Julia Gossard and Holly White are the incoming editors of the Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth. To celebrate their new editorship, Digital Childhoods co-editors Alice Sage and Hannah Stamler asked the pair about themselves, their plans for the journal, and their reflections on the field of the history of childhood and youth.
Hello from one set of editors to another! Can you briefly introduce yourselves?
Holly White (HW): I specialize in the history of childhood and youth in Vast Early America and the early United States. My personal research focuses on age-based laws and their impact on children between the American Revolution and the American Civil War. Besides co-editing the Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth (JHCY), I am teaching faculty in the history department at William & Mary in Virginia.
Julia Gossard (JG): I’m an expert on the history of childhood and youth. In fact, I consider this field to now be my dominant intellectual “home” instead of tying myself to a specific region. My interest in this field started in early modern French history with my first book, Young Subjects, centering on children’s experiences and agency in the eighteenth-century French world. Over time my research interests have evolved to encompass early modern European, Vast Early American, and modern American topics. This was one reason I was so drawn to the editor position – I can explore all these different interests! I am the Associate Dean for Research in the College of Humanities & Social Sciences and an Associate Professor of History at Utah State University.
How do you know each other and have you collaborated before?
HW: Julia and I have a long academic history together. We are oddly academic cousins–our doctoral advisors (Julie Hardwick and Karin Wulf) are best friends and encouraged us to share work and be supportive to each other as graduate students studying childhood in the early modern world.
JG: When we connected and started working on projects together, we realized that we think very similarly about the history of childhood and youth, the academic discipline, and life more generally. Our first project together was a special forum for the JHCY, and through it, we figured out how to best work together. It led to a really successful forum, as well as a collaborative book project, Engaging Children in Vast Early America (Routledge, 2024). After editing and writing two projects together, we’ve got a groove down and Holly has become one of the first people I tell about new ideas.
How do you share tasks? What are the benefits of collaboration in academic publishing?
HW: We tend to divide and conquer but we also step up and step back as each of our other responsibilities increase or decrease. If I have a light week and Julia is swamped, I’ll take the lead on managing what is going on that week and vice versa. If we’re both swamped, we’ll discuss what each of us can do and how to get it done. We use Trello to manage projects and leave notes about our work tasks, and we’re constantly in communication about who is doing what.
JG: Trello has been such a game-changer. When working on collaborative projects it’s the best way to organize your tasks, thoughts, and information. We have an editorial assistant now (Jason Matthews, a USU grad student) and Trello lets us share things with him seamlessly. It’s basically our collective brains in one place. We really do keep an eye on the load the other is carrying. If I notice Holly has done a lot of the editing for one essay, for instance, I’ll take the next one. Similarly, if Holly knows I’ll be really busy, she’ll handle the work that comes in. This works so well because we’re friends and have open communication.
HW: Over the projects we’ve done, we’ve realized how similarly we think and work. So there is complete trust there. We work well as co-editors and as co-authors. The pieces we’ve written together have been some of my favorites. Collaboration in academic publishing can be so rewarding and such a wonderful experience, especially because writing and researching alone can be isolating. But it takes finding the right person to collaborate with for it to work–so we’re lucky to have found each other.
Tell us about your first full issue of the Journal, coming out in January. How have you put it together? What are your ambitions for the Journal? What kinds of pieces do you want to publish?
JG: In our first issue, our Editors’ Introduction will chart a renewed sense of scholarly excitement and our vision for the JHCY. Our goal is to increase readership, rigor, and prestige of the journal. By doing so, we hope more people will start to explore age, and especially childhood and youth, as analytical categories.
HW: I’m really excited about Wendy Gamber’s piece, “Playing with Fire: Baby Firebugs in Gilded Age America.” Her discussion of children, fire, play, and criminal culpability is really fascinating. It was a great experience working with her on revisions for our first issue; she was an ideal first author to work with! It’s important to us to provide authors with solid, substantive feedback. Ultimately, we want to help authors revise their submissions into their best possible versions before publishing them. Sometimes, those revisions are quick, and sometimes, they may take several back-and-forths, but Julia and I are committed to working closely and collaborating with authors as we usher the journal into its next era.
