War and Childhood in the Era of the Two World Wars

Mischa Honeck teaches US and transatlantic history at the Humboldt University of Berlin. He was a research fellow at the German Historical Institute in Washington, DC, and is the author of Our Frontier Is the World: The Boy Scouts in the Age of American Ascendancy (2018). James Marten was one of the founders of the Society for the History of Children and Youth and its president from 2013 to 2015. He edited the Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth from 2013 to 2018. His book The Children's Civil War (1998) was named an "Outstanding Academic Title" by Choice.

• Introduction: more than victims: framing the history of modern childhood and war Mischa Honeck and James Marten; Part I. Inspiring and Mobilizing: 1. Patriotic fun: toys and mobilization in China from the Republican to the Communist era Valentina Boretti; 2. Forging a patriotic youth: penny dreadfuls and military censorship in WWI Germany Kara Ritzheimer; 3. Recruiting Japanese boys for the pioneer youth corps of Mongolia and Manchuria L. Halliday Piel; 4. Defining the ideal Soviet childhood: reportage about child evacuees from Spain as didactic literature Karl Qualls; 5. Learning more than letters: alphabet books in the Soviet Union and the United States during World War II Julie K. deGraffenried; 6. Boys and girls in the service of total war: defense service training in Swedish schools during World War II Esbjörn Larsson; 7. Good soldiers all? Democracy and discrimination in the Boy Scouts of America, 1941–5 Mischa Honeck; Part II. Adapting and Surviving: 8. Combatant children: ideologies and experiences of childhood in the Royal Navy and British Army, 1902–18 Kate James; 9. Drawing the Great War: children's personal representations of war and violence in France, Germany, and Russia Manon Pignot; 10. Bellicists, feminists, and deserters: youth, war, and the German youth movement, 1914–18 Antje Harms; 11. Boys without a country: Ottoman orphans in Germany during the First World War Nazan Maksudyan; 12. In their own words: children in the world of the Holocaust Patricia Heberer Rice; 13. The dark side of the 'good war': children and medical experimentation in the United States during World War II Birgitte Søland; 14. Attacking children with nuclear weapons: the centrality of children in American understandings of the bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki Robert Jacobs.

'This outstanding volume of essays addresses a central issue of twentieth-century warfare of why children who, in theory, should be shielded from involvement in war are instead continuously mobilized physically, emotionally, and imaginatively into war. It is a major contribution to our understanding of the history of children and childhood.' David M. Rosen, Fairleigh Dickinson University