Selection Criteria
The material included in Children’s Literature and Culture has been selected in close collaboration with academic subject experts, collections specialists at participating libraries and archives, and under the guidance of the Editorial Board.
The resource provides a representative spread of key titles, authors, and illustrators; important editions; and material which highlights a comprehensive range of thematic coverage, formats, and styles from the period between the 1810s and the 1920s, shedding new light on shifts in children’s culture and place in society and on advances in book printing technology. Material has been sourced in large part from the Children’s Literature and Graphic Arts collections of the American Antiquarian Society which are, within their scope, amongst the world’s finest. This enables Children’s Literature and Culture to showcase some of the central pillars of its holdings – the McLoughlin Bros Collection and the McLoughlin Art Archive, most notably.
We have also included titles from McLoughlin’s contemporary competitors to build up a picture of the publishing market and selected additional material to enable a broad exploration of children’s culture. This includes an extensive selection of children's books and material culture from the Grossman Collection of Ephemera, housed at the Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library.
A note on exclusions
Children’s Literature and Culture is a major resource that covers a timespan of more than a century. Though key themes and document types are well represented, the scale of the period and complexity of the discipline prevents the inclusion of all relevant material.
A small number of McLoughlin Bros titles from the American Antiquarian Society collection have been excluded on account of one or more of the following criteria:
- Titles which are exact duplicates
- Titles which are unavailable for permission reasons
- Titles deemed too fragile for digitization
- Titles not included in the archive’s holdings
Omissions of materials outside of the McLoughlin Bros Collection have been made according to these same criteria. Further omissions of titles not congruent with the themes of this resource have also been made.
AM acknowledges that the majority of the literature and material culture included in this resource was produced for white children by white authors and publishers, or for/about people of color by white authors and publishers. We have included as many titles authored by people of color held by the source archives as possible in line with the listed omissions criteria. Children’s Literature and Culture is an essential tool for understanding the lived experience of white children and how white Americans perceived people of color, and for exploring how those prejudices and misconceptions were passed to their children. There are limited sources that can shed light on the lived experience of children of color. We have sought to make those sources as discoverable as possible, and to contextualise their absence. Please see the Searching Guide for more information.
To learn more about the source archives and the collections selected from them please watch the video Introducing Children’s Literature and Culture.
The material included in Children’s Literature and Culture has been selected in close collaboration with academic subject experts, collections specialists at participating libraries and archives, and under the guidance of the Editorial Board.
The resource provides a representative spread of key titles, authors, and illustrators; important editions; and material which highlights a comprehensive range of thematic coverage, formats, and styles from the period between the 1810s and the 1920s, shedding new light on shifts in children’s culture and place in society and on advances in book printing technology. Material has been sourced in large part from the Children’s Literature and Graphic Arts collections of the American Antiquarian Society which are, within their scope, amongst the world’s finest. This enables Children’s Literature and Culture to showcase some of the central pillars of its holdings – the McLoughlin Bros Collection and the McLoughlin Art Archive, most notably.
We have also included titles from McLoughlin’s contemporary competitors to build up a picture of the publishing market and selected additional material to enable a broad exploration of children’s culture. This includes an extensive selection of children's books and material culture from the Grossman Collection of Ephemera, housed at the Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library.
A note on exclusions
Children’s Literature and Culture is a major resource that covers a timespan of more than a century. Though key themes and document types are well represented, the scale of the period and complexity of the discipline prevents the inclusion of all relevant material.
A small number of McLoughlin Bros titles from the American Antiquarian Society collection have been excluded on account of one or more of the following criteria:
- Titles which are exact duplicates
- Titles which are unavailable for permission reasons
- Titles deemed too fragile for digitization
- Titles not included in the archive’s holdings
Omissions of materials outside of the McLoughlin Bros Collection have been made according to these same criteria. Further omissions of titles not congruent with the themes of this resource have also been made.
AM acknowledges that the majority of the literature and material culture included in this resource was produced for white children by white authors and publishers, or for/about people of color by white authors and publishers. We have included as many titles authored by people of color held by the source archives as possible in line with the listed omissions criteria. Children’s Literature and Culture is an essential tool for understanding the lived experience of white children and how white Americans perceived people of color, and for exploring how those prejudices and misconceptions were passed to their children. There are limited sources that can shed light on the lived experience of children of color. We have sought to make those sources as discoverable as possible, and to contextualise their absence. Please see the Searching Guide for more information.
To learn more about the source archives and the collections selected from them please watch the video Introducing Children’s Literature and Culture.