Images of Empire features an enormous collection of digitized images and film clips drawn from the British Empire and Commonwealth Museum's holdings. It also features a link to Film Images, which provides access to a collection of 7,000 films from the Overseas Film and Television Archives. The main Images of Empire website does not list the total size of its holdings, but they are impressive in their geographical and chronological scope.

This collection of photographs and film clips (which are often drawn from private home movies) covers virtually every corner of the formal British Empire as well as independent nations and foreign colonies such as Peru and Mozambique where Britain had considerable informal influence. On the whole, these images, which tend to be less formal than the more official and staged photographs in the RCS Photograph Project, provide an intimate look into virtually every aspect of life in the 20th-century British Empire.

Visitors to Images of Empire have the choice of using its extremely sophisticated search function that permits Boolean searches or browsing the collection through 10 thematic galleries:

• Domestic Life;
• Dress and Adornment;
• Hunting;
• Landscapes and Scenery;
• Portraits;
• Royalty and Chiefs;
• Street Scenes;
• Trade and Industry; and
• Wars and Conflicts.

The series of keyword tags attached to each image are particularly useful in that they can be clicked to return every other image in the collection marked with similar tags. Thus, a photograph of Fijian women and children fishing includes the keywords and sub-keywords: people (children, female), domestic life (child rearing), hunting (fishing), labor (agricultural and rural, women's), landscape and scenery (marine and coastal), trades and professions (fishing and hunting).

UNICEF—the acronym stands for United Nations Children's Fund—got its initials from its former name "United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund." It now focuses on the state of children's welfare in all countries on a permanent basis, not only in emergency situations. Accordingly, UNICEF's website is much more than just an information portal. It is an active part of UNICEF's work, providing data, involving the public, and raising awareness of important global issues affecting children.

First, the site is a mine of data on children's welfare, with portals for aggregate and country-by-country statistics on child welfare indicators regarding birth, nutrition, education, access to sanitation and disease, to name just a few. Tracking progress in achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) is one of the centerpieces of several United Nations organizations, including UNICEF. A good summary portal is the sidebar link to ChildInfo, which highlights UNICEF's flagship publications, The State of the World's Children and Progress for Children, and also provides quick links to individual statistical indicators as well as data collection initiatives such as Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys / MICS3, household surveys in individual countries.

The site offers an excellent combination of comprehensive presentation of data, explanation of that data, and access through easily downloaded reports, data sets, and attractively presented material in multiple formats. For example, the 2009 The State of the World's Children report mentioned above offers: a download of the entire report; demographic information for the whole world as a spreadsheet document or pdf file; beautiful photographs; and individual charts and graphs. Several other studies are available in this way, through multiple links that allow a user to browse the site by interest areas and still reach all of the important information sources. The site also features a well-organized, user-friendly menu bar similar to an FAQ approach, such as "What We Do," "Why We Do It," "UNICEF People," and others. The graphics are colorful but not cluttered.

The most extraordinary aspect of the website is the extent to which children themselves are featured in photographs, videos, interviews and other media. The range of countries and issues represented is extraordinarily diverse, putting faces to child abuse programs, youth with disabilities, and many other ways in which youth are advocating for causes and helping themselves and others in concrete ways. These contributions are not poster children eliciting donations, but calls to action and testimony to individual determination and constructive effort. Voices of Youth is a section of the site where youth can gather information on the important issues, learn about UNICEF initiatives that address them, and participate in discussion forums and activities related to these causes. There are several sections here and in other places on the site for video contests, participation in leadership forums with world leaders, youth reports on local initiatives, and digital diaries, artwork displays, and the like. Teachers will find a lot of material here with which to stimulate discussion, research and create lesson material in a wide variety of disciplines.

