. . . It is, however, a fact that there is in full operation among us a system of which the violation of virgins is one of the ordinary incidents; that these virgins are mostly of tender age, being too young in fact to understand the nature of the crime of which they are the unwilling victims; that these outrages are constantly perpetrated with almost absolute impunity; and that the arrangements for procuring, certifying, violating, repairing, and disposing of these ruined victims of the lust of London are made with a simplicity and efficiency incredible to all who have not made actual demonstration of the facility with which the crime can be accomplished.

. . . Before beginning this inquiry I had a confidential interview with one of the most experienced officers who for many years was in a position to possess an intimate acquaintance with all phases of London crime. I asked him, "Is it or is it not a fact that, at this moment, if I were to go to the proper houses, well introduced, the keeper would, in return for money down, supply me in due time with a maid—a genuine article, I mean, not a mere prostitute tricked out as a virgin, but a girl who had never been seduced?" "Certainly," he replied without a moment's hesitation. . . ."Are these maids willing or unwilling parties to the transaction—that is, are they really maiden, not merely in being each a virgo intacta in the physical sense, but as being chaste girls who are not consenting parties to their seduction?" He looked surprised at my question, and then replied emphatically: "Of course they are rarely willing, and as a rule they do not know what they are coming for." "But," I said in amazement, "then do you mean to tell me that in very truth actual rapes, in the legal sense of the word, are constantly being perpetrated in London on unwilling virgins, purveyed and procured to rich men at so much a head by keepers of brothels?" "Certainly," said he, "there is not a doubt of it." "Why," I exclaimed, "the very thought is enough to raise hell.". . .

The third they were charged with, was Stephen Arrowsmith for the Rape committed on Elizabeth Hopkins. . . .

The Girl that was ravished, being between 8 and 9, testified that he had had to do with her for half a year together every Sunday, that she was hindred from crying the first time, by his stopping her mouth, and that he gave her money afterwards; and she never discovered it, still some of her friends observing her to go as if she were very sore, examined her, and by telling her she would be in danger of hanging in Hell, got her to confess, that the Prisoner was her fathers Prentice. . . .

The Prisoner with a great many tears denied the Fact, and desired some Witnesses might be called. Among whom there was a maid that lived at the Doctors where the Girl was for Cure, who testified that the Girl upon Taxing her, why she did conceal it, said, she took Pleasure in it, and that upon Examination there were no Symptomes on the Prisoner, as the Doctor said, of any such disease as the Girl had, which was indeed the Pox; which was also attested by one Mrs. Rawlins: and the Prisoner protesting his Innocence, alledged that they offered a Composition. 1

All which notwithstanding, the Court with great detestation and abhorrence of so Horrid and Vile an Offence, told him the Matter was so plain against him, that he must have as great impudence to deny it, as he had wickedness to Commit it; that her consent would not save him, for the Statute provides, that a Child under 10 years of age, should not be abused with, or without her Consent. That the First Violence whereby he stop'd her Crying, made the Rape, had it been a Woman above 10; that if the Parents were so wicked, as to offer a Composition, yet that made not him innocent. . . .

[The jury returned a verdict of not guilty] which Verdict Mr. Recorder, not conceiving it to be according to their Evidence, would not take from them without further deliberation, and labour'd to satisfie them of the Manifestness of the Proof. One of the Jury being an Apothecary, said it was his opinion, that a Child of those years could not be Ravished. Which the Court told him was to Elude the Statute, that having provided a Punishment, had done it in vain, if there were no offence, and so he did tax the Wisdom of a whole Parliament; Which ought not to be Others of the Jury, because the Girls were not sworn, doubted of the sufficiency of their Testimony, and they had nothing but hearsay from the other Witnesses. But the Court told them, in regard such Offenders never call others to be by while they commit such actions, they could expect no other Testimony than from the Party injured, which they had, and with it of an eye Witness, both whom they forbore to Swear, because of the tenderness of their Age; but if they insisted upon it, they should be Sworn.

