What life was like for youngsters who lived on the Great Plains in nineteenth-century frontier life. Chapters address a breadth of experiences and perceptions: why families came to the Great Plains and where they decided to settle; how families and communities were organized for education, work, and play; how health care, accidents, and mortality affected childhoods; and what children experienced outside the home. As much as possible, Ms. Holt lets the children speak for themselves. American Childhoods Series.

The Civil War influenced virtually every aspect of children's lives, and in turn they eagerly incorporated the experience of war into their daily assumptions and activities. In this new contribution to the American Childhoods series, James A. Marten places the experiences of children living in the North during the Civil War into the larger contexts of economic, political, and cultural developments during the nineteenth century. On the home front, children became almost full-fledged members of their communities in their support of the war effort. They left school to replace absent men on farms...

What was it like growing up in the Great Depression, and how did America's youngest citizens contribute to the history of that fateful decade? In The Greatest Generation Grows Up, Kriste Lindenmeyer shows that the experiences of depression-era children help us understand the course of the 1930s as well as the history of American childhood. For the first time, she notes, federal policy extended childhood dependence through the teen years while cultural changes reinforced this ideal of modern childhood. Grade-based grammar schools and high schools expanded rapidly, strengthening age-based...