Book Review: <i>Small Stories of War: Children, Youth, and Conflict in Canada and Beyond</i> by Lorenzkowski Barbara, Kristine Alexander and Andrew Burtch, eds

at The Canadian War Museum that brought together an interdisciplinary group of scholars, survivors, and activists.The contributors explored the ways that the experiences of war and conflict differ for young people and adults.Within the culminating text, the authors present analyses of the mechanics of memory, emotions, and knowledge in ways that demonstrate the different perspectives that children maintain.These perspectives are the products of different socio-political, emotional, and educational forces children face in addition to the reality of violence.Educators, parents, activists against nuclear war, and militia fighters imagined children as the ideal sources for a new socio-political future.In the responses to the pressure of futurity, children sometimes broke from the script, creating new memories and languages that differed from the expectations placed upon them by adults.As the contributors emphasize, children created new forms of knowledge as well as made political claims.The volume does not simply look to the past to examine history, but also to the future, presenting alternative forms of memorialization and justice.The authors present a valuable source for scholars and students seeking to expand their methodological toolbox.The edited volume contains four different parts, fifteen chapters, and five analytical strands: experience, ways of knowing, temporalities, children as political actors, and communities of memory.Though the editors have curated a global discussion, there is a particular focus on Canada.The contributors place Canada in a global perspective displaying networks of war mobilization and refuge.This does provide, as the editors discuss in their introduction, a kaleidoscope into Canadian history.Part One of the collection explores children's direct experiences of war with three contributions focused on the First and Second World Wars and during the Cold War.The authors emphasize that though children were the targets for scientific discourse, parental care, and forms of educational experiments, children could subvert adult-imposed expectations.This is eloquently shown in Carolyn Kay's chapter "Children's Images of War from the German Home Front, 1914-1918" which focuses on children's drawings created in German classrooms.Utilizing an impressive collection of drawings located in Germany and Austria, Kay highlights how children were targeted by pedagogues and teachers in the hopes of promoting not only patriotism, but continued support for the war.Educators encouraged children to draw various aspects of the warfront including battlefields, air raids, and caring for the wounded.Kay highlights two important methodological approaches to analyzing children's drawings.First, these sources demonstrate the ways war culture entered the classroom and how children were instructed to perform and enact pro-war feelings and emotions.And second, by closely reading the ways children participated in these exercises-examining the

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.