[The jury deliberated again and found Arrowsmith guilty]

When my brother was born I was just on 12 and the night before he was born, my mother said: "Would you like to go round and stay with Mrs Andrews?" So I stayed the night and I came home in the morning. Mrs Andrews said "Oh, you can go home now." So I went home. It wasn't far from where we were living in Petone. And when I got into the side I saw a most beautiful baby in a basket, on a chair, in the dining room and then I saw somebody rushing round in a starched apron with a cap on her head and I thought, "Well, who are you?" And I said to her, "Who's this in the basket?" She said, "That's your little brother." "Oh," I said, "Well then, I'll go and tell my mother." She said, "Don't you dare open that door. Your mother is very ill." Well, I was nearly 12 and I had no idea in the wild world where my brother had come from or how he got there or anything else – and I think that was quite wrong. I should have been told but I must have been very naïve or an idiot or something, I don't know what, but I never noticed that my mother was any different or having a baby.

The Atlantic Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Americas: A Visual Record amasses over 1,200 images documenting the history of the Atlantic slave trade and the lives of slaves and former slaves in the Americas. The images document the history of enslavement in West and West Central Africa, the English and French Caribbean, Brazil, and the United States. Most of the images are watercolors, sketches, and prints from 18th and 19th century European and American texts, although a few pieces predate this era, or are digitalized versions of previously unpublished archival material. Finally, the site also contains a few newspaper advertisements for runaway slaves, such as this 1763 "Fugitive Slave Advertisement" publicizing the escape of four slaves, including one 15-year-old boy.

Viewers can search for images of children within this site by browsing the 18 broad subject categories by which the database is organized. Two categories that include many images of children are Pre-Colonial Africa: Society, Polity, Culture and Family Life, Child Care, Schools. Larger numbers of images involving children can be located by doing a keyword search from the general database for children (97 images), girl (26 images) and boy (33 images).

While the types of sources contained in this site pose some challenges to effective classroom use, instructors who think carefully about how to have students use these images will be rewarded with rich results. Both full bibliographic references and a clear indication of the geographic and temporal setting depicted are provided for each image. Also included are any relevant textual passages that might have accompanied an image in its original publication. However, as the site makes clear, its authors have made little effort to interpret the images or establish the historical authenticity or accuracy of what they depict, so much is required in this area by viewers.

There are several ways to approach this material. Instructors might point out to students that the images do not necessarily document slavery's history in a straight-forward and unmediated fashion, and in this case, they might design exercises for students that called for them to consider how the context and objective of an image's creator shaped the content of the image generated. This approach could be done by either restricting students to the use of material contained at the site, or by requiring them to do further research on the images’ creators.

Another option would be to explore the ways in which children are ubiquitous in images on this site, for example, as infants, strapped to the backs of women – presumably their mothers. Yet this depiction seems at odds with what we know to have been the extremely high rates of infant and childhood mortality that children experienced across the Americas under slavery. Young children in these images are also most often shown playing near, or sitting on the laps of their mothers, yet again, we know that it was common for slave children to be sold to others separately from their mothers. Instructors might therefore ask their students: Have these artists exaggerated the predominance of children's proximity to their mothers in these images? If so, why?

Instructors might start by encouraging students to formulate interpretations involving childhood and children in slavery from the images, and then moving to secondary source material to learn more. Or an assignment could begin with historical context and then look for patterns mentioned in the literature or for images that counter a historical narrative. A few secondary sources that would work well with this collection of images include: Digital History's entry on African American Voices and Annie L. Burton's 19th century slave chronicle, Memories of Childhood's Slavery Days.

One fascinating theme to explore would be inter-racial relations that childcare arrangements between slave and slave-owning families entailed. See, for example, Enslaved House Servants and White Children, South Carolina, 1863 and Black Nursemaid, New Orleans, 1873-74. Instructors might have students study these and other such images to consider how the relations they depict suggest ties of emotional intimacy and social proximity that contradict the more brutal relations between slaves and slave owners portrayed in so many other images at the site.

Instructors could also use images in this collection to examine the issue of gender, encouraging students to consider, for example, how the slave experience differently affected boys and girls. Students could analyze such images as George Cruikshank's pro-abolitionist drawing, "Punishment Aboard a Slave Ship, 1792" which depicts a 15-year-old girl who was tortured to death for her "virgin modesty" (she had refused to dance naked on the deck of a British slaving ship) or the similar scene illustrated in "Whipping a Slave in Surinam, 1770s". Such illustrations allow students to examine how slave owners and captors projected notions of heightened sexuality, or presumptions of sexual availability on female slaves, and contrast these with the experience of males.

