Here's to the coffee-table book that stays open because you can't stop thinking about it. . . . The cover of "America's Children: Picturing Childhood From Early America to the Present" is predictably adorable: two little boys, gazing into the camera with bright eyes and hopeful expressions. The boy on the left is white and his little hand holds the shoulder of the other boy, who is Japanese. We don't find out until much farther into the book that the picture was taken by Dorothea Large in 1942, and that the Japanese boy was taken to a "relocation center" shortly afterward.
Kathleen Thompson and Hilary Mac Austin have compiled a book that frees childhood from the confines of piety or nostalgia and makes it part of our cultural and political history. We see children working in mines, hauling ice, at labor strikes, in orphanages, dressed exquisitely, dressed in rags, dressed for war, playing with dolls, playing in the street beside a dead horse. We see every ethnicity, and every class, and we move, thanks to engravings as well as photographs, from the 16th to the 21st century. And we experience every emotion, from grief and rage to pure delight. Here's to the miracles of creativity and truth . . . We need them desperately.

From Chief Wilma Mankiller
The poignant images of America's Children shatter our illusion that most children live protected lives of innocence. This photographic essay is an important contribution to the national dialogue about family life in America.

From Booklist
The authors of The Face of Our Past: Images of Black Women from Colonial America to the Present (2000) explore the lives of another marginalized group of American citizens--children. Like women and minorities, children have often been neglected or overly sentimentalized in portrayals of American history. The authors go a long way toward ameliorating that situation with this powerful record of the presence of children in American history over the past four centuries. The book is divided into sections on family, community, work, and school, and portrays childhood as something much more complex than the standard idealized images of care-free lives and protected innocence. Each section begins with narrative that provides historical context, and the photographs--accompanied by letters and short essays--speak for themselves, depicting children at church, school, funerals, on their front steps, as laborers on railroads and in coal mines and cotton fields, and as full participants in times of trial and triumph. A stunning presentation.