James Marten, Ph.D., says that to understand history fully, historians should pay close attention to the experiences of children.
Marten, professor and chair of the Department of History, spent three years assembling a treasure trove of newspaper articles, memoirs, photographs, letters and more, all to capture the history of Milwaukee’s children from 1850 to today. Assisted by graduate students, he has posted these documents online for teachers, students, historians and anyone interested in the city’s development — as lived by children.
They won’t be disappointed. The documents conjure vivid images: Children lugging fireplace ash to frame an ice-skating pond; “newsies” publishing their own newspaper; high school students knowing the despair of the Depression; Mayor Frank Zeidler establishing the Metropolitan Youth Commission after WWII to educate young people to become “proper citizens, instead of embracing teenager culture”; and school children participating in duck-and-cover drills during the Cold War.
The Children in Urban America Project was prompted by Marten’s fascination with the experiences of Civil War-era children — the subject of earlier research. “I became interested in children’s experiences in urban places and began to explore developing a Web site on that topic,” he says. A three-year National Endowment for the Humanities grant funded the project.
The site’s 5,400 documents are organized under the themes of work, play, schooling and health. There are common threads joining generations of children, Marten notes, including play and disease. But there also are departures from one era to the next, such as limitations placed on child labor after the 1890s.
“We put the documents where anyone can access them,” Marten explains. “It’s a different way of approaching history, but there is nothing that you can’t understand better when you look at it through the eyes of children.”
Life Cycle: From Birth to Death
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- The mind-body connection
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- Protecting muscles on and off Earth
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Studying Our World
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Quick Facts About Marquette
| Identity: | Catholic, Jesuit, private |
| Established: | 1881 |
| Location: | Milwaukee, Wisconsin |
| Undergraduate: | 8,048 |
| Postgraduate: | 3,500 |
| Campus: | Urban, 80 acres |
| Athletics: | 14 NCAA Division I teams (Big East Conference) |
| Colors: | Blue and Gold |
