didactic literature Karl Qualls
5. Learning more than letters: alphabet books in the Soviet Union and the United States during World War II Julie K. deGraffenried
6. Boys and girls in the service of total war: defense service training in Swedish schools during World War II Esbjörn Larsson
7. Good soldiers all? Democracy and discrimination in the Boy Scouts of America, 1941–5 Mischa Honeck
Part II. Adapting and Surviving: 8. Combatant children: ideologies and experiences of childhood in the Royal Navy and British Army, 1902–18 Kate James
9. Drawing the Great War: children's personal representations of war and violence in France, Germany, and Russia Manon Pignot
10. Bellicists, feminists, and deserters: youth, war, and the German youth movement, 1914–18 Antje Harms
11. Boys without a country: Ottoman orphans in Germany during the First World War Nazan Maksudyan
12. In their own words: children in the world of the Holocaust Patricia Heberer Rice
13. The dark side of the 'good war': children and medical experimentation in the United States during World War II Birgitte Søland
14. Attacking children with nuclear weapons: the centrality of children in American understandings of the bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki Robert Jacobs.

Subject Areas: Second World War [HBWQ], Spanish Civil War [HBWP], First World War [HBWN], Social & cultural history [HBTB], 20th century history: c 1900 to c 2000 [HBLW], History of the Americas [HBJK], Asian history [HBJF], European history [HBJD]