The history of childhood depends, to some extent, on understanding the history of home- and family-life, the primary context in which childhood occurs. In the U.S., the rise of the field known as "home economics" had an enormous impact on popular conceptions of children and what kind of care they require. The impressive HEARTH website offers the most comprehensive online collection of primary sources in the field of home economics from 1850 through 1950; a few sources, such as full-text articles from the Journal of Home Economics, are inclusive through 1980. Introductory material addresses the importance of home economics to women's history and children's history as well as its broad impact on American culture.

Materials are arranged into 11 broadly-defined topics; each is introduced with a short essay, an image, and a substantial bibliography of influential texts on that topic, in PDF format. The history of home economics is a relatively young discipline, so these bibliographies provide an especially valuable service. While only one of the site's self-designed subject headings (Care, Human Development, and Family Studies) appears at first glance to be relevant for historians of childhood and youth, in fact, the entire site has valuable resources to offer.

The field of Home Economics grew in concert with the popularity of the "scientific" approach to child-development. This approach influenced the systematization of public education, children's medical and psychological care, and the social studies of juvenile delinquency, among other topics. Indeed, Home Economics became one of the primary disciplinary venues through which child-study developed. Consequently, many subject bibliographies contain material relevant to the health, psychology, moral development, and education of children. Home economics was also a subject taught to young women in high schools and colleges for many decades, so a good share of the material on this site was read by female youths as part of their education.

To find material specific to the history of children and/or youth, start with the Browse page. This presents a list—fairly short now, but still growing—of available full-text journals. Clicking on the title of a journal leads to a list of all volumes and issue numbers for each year of publication; these, too, appear as hyperlinks, which lead to full-text articles. All issues of the journal Children, produced by the U.S. Government Publication Office from 1954 to 1971, for example, are reproduced in their entirety. One can scan the tables of contents for each issue and discover articles with intriguing titles such as "What Makes a Good Parent?" and "Mental Retardation in the Soviet Union".

The "Browse" page also indexes HEARTH's full-text holdings (journals and books) alphabetically by author or title. Unfortunately, the books are not categorized beyond this. A reader who does not already know specific titles or authors will find it time-consuming to scan these alphabetized lists—it is like searching for a book in a library by wandering through the stacks and gazing hopefully at the shelves.

The sole example of subject-categorization lies in the PDF subject-bibliographies. Alas, the PDF format is a poor choice. It prevents titles from appearing as hyperlinks, meaning that viewers cannot look at a bibliography and know which entries, if any, are available in full-text on the website.

The full-text books and journals at HEARTH can be used to explore a range of topics when teaching the institutional history of childhood, such as how various institutions like the government, public schools, hospitals, and social services, influenced American ideologies of home, family, and children. Students raised in late 20th century schools may find it remarkable, for example, that turn-of-the-century educators considered a child's moral development to be an imperative duty of schoolteachers. Felix Adler's The Moral Instruction of Children (1912), which can be read in full-text on the site, includes chapters on children's moral responsibilities, like "The Duties Toward All Men (Justice and Charity)" and "The Elements of Civic Duty." Adler also offers chapters on how to instill morals in children by using fables, fairy tales, and even Homer's Odyssey. This emphasis on character, duty, and citizenship bears only a scant resemblance to the modern-day emphasis on building students' "self-esteem" in K-12 teaching. A history teacher might use this text to prompt students to think about change over time in America's concepts of children's roles in society, and what children "need" to fulfill those roles.

Categories or strategies for searching would make these materials more user friendly for teachers and students, but barring that, the topics listed on the Subjects page or in the background essays provide a good starting point.

One of the most comprehensive online collections of Egyptian material culture, the Eternal Egypt website provides invaluable information and photos of many thousands of artifacts from all historical eras of the Egyptian past. Fortunately for scholars and educators of childhood, there is an easy-to-use portion of the website devoted to games and toys, bringing to life the leisure pursuits of children who have lived in Egypt through history.

