Childhood in the Promised Land: Working-Class Movements and by Laura Lee Downs PDF

Childhood within the Promised Land is the 1st heritage of France's colonies de vacances, an enormous community of summer season camps created for working-class young children. The colonies originated as a late-nineteenth-century charitable establishment, offering rural retreats meant to revive the delicate health and wellbeing of terrible city little ones. Participation grew progressively in the course of the first half the 20 th century, "trickling up" by way of the overdue Nineteen Forties to embody middle-class formative years as well.

At the center of the research lie the municipal colonies de vacances, equipped through the working-class towns of the Paris pink belt. positioned in distant villages or alongside the extra reasonably cheap stretches of the Atlantic coast, the municipal colonies collected their younger customers into variously established "child villages," during which they have been to dwell out specific, excellent visions of the collective lifetime of young children during the lengthy summer time vacation. targeting the production of and participation in those summer season camps, Laura Lee Downs offers stunning insights into the positioning and value of youth in French working-class towns and, eventually, in the improvement of recent France.

Drawing on a wealthy array of ancient assets, together with dossiers and documents of municipal colonies came upon in distant city halls of the Paris suburbs, newspaper bills, and interviews with adults who participated in the colonies as young children, Downs finds how diversified groups—including neighborhood Socialist and Communist leaders and Catholic seminarians—seized the chance to form the minds and our bodies of working-class youth. formative years within the Promised Land exhibits how, in developing the summer season camps, those a number of teams mixed pedagogical theories, non secular convictions, political ideologies, and theories concerning the courting among the nation-state and kid's actual and cognitive improvement. whilst, the booklet sheds gentle on vintage questions of social regulate, highlighting the lively function of the kids in shaping their experiences.