A few examples show how the site supports UNICEF's focus on engaging children directly. The "Child-Friendly Report" Have Fun, Be Safe is about everyday safety and injury prevention, addressing standards of living involving rural cooking over open fires, congested cities where children walk and ride bikes in traffic, addressing the full range of human economic and social conditions. The document's chapters on topics such as burns, falls, traffic safety, and poisoning are available separately in five languages that include comic strips, games and illustrated text—perfect for language instruction that provides more than practice texts. The second example is the Unite for Child Survival, Radio Drama Contest, which emphasizes the wide access of radio over other media and engages children's creativity to reinforce messages about children's health and welfare. Digital Diaries on the Voices of Youth section of the UNICEF site include input from children who would otherwise be unheard and invisible, such as Yemetu youth speak out on water and sanitation.

Teachers of modern history and regional or world geography will find a wealth of primary sources on this site that can contribute to filling in a realistic picture of children's situations and the economic, public health, scientific, social, cultural, and political issues that affect them, as well as initiatives of remarkable creativity that are currently being employed to address them. There is much material to use here for comparison with earlier global development efforts, historical situations that helped create these complex challenges, and much to draw upon for engaging discussion and inviting participation.

The New Child: British Art and the Origins of Modern Childhood, 1730-1830 exhibit at the University Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive, UC Berkeley is presented in this companion website of mixed quality and effectiveness. The site consists of nine segments that feature artworks related to themes of childhood such as innocence, parenthood, childrearing, play, institutions, and charity. Most of the thumbnails of the artworks are available in larger size, though not sufficient for detailed study, and some enlargements are unavailable. Hyperlinked word definitions and identifications in the text are mostly broken links. The site is aesthetically very ordinary, with its robin's egg blue background, serif font text, and small image size that do not flatter the mostly dark-toned paintings.

The exhibit claims to document a significant change in the "construct" of childhood in Europe, representing a change in attitude toward children's needs and development. Moreover, British artworks of the Georgian period reflect these changes as Britain "led the way in Europe to viewing childhood as a special phase of human existence." The introduction further claims that family relations changed to "bonds of affection rather than economics. The child, once on the periphery, moved to the center of family affections." The text relates this social change to mercantile economies, urbanization, and industrialization, but the paintings and engravings nearly all represent upper and upper-middle class life. Scenes of lavish interiors, well-dressed portrait sitters, and verdant estates in the background of these paintings depict children as the objects of adoring parents, or make them appear as accessories of the virtuous and prosperous life. Children wearing formal clothing appear stiffly posed in romantic outdoor scenes, and as oddly small figures in dramatic classical interiors with huge columns and drapery. A few, such as George Morland's "Blind Man's Bluff" present children more naturally, but place them in idyllic woods.

Notes to the segments of the exhibition do explore themes of class divisions and disparities in urban and rural society, particularly the enclosure movement. One of the few functioning external links on the site leads to Oliver Goldsmith's "The Deserted Village," a poem that laments the devastating effects of enclosure on traditional rural life. At a time when children labored under dreadful conditions, faced imprisonment for petty crimes, and impoverishment was rampant in Britain, it seems ironic at best to make the general claim that affection rather than economics defined children's place in the family. The point is made in some of the exhibit segments, but not consistently presented throughout. For example, William Hogarth's 1751 engraving "First Stage of Cruelty," is placed in the segment Child's Play, Toys and Recreation. Another incongruous sequence has wealthy children playing with a hobby-horse in the midst of artworks on foundlings, orphans and moral instruction.

The segment Family and Sentiment is a jumble of didactic paintings and engravings on different subjects, in which the reader would benefit from more detailed notes on each work than the bare exhibit tags with title and artist. Children, Class, and Countryside displays seven artworks that depict romanticized rural poverty, idealized children, satire, and nostalgic rural scenes. The notes describe a coherent view of how British artists represented class and economic issues of the day, but the artworks are too random and unexplained to really illustrate the movement. Some of the notes completely contradict the displayed items. The Georgian Family segment discusses middle class families as leaders in the changing family structure, but the paintings display what seem to be aristocratic family portraits, except for two, as near as the viewer can tell.

