J301: Childhood in America

The history of childhood intersects with many different fields of academic study. Depending on your topic, you may find valuable material in any part of the library, actual or virtual. This web page is an overview of likely places to go to start your research.

Feel free to contact Celestina Savonius-Wroth, cewroth@indiana.edu, history librarian, for help with your research.

I. Primary sources: what original source materials are available from the time period you're researching?

Books, films: use IUCAT to search the IU collections. Use the Advanced Keyword Search to limit your search results to materials published in a specific time period, or use the DVD/Video Search to find films. To find children's books, use Advanced Keyword Search and use juvenile fiction as a subject term. Use WorldCat to search beyond the IU collections. (In WorldCat, you can select juvenile as the audience to find all kinds of books for children, not just fiction.) If you find something you want in WorldCat that's not available at IU, use the Request materials from ILL link in the WorldCat record to borrow on interlibrary loan.

Newspapers and magazines: use 19th Century Historical United States Newspapers, Early American Newsppers, New York Times (+other historical newspapes through this link) for older newspapers (back to the 1600s!), use Lexis-Nexis Academic and Factiva for more recent ones (1980s to present). Use Readers Guide Retrospective 1890-1982, American Periodicals Series Online, and Nineteenth Century Masterfile to locate old magazine articles, Academic Search (EBSCO) for more recent ones.

Journals: see below for searching for recent journal articles. For older materials that you could use as primary source materials (eg, if your topic has something to do with intellectual debate in the past over children or childhood), try Periodicals Index Online.

Court cases and congressional hearings: use Lexis-Nexis Academic and Lexis-Nexis Congressional. For court cases, go to power search-->legal-->federal and state cases.

Diaries, letters: search IUCAT: use the Advanced Search, keyword anywhere child$ (looks for children, childhood, etc), subject diaries. You also might have luck with In the First Person, an index of personal narratives available online. Or check out North American Women's Letters and Diaries and North American Immigrant Letters, Diaries and Oral Histories, or browse the collections at American Memory.

Realia (=material objects): in Bloomington: the Wylie House museum has 19th-century toys, clothing, furniture, etc used by children. The Lilly Library has an amazing puzzle collection (not just for kids, though), as well as one of the best collections of children's books, including miniature "toy" books, in the English-speaking world.

II. Secondary sources: what has already been written about your topic by historians and other scholars and professionals?

IUCAT: for books. Do keyword searches and look at the subject headings in your results. Then use the Advanced Search and combine keywords with the subject headings you found. Or try some of these subject headings:

children social conditions
child welfare united states history
motion pictures and children (motion pictures=movies)
social work with children
children's literature history and criticism
toys

If you're having trouble finding books with a historical perspective, you can always combine keywords of your choosing with the subject heading history

America: History & Life: for articles in history journals

ERIC (EBSCO): for articles in education journals

Academic Search (EBSCO): for articles on a wide range of topics. Limit your search to "peer-reviewed" to find journal articles only, or don't limit, to get results from popular magazines as well.

Sociological Abstracts: for articles in sociology journals.

See the Libraries' Resources by Subject page for more ideas.

Last updated January 16, 2008