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Web Site Review
| Nineteenth-Century American Children and What They Read <http://www.merrycoz.org/kids.htm>. Created and maintained by Pat Pflieger, West Chester University, Pa. Reviewed Aug. 23, 2005.Children in Urban America Project <http://xserver1.its.mu.edu>. Directed by James Marten and Karen Kehoe, Marquette University. Reviewed Aug. 23, 2005.
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| Children in the twenty-first century are technologically savvy. They are comfortable surfing the Web, instant messaging with friends (e-mail is for old people), listening to music, and doing their homework on computers—often all at the same time. But what records will they leave behind for future historians? Perhaps a few old-fashioned e-mails, compact discs (CDS), and digital video discs (DVDS). But most of the Web sites they visit and instant messages they send will disappear. These two Web sites attempt to understand the lives of young people in the last two centuries through a host of materials that did survive—writings by and for children, drawings, photographs, and writings about children. |
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Nineteenth-Century American Children and What They Read is a Web site born of a passion for exactly that—material written for children, and occasionally by children, in the nineteenth century. Pat Pflieger, an English professor and the site creator, is interested in popular books and magazines that are not well known today. Topics range from morality tales to slavery to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. An 1857 poem by William C. Cutter entitled "Skating—Woman's Rights" asks why a woman may not skate when "She can walk, and run, and ride." Fear of revealed ankles is not enough to persuade the author that women should not partake of the newest fad. |
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Drawing on that passion, Pflieger has purchased, transcribed, and made public a significant number of primary sources, as well as bibliographies and scholarly works. The section called "Children" provides an eclectic sampling of materials from letters, adoption notices, and articles about raising children to writings by children, including scrapbooks, exercise books, letters, and a diary. There is no clear rationale for the inclusion of items beyond availability. |
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"Magazines" offers more than two hundred transcribed articles, jokes, letters, and illustrations from twelve magazines, as well as a "small gallery" of magazine covers. "Some of their books" provides complete transcriptions for twenty-seven books for children as well as articles and reviews of the books and of children's reading by nineteenth-century adults. In addition, the site makes available seven scholarly essays by Pflieger and comprehensive bibliographies on social history, children and child rearing, reading in the nineteenth century, Samuel G. Goodrich, and the children's author Jacob Abbott. Pflieger annotates many of the materials, providing historical context (sometimes very brief) and bibliographic information (usually). Text is almost always transcribed, and Pflieger is forthcoming about omissions and possible errors. Unfortunately, originals of the materials are generally not available. |
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Despite the eclectic nature of the site, Pflieger has created a wonderful resource for teachers, students, and researchers interested in children, publishing, or literacy in the nineteenth century. Navigating the Web site requires patience, however. First created in 1999, the Web site has grown without a cohesive structure or search engine. All materials are included on the three comprehensive indexes: title, subject, or date. Clicking on an item from the index sometimes leads you to the top of a browse page where you must search for a link to the item. Other times, you move directly to the location on the browse page that links to the item. Occasionally you move directly to the item itself. |
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