The National Museum of African Art website is a colorful destination that showcases a dynamic mixture of historical, traditional, and contemporary African art forms.

The museum and its website cover the entire continent of Africa, so the focus is not on children or youth. There are some valuable resources, but they finding them can be tricky.

Explore the Collection features three sample sub-collections showing the diversity, uses, and symbols of African art. An advanced search allows for sorting by type of object, country, ethnic group, and artist, but there is no keyword search for narrowing to "child" or "childhood." The search engine would be best for browsing by users with prior knowledge of the collection, or if a user wanted to search a particular region or type of artifact.

To locate material on children, explore categories such as "toys and entertainment" (18, including the image of the Zimbabwean toy turtle made from a gourd and woven fiber shown here); "doll" (12) ; "mother and child" (25); and "masks" (120). These bring up objects related to initiation and puberty rituals. "Costume and textile" (142) offers clothing types such as aprons and chest cloths associated with the passage to womanhood.

Unfortunately, many of the images are not very large, even expanded versions (when available). For smaller objects such as dolls, the images are quite detailed. For larger objects, such as clothing and weavings, the images do not allow the user to focus on the elements identified in the written descriptions. In addition, some of the texts are generic, repeating paragraphs for similar objects, such as dolls, game boards, ornaments, and clothing types.

Information and objects related to childhood, though difficult to find, are sprinkled throughout the site. For example, in the podcast and exhibit on the Tuareg, we learn that the highly refined traditions of leatherwork and silversmithing are being passed on to the next generation and are well received in the global marketplace. Other items include masks, aprons, dolls, costumes, and symbolic items that refer to the practice of initiation rites and clothing or ornaments associated with the transition from childhood to adulthood in various parts of Africa.

Radio Africa features an audio story for children, "The Leopard's Drum," and performance of a squirrel story by an Ethiopian musician. The exhibit TxtStyles/Fashioning Identity draws connections between traditional and modern clothing among African youth and how it has become part of the global youth style. Activities for children invite them to participate in discussion, try on virtual clothes, and view images of children in various forms of dress.

Museum activities for children offer records of children's art activities, especially workshops held for public and local schools. There are photo streams of children making masks, learning about textiles, colors, and symbols in African art, or interacting with the exhibits. Playtime has dynamic activities for learning how to make kente cloth, designing beaded decorations and motifs, and a virtual paper doll set on costume.

Another section worthy of note is the Warren M. Robbins Library of African Art, billed as the leading library on the subject in the United States. African Art on the Web leads to additional information on children and youth in museums and websites around the world.

The content on Art and Life in Africa is primarily the work and scholarship of Christopher D. Roy, Professor of Art History at the University of Iowa. There are rich materials on children, although finding them requires some creative searching.

The site design is not as elegantly organized or aesthetically pleasing as the rich content warrants. There are many broken links, such as the one to the Stanley Collection database. The link to a teacher's forum is also broken. Links to other sites do function.

What the site lacks in quality, however, it makes up in quantity of information. This includes photographs and videos that illustrate the landscape, arts, craft production, and everyday life of a wide variety of groups in the region and more than 60 streaming videos of craft production, dancing, singing and mask performances.

The site includes most countries of sub-Saharan Africa, which are designated on the map in black lettering. A database lists the names of 107 "peoples" (as the site designates these ethnic, clan, or tribal groups) in Africa. Each name links to a chart with information, a map of the territory, and sometimes the multiple countries they inhabit.

Materials on children appear throughout the site, but are not easy to find. The design includes an ALA search engine found only at the bottom of the index page—not on the home page. There is no easy way to navigate among sections of the site. Keyword searches such as "child," "girl," and "boy" yield only two general links, so the search engine apparently excludes a lot of site content. The keyword "doll," for example, which is found in at least a dozen articles, photo captions, and artworks, only returned the main website link.

The best strategy, then, is to browse the site looking in likely places. The beautiful and interesting pictures make this rewarding time spent. Key Moments in Life describes the stages from birth to initiation, marriage, old age and death, including both males and females, using photographs and art. Each is discussed in a paragraph with citation information.

A streaming video shows uninitiated boys in Boni and Lollio making masks out of millet stalks in imitation of the adults' elaborate masks. They play music, weave elaborate masks, and clown for the camera; in the evening they take part in the procession and dance. Watching this video is as interesting for the skill and intensity the boys bring to the process, as for the other children, both boys and girls, who mill around at the performance.

Many of the other videos and photos allow the viewer to catch glimpses of babies wrapped onto their mother's backs and of children and youth participating in daily activities or special occasions. A number of articles by Roy include information about children, the best example being the article on Mossi dolls. The article describes wooden figurines carved by blacksmiths for little girls that simultaneously fulfill the function of babies (biiga) for young caregivers as well as adult female role models.

This project is testament to a lifetime of work among people for whom the scholar Roy had great affection, and into whose lives he was able to gather deep insight. The materials here are based on a CD-ROM of the same name that is available for purchase on the site, but increasingly the CD content is available online.

