Children & Youth in History

This site is designed to help teachers and students learn about the roles of young people throughout history by providing access to information about living experiences of children and youth from many perspectives as swell as changing ideas about childhood and adolescence in past cultures and civilizations. Questions such as these are addressed: What was it like to be a child or adolescent throughout history? How is childhood defined? How has it changed and how has it remained the same? What factors have shaped childhood and how did children shape history, society, and culture?

These resources are FREE for educational use:

• a Primary Source Database with 350 resources along with guidance on how to use those sources critically and tools for annotating and organizing the sources;
• 60 Website Reviews that focus on valuable online resources for studying and teaching the history of childhood and youth in world history, including those covering Africa, Wast Asia, Europe, Latin America, Middle East/North Africa, North America, Pacific Basin, South/Southeast Asia;
• 11 Teaching Modules that provide historical context, teaching tools, and strategies for teaching with sets of primary sources drawn from the Primary Source Database; and
• 25 Teaching Case Studies by experienced scholars and teachers that model strategies for using primary sources to teach the history of childhood and youth.