What are some of your favorite recent articles in the JHCY?
JG: I love Chelsea Chamberlain’s “Intelligence Testing, Mental Age, and the Question of Capacity in the United States 1910,” from our Fall 2022 Forum on Double Age. Dr. Chamberlain’s essay was about a period I’m less familiar with, yet her argument was so compelling. Melding disability studies with that of childhood and youth, she argues that “the American Association for the Study of the Feeble-Minded’s creation of new diagnostic categories for ‘feeblemindedness’ that relied on the concept of ‘mental age’ created a quantified, standardized double age: one ‘mental’ and one ‘chronological.'” Dr. Chamberlain did not consider herself a historian of childhood and youth but she pushed herself to explore this concept of “double age,” providing a compelling and captivating piece.
HW: I’ve been thinking a lot about agency in my research lately, so I really enjoyed the “A Critical Conversation on Agency” piece that was published in the Spring 2024 issue.
How has the field changed since you started your research? In your opinion, what are the biggest opportunities and challenges of doing the history of children and youth today?
JG: I started researching in the field in graduate school, and this question prompted me to return to my comprehensive exam portfolio from 2012. I titled an essay on the historiography of early modern childhood as “Since Ariès” which I think shows the focus historians of childhood and youth still had on the 1960s–it seemed nearly every article and book had to engage with dispelling the “Ariès thesis.” Now, that’s accepted and understood as a given. People don’t really waste words on that anymore.
One of the biggest challenges that historians of childhood and youth still face, though, is the belief that our field of study isn’t serious or worthwhile. The debates we have and arguments we make about power, agency, personhood, subjectivity, race, class, gender, enslavement, privilege, and age are all as important as other fields of intersectionality. In fact, the special issue “A Critical Conversation on Agency” (mentioned above) is not just for historians of childhood and youth. It has wide application across many fields. I am excited to continue these kinds of conversations and ultimately contribute to the understanding of age as an essential category of intersectionality.
HW: I’d echo a lot of what Julia said. For me, the widespread acceptance of age as a category of analysis has been really exciting to watch and participate in as a scholar. Scholars who would have never considered themselves historians of childhood and youth are increasingly realizing that many of the people they study are actually children, by both modern definitions and by definitions tied to the period they study. This willingness to consider and identify the significance of age opens up a lot of possibilities of collaboration between sub-fields.
Do you have any advice for early-career scholars trying to put together their first full-length article?
JG: If you’re on the tenure track in a research excellence line, you need to publish your work frequently. Consider drafting a conference paper first, presenting it, and getting essential feedback from scholars in your field. Immediately (and I mean, like, the very next week), start making changes to that paper. Consider using Wendy Belcher’s Writing your Journal Article in Twelve Weeks over your first summer or during a semester when you have fewer teaching responsibilities. Then, share that draft with writing groups, friends, and scholars in the field. Don’t be afraid to collaborate and reach out. Whether that means sending them your draft or simply asking to connect, you can learn a lot from chatting with someone and exchanging emails.
Before you submit to us, make sure you’re defining what you mean by “youth” and “child.” These are malleable categories, and while there are legal definitions for various periods and regions, the colloquial definitions don’t always match up. Finally, try not to be scared of the “revise and resubmit.” If we give you an “R&R,” we want you to revise your article and are invested in its future in the journal. Scholarship is a collaborative process involving the author, their community of scholars, peer reviewers, and the editors.
HW: All I’d add to Julia’s advice is that if you don’t have pressure to publish, I really encourage early career scholars to take their time. The impulse to get your work out there and stake your claim is real, but many of the works I’m most proud of and excited about have been stewing for 5–10 years. It’s okay to change your thinking and update your sources and just let your initial argument sit for a little bit before coming back to it. Allowing yourself the time to mature as a scholar and writer before facing peer review and revisions can also be really important. Regardless of whether you publish quickly or slowly, finding a community of scholars and being involved in conversations about the history of childhood and youth is crucial to academic success but also happiness.
Julia Gossard and Holly White are the new editors of the Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth. Their first co-edited issue is forthcoming in January 2025.