Among the most interesting and revealing features of the site is the interview with the curator of the original exhibit, James Steward. He explains how this collection fits within the body of European art, and how the paintings, drawings, and engravings selected for the exhibit exemplify a departure from earlier European and British art in a way that should be better reflected in the collection displayed and the introductions to each segment. His statements about the background in literature and economic changes in Britain give greater credence to the historical significance of the exhibit than the notes on each segment.

A feature of the site that is still functional is the Self-Guided Tour for Young People and their Families. Only four paintings in the exhibit are illuminated by a few sentences of explanation and 4–5 guiding questions for examination of the image, and definitions of artistic terminology. The questions are open-ended and without expert answers, however, and the images are too small for careful examination. Five of the exhibit segments are not represented by this feature.

This site surely highlights an important period and location in the history of childhood—post-Enlightenment Britain in the midst of its early industrialization. The site is a good source of images that illustrate social and intellectual trends among largely upper-class people and the artists they patronized. The site does not provide convincing evidence, however, for the over-generalized claims made in its curatorial text segments. The complete exhibit may have done so effectively when it was mounted in 1995, but the site built to accompany it is ineffectively designed and poorly maintained.

The Victoria and Albert Museum of Childhood is a delightful place on the web that encourages viewers to explore the themes of childhood past and present, and invites children, adults, and whole communities to participate in childlike play and creativity. From serious studies of childhood mortality and slavery to the development of toys and games, the V & A Museum highlights English childhood, as well as some aspects of European and, to a lesser extent, world childhood. The museum has successfully captured contemporary childhood as well as historical aspects.

The site combines serious archival functions related to an important topic in social history with an invitation to interact and play. It also allows viewers to experience the permanent exhibit halls through an interactive 360-degree virtual tour. Exploring this feature is disappointing only in that the zoom feature doesn't take the viewer into close-ups of the display cases or objects.

The museum as a whole presents its collections in text and image for researchers. The images are too small for highly detailed objects like an apprenticeship contract, but are serviceable for most artifacts. The moving toys page is an example of a more in-depth presentation, with short video clips demonstrating how various toys work. The video clips could also be used to teach physics or mechanics in science class.

There are several efforts to involve the public such as "Share a Story" or the Life in the East End flickr group. "What I Wore," presents an archive of children's fashions, favorites, and mishaps illustrated in family photographs, especially the East End London community. The intended audience shifts, however, sometimes asking 21st-century children to share and other times asking adults to reflect on their childhood.

Two main areas of the site are most attractive for web users who can't visit: Collections and Children's Lives. The Collections menu leads to the museum's material culture archive: dolls, toys, clothing, childcare items, games, and the history of toy manufacturing. Each collection is divided into subsections with additional web resources and bibliographies; some also have interactive features. Browsing is a helpful way to explore the range of materials and the search box allows easy keyword access.

Children's Lives consists of seven sections covering aspects of the history of childhood and contemporary childhood: East End Lives celebrates the history and present of London's East End and the immigrant groups who live there. "My East End Childhood" presents content created by user contributors and local groups.

Edwardian Lives is about childhood and material culture at the turn of the 20th century. "Education and Creativity" covers childhood educational philosophies and the importance of play. Holidays & Entertainment includes a remarkable mural interactive with international playground songs called "The Singing Playground". Parlour Games includes instructions on how to play and Health & Work, covers child labor and offers a section on children in slavery assembled by a class of London middle school students.

Among the hidden treasures on the site are those buried under the "What's On" menu. Many of the exhibition pages have only a short description with one image—interesting for museum-goers, but too little for web users. Some of the "Past Exhibitions" pages, however, have more extensive content. For example, "Must-Have Toys" provides an entire book in (pdf) from a traveling exhibit and the fashion exhibit has many fascinating features.

The site is both about and for children. It is linked to topics in the National Curriculum, many of which are common modern history topics, to help teachers incorporate the material. Elementary level teachers will be able to find uses for it across the curriculum, and secondary level teachers as well as researchers will be rewarded for the time spent exploring this resource.

