Abstract
This chapter examines whether changing cultural beliefs about American childhood translated into changes in practice at children’s institutions. Children’s institutions played an important role in American culture throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Yet, the location of these institutions occasionally contradicted contemporaneous ideals about childcare within the United States. One of the primary cultural preferences that arose during this period was the idea that the physical proximity to undesirable individual in cities negatively influenced child development. This chapter uses time as a proxy for the increased application of these ideas to test if the location of children’s institutions adhered to these ideals. Children’s institutions in this chapter fall into two categories – children’s homes for white American children and Native American boarding schools. Using these categories, this chapter explores if adults equally applied social expectations for children’s care to children of different races. This meta-analysis draws from online-accessible information about children’s institutions to suggest that the application of child-rearing ideals at children’s institutions built for children of different races had unique patterns in site location. Suggesting that while ideas about childcare standards and ideals filtered into American culture, the application of these methods were not evenly distributed.
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Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank: Dr. Patricia Crown, Dr. Jane Eva Baxter, Mychal Ludwig, and Alicia Corleto for their help with early stages of this project; Dr. April Kamp-Whittaker and Jamie Devine for the initial invitation to the Society for Historical Archaeology (SHA) symposia where a preliminary version of this chapter appeared; the archivists at the National Archives and Records Administration at Seattle and College Park, the many local historians who answered my e-mails about city hall location and populations to build my data set. Hannah Weaver and Katherine Brewer for their helpful commentary a draft of this paper. This research was supported by the Graduate and Professional Student Association of the University of New Mexico (UNM)’s Student Research Grant, the Ed and Judy Jelks Student Travel Award from SHA, the UNM Student Conference Award Program Travel Grant, the Center for Regional Studies Fellowship at UNM, and the Binford Fellowship from the Department of Anthropology at UNM. Any errors in this chapter are entirely the author’s and not that of the publisher or editors.
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Przystupa, P. (2024). Practicality and Ideology: Examining Site Selection for American Children’s Institutions. In: Kamp-Whittaker, A., Devine, J.J., Spencer-Wood, S.M. (eds) Historical Archaeology of Childhood and Parenting. Contributions To Global Historical Archaeology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37578-1_7
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