ABSTRACT
Sparse, disjointed, and at times myopic, histories of children as consumers in the Western world nevertheless constitute a substantive area of scholarly inquiry. Historical interest in the child consumer did not arise until the 1980s and did not take hold until the 1990s despite the clear evidence that children had been thought of, acted upon, and behaved as consumers at least a century earlier in the US context. The lag between the onset of historical practice and the beginning of historical scholarship speaks not simply to the legacy of the marginalization of children in historical and social research generally. The peripheral position accorded children's consumption in historical research also indicates some conceptual difficulties that come to the fore when attempting to account for children's consumer practices.
