Ring Around the Maple is about the condition of children in Canada from roughly 1850 to 2000, a time during which “the modern” increasingly disrupted traditional ways. Authors Cynthia R. Comacchio and Neil Sutherland trace the lives of children over this “long century” with a view to synthesizing the rich interdisciplinary, often multi-disciplinary, literature that has emerged since the 1970s.
Integrated into this synthesis is the authors’ new research into many, often seemingly disparate, archival and published primary sources. Emphasizing how “the child” and childhood are sociohistoric constructs, and employing age analytically and relationally, they discuss the constants and the variants in their historic dimensions. While childhood tangibly modernized during these years, it remained a far from universal experience due to identifiers of race, gender, culture, region, and intergenerational adaptations that characterize the process of growing up.
This work highlights children’s perspectives through close, critical, “against the grain” readings of diaries, correspondence, memoirs, interviews, oral histories and autobiographies, many buried in obscure archives. It is the only extant historical discussion of Canadian children that interweaves the experiences of First Nations, Métis, and Inuit children with those of children from a number of settler groups.
Ring Around the Maple makes use of photographs, catalogues, advertisements, government publications, musical recordings, radio shows, television shows, material goods, documentary and feature films, and other such visual and aural testimony. Much of this evidence has not to date been used as historical testimony to uncover the lives of ordinary children. This book is generously illustrated with photographs and ephemera carefully selected to reflect children’s lives, conditions, interests, and obligations. It will be of special interest to historians and social scientists interested in children and the culture of childhood, but will also appeal to readers who enjoy the "little stories" that together make up our collective history, especially when those are told by the children who lived them.

Cynthia Comacchio's research focuses on the history of children/childhood and youth in Canada, late 19th to 21st centuries. She is the author of numerous articles and books, including The Dominion of Youth: Adolescence and the Making of a Modern Canada, 1920-50 (WLU Press, 2008) and Ring Around the Maple: Settler Children in Canada, Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (WLU Press, 2024).

Cynthia R. Comacchio's profile page

Neil Sutherland served for 37 years in the University of British Columbia’s Department of Educational Studies. He was the principal investigator of the Canadian Childhood History Project located at UBC, and has published articles, reviews and a number of books, most recently Growing Up: Childhood in English Canada from the Great War to the Age of Television. He is the author of Children in English-Canadian Society: Framing the Twentieth-Century Consensus(WLU Press, 2000)

Neil Sutherland's profile page

The result of decades’ worth of research, Ring Around the Maple provides a rich account of the continuities and changes that shaped the lives of young people in Canada between the mid-nineteenth and early twenty-first centuries. Centring children’s voices and informed by current debates in the field, this book is a welcome addition to scholarship on the history of childhood and to Canadian social history more generally.

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