America's Children: Picturing Childhood from Early America to the Present [Hardcover]

Kathleen Thompson (Author), Hilary Mac Austin (Author)

Book Description

A stunning collection of photographs that reveals the diverse and powerful impact that children have had on America, with an introduction by Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis.

Illuminating a vital but all too often neglected part of our nation's past, America's Children is a comprehensive print documentary of children in the United States, the first visual history of its kind. Kathleen Thompson and Hilary Mac Austin explore childhood over four centuries of American life, portraying the children of our past and present through images from museums and archives all over the country as well as from their own extensive collection. Composed of more than 300 duotone images, America's Children includes drawings, engravings, Native American ledger paintings, and sketches by early explorers that date as far back as the 1500s. Almost one-third of these images have never been published before. Hometown newspaper and studio photographers such as Charles "Teenie" Harris, Albert R. Stone, and Fred Hultstrand present a nostalgic but unsentimental view of America's small towns. Harrowing photographs by Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine show the exploitation of children in mines and sweatshops. The groundbreaking documentary photographs of the FSA photographers reveal a child's life during the hardships of the Great Depression. Betty Lane, Jeffry Scott, Cathie Lyons, Nestor Hernandez, and other contemporary photographers glimpse a group of girls at a pro-choice demonstration, an illegal immigrant huddled in his father's arms before being sent back across the border, a child hunkered in absorbed interest at the edge of a vast AIDS memorial quilt, a boy limboing under a crime-scene tape. Alongside these images, the authors have included detailed captions as well as excerpts from interviews, letters, and diaries that allow the nation's children, past and present, to be heard in their own words. Following in the path of Thompson and Austin's previous books—the best-selling The Face of Our Past and Children of the Depression—America's Children is arranged in eight sections, from "Children and Learning" and "Children and Their Families on the Move" to "Children at Work" and "Children at Play," each of which includes a brief introduction detailing the history of children from a different perspective, taking us from a sixteenth-century Algonquian village to a nineteenth-century southern plantation, and from the battlefields of the Civil War to the migrant camps of the Depression and beyond. Revealing the central—and quite adult—role that children have played and continue to play in American society, America's Children is not only a brilliantly revisionist work of historical significance but also a stunning volume that will be treasured by families for years to come. more than 300 duotone images

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Children, say Thompson and Austin, are missing from the visual history of America that most of us are familiar with. The authors (who also wrote The Face of Our Past) fill in this gap with 300 images that belie the narrow, idealized view of childhood prevalent in this country: here we see children of all colors and classes, at home, at play, at work and in the community. Though there are some early American paintings and engravings, most of the images are photographs: children in one-room rural Southern schoolhouses and New Mexican missions; marching for better working conditions and civil rights; working in mills and gas stations and cotton plantations; frolicking in the sunlight. Some of the images are by legendary photographers like Jacob Riis and Dorothea Lange, while others are by lesser known artists or anonymous family members with Polaroid cameras. The photos are accompanied by short excerpts from childhood memoirs and children's letters and diaries. Though there's not much substantive text, Thompson and Austin's detailed captions and chapter introductions-as well as their often striking curatorial finds-offer a unique perspective on the upheavals and opportunities that families have found in the U.S.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

The authors of The Face of Our Past: Images of Black Women from Colonial America to the Present (2000) explore the lives of another marginalized group of American citizens--children. Like women and minorities, children have often been neglected or overly sentimentalized in portrayals of American history. The authors go a long way toward ameliorating that situation with this powerful record of the presence of children in American history over the past four centuries. The book is divided into sections on family, community, work, and school, and portrays childhood as something much more complex than the standard idealized images of care-free lives and protected innocence. Each section begins with narrative that provides historical context, and the photographs--accompanied by letters and short essays--speak for themselves, depicting children at church, school, funerals, on their front steps, as laborers on railroads and in coal mines and cotton fields, and as full participants in times of trial and triumph. A stunning presentation. Vanessa Bush
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; 1 edition (December 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 039305182X
• ISBN-13: 978-0393051827
• Product Dimensions: 12.5 x 9.2 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.7 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,882,177 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I couldn't put it down, January 20, 2003

By 

Tamera Bryant (Columbus, OH United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: America's Children: Picturing Childhood from Early America to the Present (Hardcover)

When I first looked through this book. I was captivated by the variety of people and settings. Boys and girls of different races and ethnicities, playing, learning, fighting, working, struggling, hoping. I couldn't put the book down. I had to keep looking, to see who and what would appear on the next page.

I trust anyone would have the same reaction. But don't stop there with the photographs. This is much more than a photo album. Take the time to read the captions, the authors' commentary, and most of all, the words (letters, diary entries, conversations, etc.) of the children themselves. You won't be disappointed. Rather, you may find, like I did, that the photographs become even more real, more poignant, more personal, and more moving than they did at first glance. And, once again, you won't be able to put them down.

Whatever your notions and conceptions of childhood and of United States history and policy, this book will certainly broaden your understanding, intellectually and emotionally, of both.