ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that history also offered those same opportunities to the young. Children thwarted in their desire to read adventure fiction could often mine histories intended for adults for derring-do plots of murders, battles, political wranglings, and sexual misdeeds in addition to their purportedly exemplary educative messages. Rousseau, an early proponent of the new vision of childhood, singled out the study of history for particular disdain. A true knowledge of history depends on an understanding of history's "causes and effects", its "moral bearings", which most children are not developmentally able to understand, he argued. In the wake of changing ideas about the child and its relation to history, a new market for histories created specifically for an audience of genteel children emerged in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Books of history intended for the schoolroom rather than the private library drew on established pedagogical models in their choice of form: question and answer, dialogue, and catechetical memorization.