The Games and Toys component of the Eternal Egypt website is an easy-to-navigate collection of 21 artifacts, mostly from the Pharaonic era, used as toys or games by children of the past. Visitors may click on any artifact to be taken to a new page dedicated to explaining the toy or game in question. Expert information is provided, including the era of the toy, the materials from which it was made, where it was discovered, and in which museum or collection it currently resides. Clear images are provided as well, along with descriptions of the toy in question and explanations about how it might have been used. A handy zoom feature allows viewers to explore the item up close, making small details very clear. Moreover, IBM Text-to-Speech technology has been integrated into the site, making it possible to listen to descriptions while you are exploring the zoom imagery. These are the same descriptions given to visitors of the Egyptian Museum of Cairo, giving remote viewers a similar experience to those fortunate enough to encounter these artifacts first-hand.

Each page also provides links for more information about the time during which the toy was made and enjoyed, as well as the technique used for manufacturing it and the materials from which it was created. For example, the "child's spinning toy" from the 18th Dynasty allows modern children to compare and contrast their own spinning tops by interacting with those of ancient Egyptian children. Maps and timelines are also provided, as well as key topics for further exploration of the society and history of the toy’s era. All of these features are fantastic teaching tools and will serve educators well. Students and teachers may also register to create and store their own "collections" of artifacts on the website. This allows visitors to save items most interesting to them and helps them curate their own virtual museum of Egyptian artifacts.

An interesting classroom exercise might include an examination of the popular themes of historical Egyptian toys. For example, students visiting the site will quickly notice that monkeys and other primates were popular themes for historical children's entertainment. They may compare their own society's fascination in primate-themed toys and try to determine the reasons for this similarity. Another productive exercise may be to recreate some of the popular toys of the past—such as Senet and Backgammon—in a classroom setting, giving students a hands-on experience related to the pastimes of their historical counterparts.

Beyond the section on Games and Toys, there are additional resources available through the search function. A search on "child" yields 112 results; "girl" returns 33 items and "boy" returns 23.

This site is a fantastic resource for educators who want to infuse their classrooms with a sense of humanity. Teaching the past—particularly the ancient past of a foreign country—can be a challenge, but by integrating the material culture of entertainment, and especially that of children, teachers can better humanize their subjects for their students. Eternal Egypt is a wonderful resource for those educators and scholars who would like to get "up close and personal" with the material culture of the Egyptians in the comfort of their own classrooms.

Read a review of the entire Eternal Egypt website on World History Matters, http://chnm.gmu.edu/worldhistorysources/d/241.html.

In 1958, Dr. John Nietz, an emeritus professor of Education at the University of Pittsburgh, donated 9,000 old textbooks from his personal collection to the Pitt library. 19th Century Schoolbooks offers full-text access to 140 of these volumes as well as two surveys of historic schoolbooks created by Nietz. The books are available as page images as well as searchable text. An index of the collection provides bibliographic records for all 16,000 volumes in Nietz's collection.

The collection focuses on standardized textbooks on general subject matters (most often reading, spelling, geography, arithmetic, and history), published or circulated between 1800 and 1899 for use in K-12 schools. The site allows for several types of searches: basic, boolean, proximity, and bibliographic searches, for those seeking a specific search-term, and a helpful browsing feature for those who simply want to see a sampling of what the collection offers. Clicking on a letter of the alphabet will allow you to browse all titles that begin with that letter.

This site will be most immediately useful to those studying the history of U.S. education, but other historians can find much here that could be of use in their classes. One intriguing aspect of the site is its revelations about the social values of a bygone time. The proliferation of textbooks on elocution and oratory, for example, attests to the earnest emphasis on spoken words in the 19th century: how to pronounce them, how to voice them clearly and "correctly"; how to emote words for dramatic recitations.

Texts like Dr. Scudder's Tales for Little Readers, About the Heathen vividly demonstrate the condescending curiosity in 19th-century Orientalism. Chapter Two, "The Colors and Ornaments of the Hindoos," explains to the child-reader that some heathens are red, some are black, and many of them are beautiful, especially the "children of Brahmins and others, who are delicately brought up."

