Das Kind als sozialer Aktor in der Geschichte - eine Sichtweise aus der Geschichtswissenschaft.

This chapter has two objectives. First, to provide an overview of some of the main developments, issues and approaches to be found in histories of childhood and in those of the much less widely researched topic, ‘children’. My second objective is to make a number of suggestions as to how we historians might proceed to incorporate children as social actors into our accounts, with all that this implies for the writing of history, since they are not usually treated in such a manner. I suspect that many readers will find aspects of the argument presented here to be provocative, if not downright muddle-headed. Nevertheless, I hope that the following pages will stimulate discussion and encourage sceptical colleagues to be more conscious of what, in my opinion, are often their ageist assumptions and sympathies.
After a brief introduction, which draws attention to the particularity of children within childhood, the chapter provides a survey and commentary on the range and nature of historical studies to date. It then proceeds to examine sources in relation to identification and interpretation. These matters always pose difficulties, but they are especially acute where children and childhood are concerned, if only because the historian has to be constantly aware of the differences between childhood, as a concept, and children, as people. The chapter then looks at how the problems might be overcome. In broad terms, it argues for a politically sensitive ‘child-centred’ approach, which would be a further development in making the discipline more inclusive and, therefore, more democratic. The specific recommendation is that we look seriously at the relevance of feminist perspectives and analyses for this infant enterprise, while simultaneously informing ourselves about sociological theories of age and generation.