Introduction: Children and Families Enter History's Main Stream

Abstract

In the past, the history of families and children sometimes found a place in specialized studies, local histories, and even elementary school books. On the other hand, they made but fleeting appearances in high school and university courses or in texts in national history. The prevailing situation was exemplified for this writer by the lectures and recommended textbook in the course in Canadian history taught by Gilbert N. Tucker at the University of British Columbia in the 1940s. In the 1960s and 1970s, however, families and children began to nudge their way into the consciousness of historians and then into the mainstream of Canadian history. Their appearance reflected the growing interest of historians in laying bare the characteristics and patterns of everyday life in the past. Some of what we learned about the history of both families and children can be seen by examining the contents of a letter written by a child during the Great War. Now, every national and regional text incorporates families and children, some more successfully than others, into its narrative.