Neil Sutherland

Ring Around the Maple is about the condition of children in Canada from roughly 1850 to 2000, a time during which “the modern” increasingly disrupted traditional ways. Authors Cynthia R. Comacchio and Neil Sutherland trace the lives of children over this “long century” with a view to synthesizing the rich interdisciplinary, often multi-disciplinary, literature that has emerged since the 1970s. Integrated into this synthesis is the authors’ new research into many, often seemingly disparate, archival and published primary sources. Emphasizing how “the child” and childhood are sociohistoric constructs, and employing age analytically and relationally, they discuss the constants and the variants in their historic dimensions. While childhood tangibly modernized during these years, it remained a far from universal experience due to identifiers of race, gender, culture, region, and intergenerational adaptations that characterize the process of growing up. This work highlights children’s perspectives through close, critical, “against the grain” readings of diaries, correspondence, memoirs, interviews, oral histories and autobiographies, many buried in obscure archives. It is the only extant historical discussion of Canadian children that interweaves the experiences of First Nations, Métis, and Inuit children with those of children from a number of settler groups. Ring Around the Maple makes use of photographs, catalogues, advertisements, government publications, musical recordings, radio shows, television shows, material goods, documentary and feature films, and other such visual and aural testimony. Much of this evidence has not to date been used as historical testimony to uncover the lives of ordinary children. This book is generously illustrated with photographs and ephemera carefully selected to reflect children’s lives, conditions, interests, and obligations. It will be of special interest to historians and social scientists interested in children and the culture of childhood, but will also appeal to readers who enjoy the "little stories" that together make up our collective history, especially when those are told by the children who lived them.

""So often a long-awaited book is disappointing. Happily such is not the case with Sutherland's masterpiece."" Robert M. Stamp, University of Calgary, in The Canadian Historical Review ""Sutherland's work is destined to be a landmark in Canadian history, both as a first in its particular field and as a standard reference text."" J. Stewart Hardy, University of Alberta, in Alberta Journal of Educational Research Such were the reviewers' comments when Neil Sutherland's groundbreaking book was first published. Now reissued in Wilfrid Laurier University Press's new series ""Studies in Childhood and Family in Canada,"" with a new introduction by series editor Cynthia Comacchio, this book remains relevant today. In the late nineteenth century a new generation of reformers committed itself to a program of social improvement based on the more effective upbringing of all children. In Children in English-Canadian Society, Neil Sutherland examines, with a keen eye, the growth of the public health movement and its various efforts at improving the health of children.

Childhood is a socially constructed state that can differ significantly from culture to culture and period to period. The history of childhood is rapidly emerging as an important area of study. Neil Sutherland looks at children's lives in modern, industrialized, pre-television Canada, from before the First World War to the 1960s. Based on adult memories of childhood, this book investigates a wide selection of experiences of growing up. Sutherland lays out the structure of children's lives in such settings as the home, the classroom, the church, the streets, and the playgrounds - in short, in the communities of childhood. He explains how children arrived at their gender, class, and other identities, and how they came to adopt the values they did. Sutherland focuses on recurrent, common features of the everyday life of children. This book offers a unique, child-centred approach developed by a leading expert on the history of Canadian childhood. Written in straightforward, jargon-free language and illustrated with numerous photographs, it will be of special interest to those in the fields of social and educational history. Also, because Sutherland is successful in describing the perceptions and feelings of children, it will intrigue anyone who grew up in this period or who wants to understand the experiences of friends and family who did.

This comprehensive bibliography provides complete coverage of the English-language literature on contemporary Canadian childhood and youth. It covers scholarly, professional, and other writings, including books, monographs, the reports of government commissions, scholarly and professional articles, and magistral and doctoral dissertations. The material is arranged geographically, and the work includes an extensive subject index and a full author index. A companion volume provides coverage of contemporary Canadian childhood and youth.

This comprehensive bibliography provides complete coverage of the English-language literature on contemporary Canadian childhood and youth. It covers scholarly, professional, and other substantial writings, including books, monographs, the reports of government commissions, scholarly and professional articles, and magistral and doctoral dissertations. The material is arranged geographically and includes full subject and author indexes. A companion volume covers the literature on the history of Canadian childhood.

Professor Sutherland has a keen eye, both for the illuminating and for the typical, and has assembled this history from English-language sources across the country. It is a readable and important work that will interest social historians and all involved, in whatever capacity, with the care and development of children.