The American media has recently "discovered" children's experiences in present-day wars. A week-long series on the plight of child soldiers in Africa and Latin America was published in Newsday and newspapers have decried the U.S. government's reluctance to sign a United Nations treaty outlawing the use of under-age soldiers. These and numerous other stories and programs have shown that the number of children impacted by war as victims, casualties, and participants has mounted drastically during the last few decades. Although the scale on which children are affected by war may be greater today than at any time since the world wars of the twentieth century, children have been a part of conflict since the beginning of warfare. Children and War shows that boys and girls have routinely contributed to home front war efforts, armies have accepted under-aged soldiers for centuries, and war-time experiences have always affected the ways in which grown-up children of war perceive themselves and their societies. The essays in this collection range from explorations of childhood during the American Revolution and of the writings of free black children during the Civil War to children's home front war efforts during World War II, representations of war and defeat in Japanese children's magazines, and growing up in war-torn Liberia. Children and War provides a historical context for two centuries of children's multi-faceted involvement with war.
1 Childhood, Memory, and the American Revolution 2 "After the War I Am Going to Put Myself a Sailor" 3 Flowers of Evil 4 Imagining Anzac 5 Rescue and Trauma 6 Mama, Are We Going to Die? America's Children Confront the Cuban Missile Crisis 7 Bereavement in a War Zone 8 Representations of War and Martial Heroes in English Elementary School Reading and Rituals, 1885-1914 9 The Child in the Flying Machine 10 World Friendship 11 Ghosts and the Machine 12 Japanese Children and the Culture of Death, January-August 1945 13 The Antifascist Narrative 14 Humanitarian Sympathy for Children in Times of War and the History of Children's Rights, 1919-1959 15 "These Unfortunate Children": Sons and Daughters of the Regiment in Revolutionary and Napoleonic France 16 Children and the New Zealand War 17 Stolen Generations and Vanishing Indians 18 "Baptized in Blood" 19 "Too Young for a Uniform" 20 Against Their Will 21 Innocent Victims and Heroic Defenders
