by Kathleen Thompson and Hilary Mac Austin
Introduction by Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis
W. W. Norton, 2003
Here’s to the coffee-table book that stays open because
you can’t stop thinking about it.
Margo Jefferson
Illuminating a vital but all too often neglected part of our nation’s past, America’s Children is a comprehensive print documentary of children in the United States, the first visual history of its kind. Kathleen Thompson and Hilary Mac Austin explore childhood over four centuries of American life, portraying the children of our past and present through images from museums and archives all over the country as well as from their own extensive collection. Composed of more than 300 duotone images, America’s Children includes drawings, engravings, Native American ledger paintings, and sketches by early explorers that date as far back as the 1500s.
Almost one-third of these images have never been published before. Hometown newspaper and studio photographers such as Charles “Teenie” Harris, Albert R. Stone, and Fred Hultstrand present a nostalgic but unsentimental view of America’s small towns. Harrowing photographs by Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine show the exploitation of children in mines and sweatshops. The groundbreaking documentary photographs of the FSA photographers reveal a child’s life during the hardships of the Great Depression. Betty Lane, Jeffry Scott, Cathie Lyons, Nestor Hernandez, and other contemporary photographers glimpse a group of girls at a pro-choice demonstration, an illegal immigrant huddled in his father’s arms before being sent back across the border, a child hunkered in absorbed interest at the edge of a vast AIDS memorial quilt, a boy limboing under a crime-scene tape. Alongside these images, the authors have included detailed captions as well as excerpts from interviews, letters, and diaries that allow the nation’s children, past and present, to be heard in their own words.
Following in the path of Thompson and Austin’s previous books—the best-selling The Face of Our Past and Children of the Depression—America’s Children is arranged in eight sections, from “Children and Learning” and “Children and Their Families on the Move” to “Children at Work” and “Children at Play,” each of which includes a brief introduction detailing the history of children from a different perspective, taking us from a sixteenth-century Algonquian village to a nineteenth-century southern plantation, and from the battlefields of the Civil War to the migrant camps of the Depression and beyond.
Revealing the central—and quite adult—role that children have played and continue to play in American society, America’s Children is not only a brilliantly revisionist work of historical significance but also a stunning volume that will be treasured by families for years to come.
Margo Jefferson, The New York Times
The cover of America’s Children: Picturing Childhood From Early America to the Present is predictably adorable: two little boys, gazing into the camera with bright eyes and hopeful expressions. The boy on the left is white and his little hand holds the shoulder of the other boy, who is Japanese. We don’t find out until much farther into the book that the picture was taken by Dorothea Large in 1942, and that the Japanese boy was taken to a “relocation center” shortly afterward.
Kathleen Thompson and Hilary Mac Austin have compiled a book that frees childhood from the confines of piety or nostalgia and makes it part of our cultural and political history. We see children working in mines, hauling ice, at labor strikes, in orphanages, dressed exquisitely, dressed in rags, dressed for war, playing with dolls, playing in the street beside a dead horse. We see every ethnicity, and every class, and we move, thanks to engravings as well as photographs, from the 16th to the 21st century. And we experience every emotion, from grief and rage to pure delight. Here’s to the miracles of creativity and truth . . . We need them desperately.
Booklist
The authors of The Face of Our Past: Images of Black Women from Colonial America to the Present (1999) explore the lives of another marginalized group of American citizens–children. Like women and minorities, children have often been neglected or overly sentimentalized in portrayals of American history. The authors go a long way toward ameliorating that situation with this powerful record of the presence of children in American history over the past four centuries. The book is divided into sections on family, community, work, and school, and portrays childhood as something much more complex than the standard idealized images of care-free lives and protected innocence. Each section begin s with narrative that provides historical context, and the photographs–accompanied by letters and short essays–speak for themselves, depicting children at church, school, funerals, on their front steps, as laborers on railroads and in coal mines and cotton fields, and as full participants in times of trial and triumph. A stunning presentation.
Publishers Weekly
Children, say Thompson and Austin, are missing from the visual history of America that most of us are familiar with. The authors (who also wrote The Face of Our Past) fill in this gap with 300 images that belie the narrow, idealized view of childhood prevalent in this country: here we see children of all colors and classes, at home, at play, at work and in the community. Though there are some early American paintings and engravings, most of the images are photographs: children in one-room rural Southern schoolhouses and New Mexican missions; marching for better working conditions and civil rights; working in mills and gas stations and cotton plantations; frolicking in the sunlight. Some of the images are by legendary photographers like Jacob Riis and Dorothea Lange, while others are by lesser known artists or anonymous family members with Polaroid cameras. The photos are accompanied by short excerpts from childhood memoirs and children’s letters and diaries. Though there’s not much substantive text, Thompson and Austin’s detailed captions and chapter introductions-as well as their often striking curatorial finds-offer a unique perspective on the upheavals and opportunities that families have found in the U.S. (Nov.) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.
Library Journal
The authors, who previously collaborated on a book about black women in American history (The Face of Our Past), here illustrate the role of children in American history and life, a role that has been surprisingly adult and defined largely by class. This is a more somber picture of childhood than that presented in another recent book of portraits, When They Were Young: A Photographic Retrospective of Childhood from the Library of Congress. Here we see the orphan trains that sent homeless children to be adopted in the West, children whose families were victimized by anti-Chinese riots in Seattle, teenagers working at tedious full-time jobs, and American Indian children sent to school to be “civilized” out of their language and customs. A number of pictures are by well-known documentary photographers (e.g., Jacob Riis, Dorothea Lange, and Lewis Hine). The reproduction quality of the book’s 300 images is as good as it needs to be, and lengthy captions help us understand the context. Essays trace the changing role and treatment of children in the United States. Recommended for American history and photo-history collections at larger public and academic libraries.-Kathleen Collins, Bank of America Corporate Archives, San Francisco Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information