Africa Speaks: West African University Students Write About Their Lives features a collection of short autobiographical essays written by students in an English-language composition class taught by Dr. Patricia Stoll at the University of Niamey in the Niger Republic. Dr. Stoll, a Fulbright Professor of Writing and Literature, who collected, edited, and published her students' deeply personal life histories, explains that the common denominator in all their stories is the shared experience of becoming "an outsider in one's own country" through a western-style education. Written between 1990 and 1992, the letters touch on a wide range of topics related to the trials of children, adolescents, and young adults in Niger and several other African countries. These include the tensions between individualism and family obligations, gender roles, parenting, love and courtship, rural versus urban life, formal religion and folk beliefs, and most significantly, the trials and consequences of a western-style education.

The Fulbright Association-supported Africa Speaks site that went on-line in 1998 lacks the usability and polish of today's more advanced websites. The student essays are grouped into non-searchable thematically organized collections on: education, childhood, marriage, customs, family, magic and belief, teaching, politics, martyrs, town and country, trouble, heritage, letters home, life stories, and outsider. While the website's overall layout is simple but serviceable, the single spacing and dense formatting of the students' entries make them difficult to read on line. There are also seven galleries of general images featuring the geography and people of Niger. Dr. Stoll also provides a detailed account of her experiences teaching at the University of Niamey.

Despite the site's shortcomings, the great strength of Africa Speaks is the honest and unfiltered voices of the Nigerien students. Rather than being described and defined by journalists, scholars, and other outsiders, they speak for themselves about the experience of growing up in a developing and politically unstable African country during the 1970s and 1980s. Unfortunately, the website offers little guidance on how to contextualize their stories. There is no supporting information on the authors' gender, ethnicity, or regional origin apart from what can be gleaned directly from the entries. Similarly, there is not much information on the intense political upheavals that shook Niger in the early 1990s apart from the information provided by Dr. Stoll. Consequently, it will take some extra reading and research for non-specialists to use these materials. To this end, the following sources will provide a helpful starting place: Jibrin Ibrahim "Political Exclusion, Democratization and Dynamics of Ethnicity in Niger," Africa Today, 41:3 (1994), 15-39; Samuel Decalo, "The Process, Prospects and Constraints of Democratization in Africa," African Affairs, 91:362 (1992), 7-35; Samuel Decalo, Historical Dictionary of Niger, (Lanham MD: Scarecrow Press, 1997); U.S. Department of State, Background Note: Niger; University of Pennsylvania African Studies Center, Niger Page.

With additional preparation, Africa Speaks will provide teachers with some interesting possibilities for lecturing and lesson planning. The simplest but perhaps most productive assignment would be to ask students to compare and contrast their own life and schooling experiences with those of their Nigerien counterparts. Additionally, the essays in the "Magic and Belief 1" and "Customs 2" collections about the importance of rain in agrarian societies provide an opportunity to think about the origins and meanings of the folk customs that western observers often dismiss as primitive superstition. Teachers willing to undertake more detailed background reading in Nigerien history can use the stories about school strikes and general unrest in the "Politics 1" and "Martyrs 1" collections. For students, these will shed new light on how younger Nigerien generations experienced the inherent fear and optimism associated with the populist demands for reform and multi-party democracy that swept through much of sub-Saharan Africa following the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s.

Africa Focus: Sights and Sounds of a Continent is a repository of images, sound clips, and scanned texts produced by the University of Wisconsin Digital Collections Center. The collection consists of two distinct databases: the Africa Focus: Image and Sound Collection and the Africana Digitization Project. Africa Focus features an impressive 3,000 slides, 500photographs, and 50 hours of sounds collected by University of Wisconsin faculty and staff members from 45 African countries. The Africana Digitization Project offers digitized versions of a handful of European accounts of pre-colonial West Africa, several bibliographic guides to these sources, and a collection of essays on slavery and the slave trade. (These sources are all from the University of Wisconsin libraries.)

Most images in Africa Focus date from the last four decades although there are some of colonial era children. The database is organized into pre-defined collections of images featuring:

• artisans,
• buildings and structures,
• cities and towns,
• education,
• landscape,
• religion,
• women,
• audio clips of songs and singing,
• rites and ceremonies,
• drums, and
• greetings.

The education collection—which is the most relevant to the study of children and youth—consists of 120 pictures of students and school buildings and several audio clips of students singing. Searching "child" and "children" produces 27 and 183 images respectively. There are also 141 images of "boys" and 59 of "girls." A search for "youth" returns 87 pictures of mostly older adolescents and young adults. There is also an "atlas" feature that targets searches to a specific country. Most of the images are high quality and feature relatively detailed citations, and visitors have the option of saving and e-mailing the results of their searches. Listening to and saving the audio files requires a Realplayer media player.

