GRADES 6-8:

Question: How have the kinds of games that children played and the toys they played with change during the last 150 years?

Research Tip: Make a list of the toys and games that you and your friends are familiar with and do a word search for those toys and games. See which ones turn up. There are also several "keywords" related to toys and games. You can also compare different periods of time by choosing specific decades when you do your searches.

Question: This is a slightly different question: How have the hobbies and sports that Milwaukee children enjoy changed over time? How have the ways that children and their parents thought about these activities changed over the years?

Research Tip: Choose one of your favorite past times — a sport, music, dancing — and do a "word search" for it. Show the different ways that newspapers have covered certain activities, the ways schools and parents have encouraged or discouraged them, or the importance society has placed on them.

Question: Choose a week, a year, or a decade in Milwaukee history. Look at all the newspaper articles or other documents you can from that period of time and write a story—not a report—about a fictional child living at that time.

Research Tip: Limit your keyword and word searches to certain documents and certain decades.

Question: Compare the part of Milwaukee County in which you live to that same area during an earlier time. What events and organizations and activities are the same? Which are different? Has the people who live there changed (their race, ethnic group, wealth)?

Research Tips: You can limit word and keyword searches by "neighborhood." Ask you teacher to help you use the map and the "boundaries" guide. You can start researching your neighborhood by doing word searches of streets, churches, schools, or even families.

Question: How have schools changed since your grandparents were children?

Research Tips: There are a number of ways to research this question. One way is to do an oral history with your grandparents and compare their experiences to your own (for ideas about the kinds of questions that you could ask in your interview, read a number of the oral histories in "Through Children's Eyes"). You could also check out the yearbook articles and pictures in the "Schooling" section and compare them to your school's most recent yearbook. Or you could compare the evidence related to "curriculum" (the classes planned by the school to give students the skills and knowledge that administrators and teachers think are important for children to learn) and see how the classes taken by students changed over the years.

Question: Children have always tried to contribute to their communities. Examine the ways that children of any age have tried to "make a difference."

Research Tips: What programs can children participate in? How do schools use "service learning" to educate children? How do groups like the Boy and Girl Scouts, churches, the Red Cross, and others try to help children help others? Next, work backward in time to discover how Milwaukee children have, over the years, contributed to the well-being of their neighborhoods and of the city. Do a word search for "volunteer" or "service" or other words that describe efforts to help others (but remember that these words have other meanings and some of the documents your search will turn up will not help you).

Question: Technology—machines, sources of energy, transportation, communication—affects our lives every day, at home, at school, at work, and at play. How have they affected children?

Research Tips: List the three or four most important technologies in your life. Then find out if those technologies were important in the past. For instance the spread of automobiles made children's lives easier, but also made them more dangerous. Radio and television have enriched the lives of children, but have also made them consumers through advertising.

Question: Children have always had to work—on farms, in the home, and in factories. But the kinds of work they've done and the reasons they've done it have changed. Using the documents found on CUAP, make a list of as many forms of children's work as you can find. Which ones do children still do today?

Research Tip: Although there are many documents related to children's work in the "Work" section, you may find more in other sections. Search the entire site, not just "Work," and check out the keyword list for topics connected in some way to work.

Question: Attitudes about children have changed many times in our country's history. What events and ideas caused those changes in attitudes?

Research Tip: Figure out which institutions and organizations might show the way that society feels about its children, then do a word search using the names of those organizations and institutions.

GRADES 9-12:

Question: How did the way that newspapers and magazines "cover" children change between the 1850s and the 1980s?

Research Tip: Search the newspaper file for articles related to a certain topic (like "crime," "play," or "orphans"). You can measure the changes in newspaper coverage by contrasting: the number of published stories about children, the reporters' points of view (whether they blame the children themselves or "society" when children become criminals, for instance), and the kind of news about children that editors decided they should include. Then check out a week's issues of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel to see how those issues are covered today.

Question: For many years, historians have debated when "modern" childhood was created; some believe that children were treated as "little adults" until as recently as the mid-nineteenth-century, while others believe childhood has been considered a separate stage of life for centuries. In your opinion, what ideas and experiences make up "modern" childhood? What factors made it possible for urban children to live that kind of childhood?

Research Tip: You may decide that two of the most important factors in the formation of modern childhood is lengthening the period of time in which children attend school and postponing the time when they begin full-time work. In the "Schooling" section, search for information about school attendance or graduation rates. In the "Work" section, survey the different kinds of jobs performed by children at specific points in time and determine if these jobs were vital to the family's well-being or merely allowed children to make a little spending money for themselves.

Question: Milwaukee youths have always "dated," but the meaning and the forms of dating have changed. How have the relationships between boys an girls changed over the last century? And how have institutions like schools, families, and even the government reacted to dating?

Research Tip: Of course, this question forces you to ask another question: how do historians find out about things like this? You might try to discover the following: the earliest use of the term "dating" in the documents collected on CUAP; the effects of the automobile on dating; the ways that school newspapers, yearbooks, memoirs, and other documents produced by children (or by people who were children in Milwaukee) reported on dating.

Question: Identify the greatest threats faced by children in Milwaukee to their health, their mental well-being, and their happiness. Determine how those threats differed according to the age, gender, and place of residence of children. What organizations, institutions, and government agencies have responded to those threats?

