Ring Around the Maple

Cynthia Comacchio's research focuses on the history of children/childhood and youth in Canada, late 19th to 21st centuries. She is the author of numerous articles and books, including The Dominion of Youth: Adolescence and the Making of a Modern Canada, 1920-50 (WLU Press, 2008) and Ring Around the Maple: Settler Children in Canada, Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (WLU Press, 2024). Neil Sutherland served for 37 years in the University of British Columbia’s Department of Educational Studies. He was the principal investigator of the Canadian Childhood History Project located at UBC, and published articles, reviews and a number of books on the history of children in Canada.

• AcknowledgementsPrefaceIntroduction: Ring Around the Maple: Rhymes and Rhythms of Childhood Part I Chapters 1-7 New Childhoods for Old: Changing Ideas and Institutions 1. “National Assets”: Children in a Transforming Nation 2. “The Century of the Child:” Science, the State, and Modern Childhood3. The First Known World: Home and Family 4. “The Golden Rule:” School and Nation5. The Children’s Church: The Meanings of Christianity in Children’s Lives6. The “Stuff” of Childhood: Creating the Juvenile Marketplace7. “Play is the Real Work of Children”: How Children Had FunPart II Chapters 8-10 Growing Up in Troubled Times: The Great War, the Great Depression, and the Second World War8.“Fighting for Our Dear Old Flag”: The Great War and the New Day 9. “There Was a Cloud Over Us”: Children of the Great Depression 10. “Taking Up the Torch”: Children and Another Big War Part III Chapters 11-12 Post-War Childhoods: The Cold War and Societal Shifts 11. Growing Up Atomic: Cold War Childhoods 12. The More Things Change: Heading to Millennium Conclusion: “Ring Around the Maple”: Canadian Children and Childhoods

The result of decades’ worth of research, Ring Around the Maple provides a rich account of the continuities and changes that shaped the lives of young people in Canada between the mid-nineteenth and early twenty-first centuries. Centring children’s voices and informed by current debates in the field, this book is a welcome addition to scholarship on the history of childhood and to Canadian social history more generally." - Kristine Alexander, Associate Professor of History, University of Lethbridge, author of Guiding Modern Girls: Girlhood, Empire, and Internationalism in the 1920s and 1930s