Childhood and Child Welfare in the Progressive Era examines a central focus for reform efforts between 1870 and 1930: children. Progressive-era reformers, holding the middle-class childhood as ideal, found the lives of poor urban children especially troubling. Using the methods of the social sciences, they studied this population and sought government action to remedy what they saw as poor children’s deprivations. In this volume, James Marten first introduces these issues and then presents a collection of documents and images from books, social surveys, and social work journals that describe the conditions of urban children, track the development of “a right to childhood,” and explain programs to improve children’s health, promote juvenile justice, and prevent child labor. A final section presents children’s experiences in their own words, as they reflect on the perils and fun of their young lives. Document headnotes, a chronology, questions for consideration, and a selected bibliography help contemporary students understand why the Progressive era was so crucial in the development of ideas about the nature of childhood and government’s responsibility for child welfare. JAMES MARTEN (Ph.D., University of Texas at Austin) is professor of history at Marquette University in Milwaukee, where he teaches courses on the Civil War and on children's history. He is the author of The Children's Civil War (1998), which was selected as an Outstanding Academic Book by Choice Magazine and chosen for the Jesuit National Book Award in 1999. He is also the editor of Children and War: An Historical Anthology (2002). He serves as director of the Children in Urban America Project, an NEH-funded online archive of documents related to the history of children in Milwaukee. Marten is a founding member and secretary-treasurer of the Society for the History of Children and Youth. In 1999 he was a Fulbright Lecturer at Northeast Normal University in Changchun, People's Republic of China.