The World Images site, a project of California State University, is designed for simplicity of use if not aesthetic elegance. It is a utilitarian database well suited to teachers, professors, or students looking for presentation images licensed for educational use on a comprehensive range of subjects including photography, painting, illustration, and material culture with global geographic representation.

The image collections are arranged as thumbnail panes on the home page, each hyperlinked to a list of portfolios that indicate how many images each contains. The site holds an archive of 72,000 images organized into 867 portfolios, and a tutorial shows how to create Community Portfolios. Users can browse the collection using keywords, artists, topics, titles, regions, or periods in quick or advanced search modes. Search results can be viewed as titles with hyperlinked acquisition numbers, as thumbnail images with titles, or as small or zoomable images with their metadata.

Categories include institutional collections in the database, faculty collections, course materials, and a collection of image portfolios correlated to required history topics in the California Educational Standards for grades 4–10. Since these curricular requirements are fairly common across the U.S., and in world history beyond the U.S., this is a valuable resource for teachers.

World Images is rich in images related to children and youth. The "People and Portraits" portfolio contains three sub-categories on children with a total of 1,094 images, some overlapping. They include Children to 1500 (234), Children 1500-2000 (544), and Children of the World (316).

The first is fairly inclusive geographically, but includes many images from Western traditions. The second is almost entirely European and American, and the third includes North and South American, African, Asian, and European children's photos and a few artworks and artifacts. Much of the third collection is the work of photographer Kathleen Cohen.

The following search terms returned images on children and youth: "children" (1000), "childhood" (80), "girl" (382), "boy" (555 items), "infant" (119), and "family" (858). The metadata provided with each image includes title, artist or maker, historical period, region or country of origin, copyright holder of the image, and/or museum holding the object. The individual object view also shows what other collections include the object, and links to other objects by the same artist or unknown generic maker from that culture. The photographs are labeled with title, year, location, and photographer, but nothing further, though some of the titles are very descriptive.

The information associated with World Images is thus limited, providing no further contextualization, nor are there links to descriptive information on museum sites where some are housed, for example. For this reason, the works of art found through this website are starting points for research about children in history rather than destinations. Some images, however interesting, remain mysterious.

Teachers wanting to illustrate already researched lectures or activities with licensed images will find this site a rich resource, especially if the lack of detailed information on the images is not a problem. Interesting objects from the collection can stimulate fruitful discoveries of available research on the web or from books and articles. For example, an image of an ancient baby bottle led to a trove of online information about infant feeding through the centuries.

Teachers can also create thematic collections that can be used for primary source investigations. A number of art images show punishment of children's misbehavior, for example, and children at play, as well as infant equipment from various times and places. These images can be used as exercises in examining primary sources as if they were "found objects" at a site or in an archive.

World History Sources at the Center for History and New Media has extensive lessons, exercises, and scholarly models for analyzing primary sources, including photographs, that could provide tools for working with the rich sources available on this website. A feature called "You be the Historian" could be adapted to interrogating the images from the World Images collections, and would reveal much about childhood by investigating questions to ask, and suggesting how to find answers.

A remarkable collection of historical images focused on biomedical and other scientific topics, the Wellcome Images website is a treasure trove for educators and students. Although there is not an emphasis on children’s and youth history, creative use of the site’s search engine allows scholars and students of the history of childhood some fascinating glimpses into changing presentations of children in various historical locations and eras. Moreover, there are many resources to facilitate education, particularly in the realms of medicine, biology, and the changing nature of scientific knowledge over time. This makes the Wellcome Images website a welcome addition to any educator’s toolbox for teaching.