The paired databases comprising Africa Focus: Sights and Sounds of a Continent will be useful to teachers interested in incorporating children's experiences into their courses. Searching the Africana Digitization Project returns several hundred results for children and youth, but teachers will need a fairly advanced background in African history to make effective use of them. The pictures and sounds in Africa Focus are considerably more accessible to non-specialists, but it will still take some care to make proper use of them in the classroom. The collection shows young people wearing a wide variety of clothing engaged in an equally diverse range of activities, and the extensive identifying tags offer useful guidance on how to contextualize each image. Nevertheless, instructors will want to take care to ensure that the pictures featuring non-western topics and themes do not reinforce popular stereotypes of African peoples and cultures.

To this end, exercises drawing on this material can provide a richer understanding of both the unique trials facing young Africans in the second half of the 20th century as well as the similarities and differences with children and youth in other parts of the world. Comparing and contrasting the various images of worship, schooling, work, and play will highlight the vast cultural and ecological diversity of Africa while also demonstrating that there was often nothing particularly unusual or exotic in the way many African children spent their days. Equally important, however, Africa Focus offers key insights into the unique challenges of growing up in a developing society. Instructors can draw on the collection's images of child refugees, laborers, and even soldiers to develop lectures and lesson plans that provide a youthful perspective on some of the key problems that have confronted many African societies in the post-imperial era.

Featuring approximately 600 photographs chronicling daily life and politics in Swaziland, the Swaziland Digital Archives provides visual insights into the experiences of childhood and adolescence in southern Africa over the past century. The Swaziland National Trust Commission hosts the website, but it is the work of a Swaziland-based author and photographer who has collected, scanned, and posted historical images drawn from private collections and the Swaziland National Archives.

The photographs are organized into galleries based on decades, and the collection can by searched by title, date, caption, and photographer. There are also brief historical essays linked to each gallery sketching the main events of each decade, which vary in quality. While the first essays dealing with the late 19th century are detailed and fairly sophisticated, the entries covering the later decades of the 20th century are little more than quick blurbs.

Consequently, non-specialists planning on using the website might wish to consult the following sources: Hilda Kuper, Sobhuza II, Ngwenyama and King of Swaziland: The story of an Hereditary Ruler and His country, (New York: Africana Publishing Company, 1978); Alan Booth, Swaziland: Tradition and Change in a Southern African Kingdom, (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1983); Alan Booth, Historical Dictionary of Swaziland, 2nd Edition, (Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, 2000).

Children and adolescents figure prominently in the collection. Using the "caption" search function, which is more productive than searching "title" tags, yields 19 hits for "children," seven for "student," eight for "boy," 11 for "girl," and four for the antique category of "maiden." Both Swazi and European children (from settler and missionary families) are the subjects of these photographs.

Each image has a catalogue number, approximate date, and a caption that can range from highly informative to whimsical. While the website's search feature is reasonably thorough, it is still worthwhile to browse the galleries for more unconventionally tagged child-related pictures.

If properly contextualized, the images in the Swaziland Digital Archives suggest some interesting possibilities for exploring the various and changing meanings of childhood in 20th-century southern Africa. While the Swazi ruling family dates to the 19th century, modern Swaziland was originally a British protectorate that spent much of the last century under the economic and social influence of South Africa.

The series of photographs chronicling the childhood of Swaziland's Paramount Chief (later iNgwenyama, 'King') Sobhuza II, coupled with two related pictures on the Images of Empire website, illustrate how British imperial officials ruled by co-opting local institutions of authority. These images, which show the young Sobhuza with his mother and grandmother (and queen regent), sitting in state council (Images of Empire, Media ID 00007073), inspecting the present of a toy elephant from the wife of a British imperial official (Images of Empire, Media ID 00007077), and as a young recently enthroned ruler, offer students a unique look into a highly politicized form of African childhood.

The numerous photographs of young Swazi girls and "maidens" in varying degrees of dress and undress are equally illuminating but should be used with caution and are probably not for younger students. Western colonial-era male photographers obviously found them a popular subject, but teachers can give these young Swazi women their proper dignity through lesson plans that consider the cultural and political form and function of their clothing styles.

Grouping their portraits with the collection's corresponding images of young Swazi Catholic "communicants" and European girls in Swaziland (Watts family, St Marks Kids, and Holtman family will help students understand how education, religious conversion, and race shaped the experience of gender and childhood in colonial southern African society. The archive's various initiation and marriage images similarly show how these young western and African Swazi women marked the transition to adulthood (e.g., "Miss Krogh's Wedding," "Wedding Smile," "Umcwasho Maiden," "Umcwasho maidens," Dlamini Khumalo wedding, "Dlamini Khumalo wedding," "lamini Khumalo wedding," and "Dlamini Khumalo wedding," "Sobhuza II, King of Swaziland, with toys," [Images of Empire, Media ID 00007077] "Sobhuza II, King of Swaziland, as a child" [Images of Empire, Media ID 00007073]).

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 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.

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.