Frontier Children
by Linda Peavy and Ursula Smith
Published by: University of Oklahoma Press
Imprint: University of Oklahoma Press
176 Pages | 8 x 11 | 196 duotone illus., 10 line illus.
$21.95
“Peppered with letters and diaries written by children and liberally illustrated with photographs of children in their best clothes, or hard at work, this is a book for the entire family to read, look at, savor, and enjoy."—American Cowboy
Enriched by over 200 vintage photographs, Frontier Children is a visual and verbal montage of childhood in the nineteenth-century West. From a wide range of primary and secondary sources, Linda Peavy and Ursula Smith, well known for their books on western women, have brought together stories and images that erase the stereotypes and bring to life the infinite variety of the experience of growing up in the American West.
Ursula Smith pursued graduate work at San Francisco State University under a Ford Foundation Fellowship and taught in the San Francisco school system. She began collaborative work in women's history and biography with coauthor Linda Peavy in Bozeman, Montana. Since then Peavy and Smith have coauthored ten books, including Women in Waiting in the Westward Movement, Pioneer Women, Frontier Children, and Frontier House. Currently residing in Vermont, Smith has given presentations and workshops with Peavy across the nation, including at the Library of Congress and the White House. With Peavy she has been awarded a Redd Center for Western Studies Independent Research Award, a Smithsonian Short-Term Visitors grant, two nonfiction writing residencies at Centrum, Port Townsend, Washington, and two Paladin Awards for excellence in writing western history.
“To the history of children, an emerging field that is both challenging and exciting, Frontier Children is a valuable contribution.”—Pacific Northwest Quarterly
“By all means buy Frontier Children for the pictures...But you may find yourself as interested in the text as in the illustrations. Peavy and Smith combed through hundreds of sources to tell the harrowing, humorous stories of children who participated in many of the same activities as their adult counterparts, but from the parallel universe of childhood."—Book Talk
“Linda Peavy and Ursula Smith lead us into two territories that are both intimate and alien. The first is the American frontier, which haunts our memory as a place of national beginnings...The second territory is that of individual origins--our childhoods. We form our personal myths, the stories that explain who we are, through remembered moments from the age of seven or twelve...Like our selected frontier episodes, these personal memories shaped us, we believe; and so they are still with us...The experiences of frontier children are a distinctively American variation of what draws us to all history.”—Elliott West
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