ABSTRACT
A fairly recent historical change in the relationships between childhood and memory is manifested in a new form of nostalgia. This takes the form of collecting and memorializing the past through narrow age-linked consumption by childhood encounters with short-lived goods and media that later in life re-appear as nostalgia. New methods of advertising, packaging, and distributing goods in the generation around 1900 combined with an extraordinary increase in the range and number of innovative products to produce the birth of modern consumer society in the US. After about 1970, cross-generational fantasy declined with increased and more systematic media/merchandiser efforts to accommodate and even encourage children's rebellion. Memory and its emotions have often been evoked through things, but increasingly nostalgia is linked to things distinctive to modern childhood and consumerism. In the gendered world of nostalgia, mostly male toy collectors live in a world separate from but parallel to the mostly female doll collectors.