Scholars of childhood histories will find that the site's built-in search function easy to use, and, by plugging in keywords such as "boy," "girl," and "child," a plethora of images will emerge that depict a variety of historical representations of children. Many European images depicting methods of child health care, ranging from the medieval to modern eras, are available on the site. There are also scores of 20th-century promotional posters available that reveal (mainly) British public health education efforts promoting preferred methods of child rearing and health care. Moreover, there are tens of advertisements from the past 200 years, depicting children as promotional tools for selling hygiene products. There is a wealth of photographs and manuscripts from the medieval and modern eras from India that illustrate changing attitudes toward children and health care.

The Wellcome Images website is easy to navigate, and all images are free for personal and academic use under Creative Commons sharing rules. The site has divided its collections into five categories: "Illness and Wellness," "Life," "Culture," "Nature," and "War." Each image may be downloaded in a low-resolution format that is acceptable for websites, multi-media presentations, and other educational presentation needs. Users who wish to purchase high-resolution scans and physical prints may do so, for a price. Moreover, users who register (for free) with the website may save images to a "Lightbox," in order to compile, organize, and view their collections at any time. This is a welcome addition to the website and allows users to collect a variety of images at once, then sort and organize them later.

A useful section of the website is the "Life" section. Curated with an emphasis on human body parts and historically shifting notions of human anatomy, images from this group would be excellent sources for educators who wish to illustrate the changing conceptions of biology throughout the ages. Images of x-rays and microscopic cell photography sit side-by-side with Victorian "cure-all" advertisements and early modern anatomical illustrations. Like the rest of the site, the user must select his or her own images and place them within a larger historical context. However, given the proper supplementary information, this section in particular would be a wonderful basis for illustrating historical trends in understanding human biology. Comparing and contrasting images of children and adults would allow scholars of childhood histories the opportunity to discern changing attitudes about the nature of children and their anatomies over time and space.

Educators may want to keep a couple of caveats in mind when using this site. First of all, the collection is not comprehensive, nor it is chronologically organized. It is a marvelous resource for image finding, but not a starting point for obtaining information about any subject matter. Second, there are some rather graphic depictions of warfare, medical procedures, and biological functions shown in some of the images. Adults may want to preview the site before having younger children conduct research. That being said, the Wellcome Images website is a wonderful resource for educators and students who are looking for some fascinating historical images of scientific understanding of youth across cultures and eras.

A truly fascinating collection, the Perseus Digital Library presents an immense array of ancient texts, artifacts, and images from Greece and Rome, as well as a smaller collection of materials from the European Renaissance, the Arabic world, and 19th-century America. A rich website for educators and students alike, those engaged in the study of children and youth will find several sources of great interest, particularly in the histories of the ancient Mediterranean and the U.S. in the 19th century.

There are seven primary collections in the Perseus Library. The largest collection is devoted to Greek and Roman materials. There is a vast collection of ancient prose, including iconic authors such as Homer and Aristotle, but also hundreds writers who are less well known. An Art and Archeology Artifact Browser catalogues "1305 coins, 1909 vases, 2003 sculptures, 179 sites, 140 gems, and 424 buildings" for perusal. There is also a small Arabic collection, which is focused almost exclusively on translations of the Qur'an, as well as a Germanic Peoples collection, a section devoted to Renaissance works, and a database of Documentary Papyri. Moreover, there is a 19th-century American history source collection, as well as many 19th century issues of the Richmond Times Dispatch, a Civil War-era newspaper from Virginia.

The Perseus Digital Library is an incredibly rich resource. There is one significant issue, however, that users must contend with if they are trying to locate resources on children and youth in history. The search function for the website is not very specific, making its utility reliant on the patience of the user. For instance, a search for "child" brings up every single time the word “child” is mentioned in any of the website’s sources. Because there are many thousands of sources on the site (including the complete works of Shakespeare and a vast array of Aristotelian works), such a search is useless for quickly narrowing down required documents that specifically deal with the history of children. However, users may find what they are looking for by taking some time to browse more generally among the various collections, as well as become more creative with the "exact phrase" search mechanism.