Entries such as The Ladies' Reader: designed for the use of schools and family reading circles, are valuable for exploring gender. This reader contains selections from famous literary works deemed appropriate for female sensibilities.

Teachers of early American history might find it useful to examine the New England Primer, a valuable resource reproduced in its entirety. The New England Primer was a standard reader used for over two centuries, making it one of the foremost influential pedagogical texts in U.S. history. Examining each page of the Primer, visitors can study its juxtapositions of Puritan theology with elemental reading lessons, as in its famous Rhymed Alphabet (Letter J: "Job feels the Rod / Yet blesses God").

The full texts of two treatises written by Nietz on textbooks are also useful resources: Old Textbooks (1961) and The Evolution of American Secondary-School Textbooks (1966). These texts provide a good historical overview and introduction to the subject matter, as well as providing insight into the approach to analyzing textbooks in the 1960s.

Additional reference materials include Using Textbooks as a Research Resource: A Bibliography, which offers an annotated list of scholarly works that utilize children's textbooks as primary sources. The bibliography includes works from as early as 1908, providing a rare longitudinal glimpse of the field of education-history. One limitation in this bibliography is that it contains no works more recent than the 1990s.

A resource page provides links to related websites, such as the American Antiquarian Society's Pedagogical Juvenile Books collection. The entries are representative (not comprehensive) of special collections and rare-book rooms in U.S., British, and Canadian libraries. Some links are out of date. Overall, this website offers much that is useful in studying the history of American children's education.

Why I Taught the Source

Undergraduates enrolled in the 100-level course I teach on the Holocaust find the topic both compelling and overwhelming especially given the array of topics that cover the background to and mechanisms of destruction. In order to enable students to go beyond the countless facts and deeply disturbing details, I utilize survivors' narratives that provide a fuller understanding of the complexity of war and genocide. In my experience I have found that children's testimonies—diaries, memoirs, and documentaries—provide an unusual angle of vision into childhood, the family, everyday life, and survival. Using the oral histories of children provides a child-centered view of the Holocaust in which young people were not only victims and witnesses, but also historical agents.

Originally published in Polish by the Jewish Historical Commission in Cracow in 1946 and republished in English in 1996 by the British publisher Vallentine Mitchell, The Children Accuse is required reading about the early postwar testimonies of Jewish children in Poland. 1 The book consists of 55 children's testimonies and 15 adult testimonies. The latter testimonies focus on children's experiences in various ghettos in Nazi-occupied Poland, whereas the children's testimonies are divided into six thematic sections: the ghettos, the camps, on the Aryan side, in hiding, the resistance and prison. The children's testimonies can be characterized as 'unliterary,' simple descriptive reports, close in time to the events they describe. They convey diversity of individual experiences, but, at the same time, they revolve around common themes and shared wartime experiences. They all are based on oral interviews with child survivors that were conducted according to the official guidelines on how to research Jewish children's wartime experiences that were issued in 1945 by the Historical Commission of the Central Committee of Polish Jews. These interviews were carried out in Jewish children's orphanages, dormitories, and places of daily care that were established in various Polish cities and towns immediately after the end of war.

How I Introduce the Source

I introduce students to the testimonies by discussing the historical background and by posing a question about what we can learn from the close reading of children's testimonies. My main objectives are to teach students that children's testimonies are a rich documentary source useful for the reconstruction of the history of Jewish children and Jewish family in Poland during the Second World War, and for the reconstruction of the multi-dimensional histories of Polish-Jewish and also Ukrainian-Jewish relations of the period. My specific aims are to demonstrate the ways in which testimonies: (1) shed light on the patterns of Jewish family life (e.g., the reversal of the roles between children and their parents) and in the ghettos; (2) map out social relations between the children and other individuals in the ghettos and camps (e.g., between children and individuals on the Aryan side in wartime and early post-war Poland as well as with their Christian Polish rescuers); (3) inform us about children's particular methods of survival and their role in the process of their own survival; and (4) reveal the emotional, intellectual, and physical state of young people emerging from the conditions of war, genocide, and a deep-seated fear of being exposed as Jewish.

