This module traces the shifting ways that age of consent laws have been defined, debated and deployed worldwide and from the Middle Ages to the present, and explores how such laws figure in debates over the nature of childhood, adolescence, and adulthood, in campaigns against prostitution and child marriage, and teenage pregnancy, as well as struggles to achieve gender and sexual equality.

Cities in Italy passed legislation aimed at preventing or reducing the effects of plague. Since the scientific view was that plague was caused by miasma or bad air, the measures targeted rotting and smelling matter, viz. cloth which could retain… [more]

During the great outbreak of bubonic plague or black death in the hot summer of 1665 in London, special bills of mortality were issued that listed causes of death. By mid-July over a thousand deaths a week were reported on handbills that were… [more]

The Dolben's Act of 1788 was proposed by noted abolitionist Sir William Dolben before the English Parliament. While it was meant to restrict the slave trade, it actually had an adverse effect on children. The act mandated that no more than two… [more]

During the first two decades of the Meiji era, the new government invested a great deal of effort into building the institutions of the modern Japanese state. By the 1880s, officials and other commentators had begun in earnest to articulate the… [more]

During the 1870s, the Meiji government established many institutions based on the examples from Europe and the U.S., and many intellectuals advocated a thoroughgoing transformation of Japanese society and culture patterned after the model of… [more]

The following paragraphs came at the beginning of a 109-article plan, promulgated in 1872, to establish a national school system under the direction of the new Meiji government. This ambitious plan divided the country into eight university… [more]

By the early 20th century, urbanization and industrialization led many reformers to focus on child welfare and a recognition of children's rights as separate from those of adults. Several years later, Congress responded by creating the U.S.… [more]

Examining children's rights as human rights provides avenues for understanding the complexity of creating and implementing universal declarations of rights and makes international diplomatic history more approachable; the case study offers students the opportunity to research the current status of children from around the world, and connects the history of human rights to the children's rights movement that marked the opening and closing decades of the 20th century. echo [more]

Much of early modern Europe saw increasing numbers of abandoned children, and new institutions designed to care for them. Published notarial documents, such as the two excerpted here, allow a glimpse into the fortunes of individual orphaned… [more]