For example, a fascinating piece from Plato's Laws comes up when searching for the phrase "slave child." In this piece, Plato conflates adult slaves with children in terms of legal testimony, thereby reducing the significance of both in a court of law. Educators could create instructive lessons using this source, along with other sources on legal testimony and children throughout time, and have students compare and contrast the legal authority of youth testimony cross-culturally and cross-temporally.

Another wonderful example comes from a search for "children’s education"—an excerpt from the Roman historian Cornelius Tacitus' A Dialogue on Oratory. In this passage, Tacitus explains that he believes that Roman boys grew up to be great only when reared by virtuous and well-educated mothers, and he cites important emperors as evidence. This excerpt provides teachers of children's history a wonderful opportunity to create lessons based on historical notions of education, the role of the family in creating citizens for the nation, and shifting notions of gender roles and domestic life over time.

There are also interesting and useful sources for American history, including a primary source entitled The War-time Journal of a Georgia Girl, 1864-1865 by Eliza Frances Andrews. Written during the Civil War by a young teen, the document invites educators and students alike to consider the value of first-hand narratives to understanding larger historical events, as well as the subjective nature of primary sources. Moreover, it is a fascinating look into the social expectations of young women of the era who were living in the midst of war, and sheds an interesting light on the significance of gender, race, and class for understanding the historical experiences of children. An intriguing assignment using this source may be to juxtapose the experiences this young girl relayed in her wartime journal to other girls in warfare situations in other parts of the world, both contemporaneous to the U.S. Civil War and in other eras.

Overall, the Perseus Digital Library is a fantastic resource. With a little patience learning the search engine’s peculiarities, it is also a wonderful resource for exploring the history of children.

The impressive photography of the Abdul-Hamid II Collection contains 1,819 photographs from the Ottoman Empire. Dated from approximately 1880 to 1893, the images depict scenes within the borders of modern Turkey, as well as Ottoman holdings in Greater Syria, Greece, and modern Iraq. Teachers and students of the history of children and youth will be particularly taken by the vast array of education-themed photographs, which reveal a strong emphasis placed on schooling by the Ottoman Empire at the time.

The photos in this collection were originally presented to the Library of Congress by Sultan Abdul-Hamid II in 1894. Most of the photos promote the Empire's modernization, with institutions such as schools, hospitals, military barracks, medical and law schools, and fire departments featuring prominently. A keyword search on "school" returns 546 images.

One of the most interesting elements of the collection are the many images of school children from the 19th century, particularly in Istanbul and surrounding areas of modern-day Turkey. There are also several images depicting school lessons, with an emphasis on cultural trends, such as physical fitness, art education, and schooling for the handicapped. See, for example, this "Group photograph of the students and the teachers of the school for the deaf."

Scholars and educators will be impressed by the many portraits of school children available in the collection. Using the website’s search function, keywords such as "girl," "boy," and "education" reveal tens of portraits of children in their school uniforms.

One of the more common portrait styles for children is to pair kids together. [Students, orphan school, Darüssafaka] These photos are fascinating primary documents that reveal important social indicators, including schoolboy and schoolgirl fashions (both in terms of uniforms and dress clothing), aesthetic notions about presenting children in portraiture, and elements of class and ethnicity in school populations of the Ottoman Empire.

Another essential element of this collection for those who study children’s history in the Ottoman Empire is the emphasis on modern educational facilities and contemporary methods of education. There are several photos highlighting the modern architecture of educational institutions, as well as images that reveal the scope of children’s education in the Ottoman Empire. Not only are private institutions represented, but mosque schools, orphanages, and schools for the deaf and blind are depicted, along with portraits of children attending these facilities. [Students, school for the blind] Schools for art and various trades are also depicted, and these images reveal fascinating gender assumptions, as it is girls who are attending art schools, whereas boys are taking part in trade school education.

An interesting assignment would be to have students search through the images and compare and contrast elements of the portrait photography. For instance, students could compare and contrast clothing styles, students’ ages and genders, and the types of schools depicted. Then, they could extrapolate upon various elements of Ottoman life in the late 19th century, including topics such as the increasing European influence on the Empire, the role of physical fitness and militarization in education, and the increasing diversity of educational options in the Ottoman polity.