Students also learn about the differences between children's testimonies and other primary sources—the official documents—which they also read and discuss in the classroom prior to our discussion on Jewish children's wartime experiences. This is achieved through a two-page take-home assignment in which they answer the following key questions: How and in what ways do the testimonies differ from official documents? Describe the similarities and differences. What are, in your opinion, the shortcomings of the children's testimonies and what are their strengths as a historical evidence?

The subject is discussed in two 75-minute course periods during a week. In preparation, I show students a 15-minute clip from the film Undzere Children (Our Children). Afterwards, I ask them questions about the images of Jewish childhood during the war presented in the film and about representations of Jewish children during the Holocaust in Nazi anti-Jewish propaganda material discussed the previous week in the context of the Warsaw ghetto. This is conducted in the form of a "15-minute buzz discussion," aimed at the overview and categorization of acquired historical knowledge.

Reading the Source

Next, I provide a 10-minute general historical background (e.g., information and explanations about the various localities) and short definitions of unusual terms and vocabulary encountered in the testimonies. Students then form working groups—numbering between 5 and 6 individuals—that are assigned one or two children's testimonies from The Children Accuse. The final part of the first session is dedicated to going over the first homework assignment. Students read the testimony and answer the following questions: Does the child—she/he—remember his/her prewar childhood? What kind of social background does she/he have? Does the child remember his parents? What does she/he remember? What kind of wartime experience did the child undergo? What are the main recollected individuals, events and developments? What image of the life in a ghetto emerges from the testimony? How did the child survive? Was he/she assisted/helped by a rescuer and, if so, by whom? Who are the rescuers and how did they behave towards the child? What do we learn about the life of the child after the end of the war? How does she/he view their present situation? What feelings and reflections does she/he express? Are these feelings and reflections typical of a childhood age? What information appears to be absent from the child's testimony?

These questions are written on the weekly outline posted on blackboard and circulated in class at the beginning of the first session. I ask the students to provide written answers in the form of notes. At the beginning of the second class session, students in each group are asked to compare their written notes, discuss their individual answers, and prepare the comprehensive group answer to the abovementioned questions. I ask each of the groups to select the most striking passages from testimonies to exemplify their answers. This takes place during the first 15-20 minutes and is followed by each groups' 10-minute oral presentation about its child's/children's testimony. This is followed by a general class-wide discussion that builds on issues raised in each of the presented cases. This discussion aims at a differentiation of the children's wartime experiences and at making analogies between "ordinary" childhood and childhood under the conditions of war and genocide. These discussions are usually animated.

The second homework assignment—the above mentioned two-page essay—asks the students to discuss and reflect on the value of a child's testimony in Holocaust history. This assignment offers students the chance to wrestle with salient questions about a variety of primary sources in an historical investigation.

The two sessions are essential preparation for working on their final group assignment, a poster about Jewish children's life during the war. (The poster represents 15% of the final grade.) Through the final assignment, the students expand their knowledge about and understanding of the subject by building on their previous work and by further investigating the subject outside the classroom. Students usually are quite enthusiastic about the poster project. It allows them to demonstrate not only historical knowledge but also their creativity with written and visual images, as well as artistic and aesthetic talents.

Reflections

Having used children's testimonies in a range of courses, I have learned to adapt them according to the course level and subject matter. In all classes, I have founded that students' responses to this material is very positive.

The testimonies, together with diaries, memoirs and documentary films such as Undzere Children (Our Children, Poland, 1948, Yiddish with English translation) allow students insight into the everyday life of the historical actors: the Jewish child survivors, family members, their Christian rescuers and other individuals whom children encountered in a ghetto and on the Aryan side. These primary sources allow students to follow in the footsteps of young Jewish children and see them as human beings who went through various wartime experiences and who harbor particular child-focused memories of the war. Students confront, in these testimonies, the uncontrived story of personal experience. From the testimonies, students gain not only an understanding of the variety of wartime experiences and survival, but also an understanding of the particular pain and perplexity of the children, who lost their families, were forced to assume Christian identities, and to fend for themselves though children.

One of a pair of woodblock prints from Japan's Tokugawa Period (1600–1868) depicting popular children's games for girls.

Age Limit in Age of Consent Laws in Selected Countries