Making a Case for the History of Children and Youth

Two of my recent publications focus on the unique analytical power and characteristics of the history of children and youth.  The first article, “ ‘Children Obviously Don’t make History’: Children’s Modalities of Power and Their Contribution to Historical Change,”  published in the Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth goes head to head with claims that young people are not historical actors. Focussed on children’s unique contributions to historical change, I offer ways for historians to challenge the notion that history is made by adults only. My second article, entitled “The Archived Child: Strategies for Amplifying Children’s Contributions to History” in Qualitative Inquiry, explores three interrelated interpretive strategies or dispositions for amplifying young peoples’ contributions to history: empathic inference, relational agency, and the axiom that children are heirs to the future. I argue that young peoples’ contributions to historical change are most clearly legible when interpretive strategies, including the historical methods and methodological dispositions historians adopt, reject traditional conceptions of history as exclusively or mainly adult driven.