Research Tip: First identify the threats facing Milwaukee children today, and what organizations try to help. Then work backwards in time with word and keyword searches of specific decades.

Question: Children have always tried to contribute to their communities. Examine the ways that children of any age have tried to "make a difference."

Research Tips: What programs can children participate in? How do schools use "service learning" to educate children? How do groups like the Boy and Girl Scouts, churches, the Red Cross, and others try to help children help others? Next, work backward in time to discover how Milwaukee children have, over the years, contributed to the well-being of their neighborhoods and of the city. Do a word search for "volunteer" or "service" or other words that describe efforts to help others (but remember that these words have other meanings and some of the documents your search will turn up will not help you).

Question: Technology — machines, sources of energy, transportation, communication — affects our lives every day, at home, at school, at work, and at play. How have they affected children?

Research Tips: List the three or four most important technologies in your life. Then find out if those technologies were important in the past. For instance the spread of automobiles made children's lives easier, but also made them more dangerous. Radio and television have enriched the lives of children, but have also made them consumers through advertising.

Question: Children have always had to work—on farms, in the home, and in factories. But the kinds of work they've done and the reasons they've done it have changed. How has society's attitude about child labor changed since 1900?

Research Tip: Although there are many documents related to children's work in the "Work" section, you may find more in other sections. Search the entire, not just "Work," and check out the keyword list for topics connected in some way to work.

Question: Attitudes about children have changed many times in our country's history. What events and ideas caused those changes in attitudes?

Research Tip: Figure out which institutions and organizations might show the way that society feels about its children, then do a word search using the names of those organizations and institutions.

Question: How have national events—wars, economic problems, racial conflict—been reflected in the lives of young Milwaukeeans.

Research Tip: Begin with some of the special topics related to major events and trends. But think creatively, too; consider national trends in areas like music, science and health, and technology.

COLLEGE AND UNIVERSITY STUDENTS:

Question: Politicians, writers, and cultural critics have argued for a number of years that traditional "family values" have deteriorated since the 1950s. Is it possible to define what "family values" meant to men, women, and children in the past? If so, how have those values shaped the lives of children over the generations? Has the importance of family values in Milwaukee declined since the Second World War?

Research Tip: No single category in the CUAP defines family values. Determine in your own mind their most important characteristics. If you believe that family values include a strong religious component, search for information about Sabbath School curricula or family activities sponsored by churches or synagogues. If you believe that true family values requires stay-at-home mothers, search for information about the problems reported among children attending day care.

Question: Historians have debated the extent to which social and political reforms are actually "liberal" or "conservative"—was Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, for instance, an attempt to fundamentally alter the structure of American government and society or merely an effort to preserve the status quo through superficial change. How has the history of social activism and government intervention in the lives of children

Research Tip: There are virtually unlimited ways of answering this question. If you want to focus on reformers' efforts to end child labor, search the "Work" section. If you choose to focus on institutional responses to children in distress, search the "Health and Welfare" section. Focus not only on the laws passed and policies designed, but also on their actual effects on children (through their memoirs and oral histories).

Question: Identify the greatest threats faced by children in Milwaukee to their health, their mental well-being, and their happiness. Determine how those threats differed according to the age, gender, and place of residence of children. What organizations, institutions, and government agencies have responded to those threats?

Research Tip: First identify the threats facing Milwaukee children today, and what organizations try to help. Then work backwards in time with word and keyword searches of specific decades.

Question: Children have always tried to contribute to their communities. Examine the ways that children of any age have tried to "make a difference."

Research Tips: What programs can children participate in? How do schools use "service learning" to educate children? How do groups like the Boy and Girl Scouts, churches, the Red Cross, and others try to help children help others? Next, work backward in time to discover how Milwaukee children have, over the years, contributed to the well-being of their neighborhoods and of the city. Do a word search for "volunteer" or "service" or other words that describe efforts to help others (but remember that these words have other meanings and some of the documents your search will turn up will not help you).

Question: Technology—machines, sources of energy, transportation, communication—affects our lives every day, at home, at school, at work, and at play. How have they affected children?

Research Tips: List the three or four most important technologies in your life. Then find out if those technologies were important in the past. For instance the spread of automobiles made children's lives easier, but also made them more dangerous. Radio and television have enriched the lives of children, but have also made them consumers through advertising.

Question: Children have always had to work—on farms, in the home, and in factories. But the kinds of work they've done and the reasons they've done it have changed. One of the most important—and most difficult—reform movements of the early 20th century was the fight against child labor. What evidence could reformers and their opponents present to support their arguments, based on the experiences of Milwaukee County children?

Research Tip: Although there are many documents related to children's work in the "Work" section, you may find more in other sections. Search the entire, not just "Work," and check out the keyword list for topics connected in some way to work.

Question: Historians would argue that American society has become more "child-centered" over the past 150 years. Indeed, some experts predicted in the early 1900s that the 20th century would be the "Century of the Child." Define what you believe the phrase "child-centered" means, then find evidence supporting and/or contradicting that notion.

Research Tip: Search for documents found in the Play and Leisure section—or any section, for that matter—contrasting the information found in documents from two decades (1900 and 1960, for instance).

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