History Post-confederation (1867-)
Ring Around the Maple
A Sociocultural History of Children and Childhoods in Canada, 19th and 20th Centuries
- Publisher
- Wilfrid Laurier University Press
- Initial publish date
- Jun 2024
- Category
- Post-Confederation (1867-), Children's Studies, Social History
-
eBook
- ISBN
- 9781771126168
- Publish Date
- Jun 2024
- List Price
- $59.99
-
Paperback / softback
- ISBN
- 9781771126151
- Publish Date
- Jun 2024
- List Price
- $59.99
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Description
Ring Around the Maple is about the condition of children in Canada from roughly 1850 to 2000, a time during which “the modern” increasingly disrupted traditional ways. Authors Cynthia R. Comacchio and Neil Sutherland trace the lives of children over this “long century” with a view to synthesizing the rich interdisciplinary, often multi-disciplinary, literature that has emerged since the 1970s.
Integrated into this synthesis is the authors’ new research into many, often seemingly disparate, archival and published primary sources. Emphasizing how “the child” and childhood are sociohistoric constructs, and employing age analytically and relationally, they discuss the constants and the variants in their historic dimensions. While childhood tangibly modernized during these years, it remained a far from universal experience due to identifiers of race, gender, culture, region, and intergenerational adaptations that characterize the process of growing up.
This work highlights children’s perspectives through close, critical, “against the grain” readings of diaries, correspondence, memoirs, interviews, oral histories and autobiographies, many buried in obscure archives. It is the only extant historical discussion of Canadian children that interweaves the experiences of First Nations, Métis, and Inuit children with those of children from a number of settler groups.
Ring Around the Maple makes use of photographs, catalogues, advertisements, government publications, musical recordings, radio shows, television shows, material goods, documentary and feature films, and other such visual and aural testimony. Much of this evidence has not to date been used as historical testimony to uncover the lives of ordinary children. This book is generously illustrated with photographs and ephemera carefully selected to reflect children’s lives, conditions, interests, and obligations. It will be of special interest to historians and social scientists interested in children and the culture of childhood, but will also appeal to readers who enjoy the "little stories" that together make up our collective history, especially when those are told by the children who lived them.
About the authors
Cynthia Comacchio's research focuses on the history of children/childhood and youth in Canada, late 19th to 21st centuries. She is the author of numerous articles and books, including The Dominion of Youth: Adolescence and the Making of a Modern Canada, 1920-50 (WLU Press, 2008) and Ring Around the Maple: Settler Children in Canada, Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (WLU Press, 2024).
Cynthia R. Comacchio's profile page
Neil Sutherland served for 37 years in the University of British Columbia’s Department of Educational Studies. He was the principal investigator of the Canadian Childhood History Project located at UBC, and has published articles, reviews and a number of books, most recently Growing Up: Childhood in English Canada from the Great War to the Age of Television. He is the author of Children in English-Canadian Society: Framing the Twentieth-Century Consensus(WLU Press, 2000)
Other titles by
Ring Around the Maple
A Sociocultural History of Children and Childhoods in Canada, 19th and 20th Centuries
A War Guest in Canada
A War Guest in Canada
The Dominion of Youth
Adolescence and the Making of Modern Canada, 1920 to 1950
Children in English-Canadian Society
Framing the Twentieth-Century Consensus
The Infinite Bonds of Family
Domesticity in Canada, 1850-1940
Nations are Built of Babies
Saving Ontario's Mothers and Children, 1900-1940
Other titles by
Ring Around the Maple
A Sociocultural History of Children and Childhoods in Canada, 19th and 20th Centuries
A Common Countenance
Stability and Change in the Canadian Curriculum
Growing Up
Childhood in English Canada from the Great War to the Age of Television
Children in English-Canadian Society
Framing the Twentieth-Century Consensus
Growing Up
Childhood in English Canada from the Great War to the Age of Television