The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 104, July 2000 - April, 2001 Page: 616
673 p. : ill. (some col.), maps, ports. ; 23 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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616 Southwestern Historical Quarterly April
as a "tribute" (p. 8) to the many ways and aspects of growing up in the West. The
book is organized into seven chapters, combining photographs and text that is
largely based on primary sources. The first chapter serves as an introduction,
commenting on the "infinite variety" of childhood on the frontier, including
photographs of children of white Americans, African Americans, Native
Americans, and Chinese Americans.
The rest of the chapters capture children as they are on the move during sea-
sonal or permanent migrations: white children on the overland trail, Cherokees
on "The Trail of Tears" (illustrated by drawings as well as photos), exodusters
and Mormons. Another chapter captures children in their environment and
another places them within their families.
The book also explores the "Blurred Boundaries" between work and play
where work could be carried out like play and children mimicked work while
playing. A chapter explores education, in a school house for whites, by elders or
other adults among Indians or Indian children attending government schools.
The last chapter explores the passage to adulthood. In each chapter, short
vignettes highlight various stories related to the main text.
The photographs from thirty-four collections make Frontzer Children a page-
turner, with the reader going to the captions to find out the place and time and,
sometimes, the circumstances in which they were taken. They remind us both
how some of the joys of childhood remain the same today and yet also the dis-
tance for most peoples between now and the frontier in material and environ-
mental circumstances.
One criticism of the book is that it is, as the authors states, a montage of
image and text, making it more of a glimpse here and there of childhood on the
frontier rather than a consistent series of portraits or arguments. Going back
and forth between children in text and other children in photographs produces
divided narratives and some dislocation of the reader. I also would have liked to
find the archival sources contained in the captions for the photos rather than in
the back of the book.
Frontier Children, though, is a fine addition to the literature of children on the
frontier. The collection of photographs is a valuable visual record and well
worth a page-turning session with this book.
Salt Lake City Tom Harvey
Indians of the Greater Southeast: Historical Archaeology and Ethnohistory. Edited by
Bonnie G. McEwan. (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2ooo. Pp.
xvi+3 21. Illustrations, maps, tables, notes, works cited, index. ISBN o-8130-
1778-5. $55.00, cloth.)
The goal of this edited volume "is to develop social histories of southeastern
Indian cultures following European contact and to hypothesize about the rela-
tionship between native life and the material world during that time" (p. xiv).
These social histories are developed under McEwan's able editorship through
the integration of archaeological, ethnohistorical, and documentary evidence to
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Texas State Historical Association. The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 104, July 2000 - April, 2001, periodical, 2001; Austin, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth101221/m1/694/?rotate=90: accessed March 28, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas State Historical Association.