Are Histories of Children and Youth Historically Significant?

Historians of children and youth might read my question above as rhetorical. “Of course histories of children and youth are historically significant!” I think the answer is perhaps not as straightforward and obvious as we might think or hope. In March of 2021, I gave a keynote address to the Center for the History of Experiences at Tampere University that explored this very question. The conference theme was “The History of Experience and Agency: A Critical Intervention.”  In my address, I challenged historians to consider how uncritical assumptions about children’s agency in the past, a topic that I’ve written about previously, play into adult-centric conceptions of what constitutes topics and themes of historical significance. The recent critique of the field of the history of children and youth by scholars such as Sarah Maza in the American Historical Review is a great case in point. Maza essentially dismisses the field, arguing that while writing history through the lens of children and youth might have some merit, histories of children and youth do not “significantly recast our understanding of ‘normal’ [sic] history” (Maza, 1261).  Perhaps the problem, I argued in my keynote, is not with children and youth but with what Maza calls “normal history.” What constitutes “normal history” and who decides? How have traditional notions of the constitution of historical significance elevated some histories and marginalized and silenced others? This question will animate my next article…stay tuned!