The images are well displayed on dedicated pages, and are available as thumbnails, web-ready JPEG files, and uncompressed archival TIFF files. Full archival citation information is displayed, as well as clear information about how to purchase copies of some images.

The primary drawback of this website is its organization. From the search page users can preview all images, browse Library of Congress subject and format headings or names of creators or conduct broad searches or searches on specific fields. An exterior search engine (similar to Google) reveals a broad subject index, but there is no link from the main page to direct visitors there. This page will lead viewers to a comprehensive index, but without this knowledge, those looking for specific images or topics must rely on the Library of Congress search engine featured on the home page. Because of this flaw, viewers may find what they are looking for but miss related topics.

Despite this flaw, this collection is a rich resource. The photographs provice an excellent sense of the way that Abdul-Hamid II wanted Americans to view his empire. Moreover, the many images of educational facilities, as well as the myriad portraits of school children, illustrate a fascinating connection between education and modernity in the Ottoman Empire and its image projection abroad, one in which teachers and students should find much to explore.

The vast collection of the Metropolitan Museum is effectively arranged and integrated on the www.metmuseum.org website. Navigation of the site is straightforward, enabling efficient browsing or research. Although no specific essays or exhibits on children and youth are found on the site, several hundred artworks relevant to the topic can be located by searching the Collection Database or the Timeline of Art History (TOAH)—more than sites dedicated to the subject.

The Collection Database of 129,022 objects can be searched as a whole, by subject, by curatorial department, or by exhibit. The collection database search is comprehensive, and returned 3629 entries under "children." Childe Hassam is a distracter in this keyword search, but the search "Children NOT Childe" reduced the return to 319 items. "Boy" returned many distracters, but "girl" returned 954 items, and "infant" returned 252 items. "Toys" returned only 21 items, indicating a limitation of the museum's collection in that area. "Youth" returned 186 works and "young" 1741 items. The biggest drawback of the collection search was that many of the works are associated with placeholder images, although the metadata may help locate images elsewhere. As digitization of the collection proceeds, this may improve.

The TOAH is an unmatched resource for educators. The 6,000 included artworks are organized by three integrated elements: maps, timelines, and thematic essays. World and regional maps correlate artwork to eleven world eras and locate it in ten world regions. Timelines place the artworks in historical context, and include key events, political, stylistic and technological periodization. Eight hundred thematic essays provide historical context for groups of artwork and discuss characteristics, techniques, and significance. The essays reveal connections among civilizations and regions, and provide material for comparative study.

Educators searching for information on children in art can locate artworks featuring children and youth by a search of the TOAH, which seems more rewarding than the database search because all of the works are associated with images, and they are easily placed in context by TOAH's features. The searches are conveniently shown by category, so the user can bring up all relevant artworks, essays, timelines or other occurrences with one click.

A TOAH search of "children" found the term in 23 timelines, 153 thematic essays, and 396 works of art. "Figure, Child" in the Subject Index returned 21 essays and 80 works of art, each shown as a thumbnail image with titles. On the subject of childbirth, 15 artworks can be viewed. Terms such as "girl" (97 works), "boy" (9) and "young" or "youth" (4) returned artworks from across the globe and the eras.

An activity using the 97 artworks under "girl" might compare the relative age connoted by the term in various cultures and periods. Some depict small children, while others are clearly young women. A selection of western European drawings and paintings could focus on the changing definition of girlhood over time or explore symbols and objects associated with girlhood. Some of the artworks show girls in active social roles, playing sports and games, fulfilling ritual roles, or being mourned in funerary works. Some of the works are expressions of girls' work in various societies, such as needlework, preparation of trousseaus, or manual labor at home. In short, the collection can be used to gather ideas about girlhood over time and across cultures. Similar explorations about youth and boys could be made. Educators will find many ways to place childhood in historical context using this website.

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.