Like all anthologies, Children and War is truly the product of the work of many different people coming together to tell the often sad, sometimes inspiring, but always important stories of the ways children have been and are affected by war. This particular team came together when, at the invitation of Jennifer Hammer of NYU Press, I issued a call via H-Net for essays on children and war. Well over forty scholars responded. Indeed, one of the most difficult parts of editing this volume was cutting the number of proposals down to a workable one. I was aided in that task by the comments of three anonymous readers of the book proposal—which still included over thirty ideas for essays—who, in addition to advising me on which essays would and would not fit, also helped guide my own thinking about how to frame the essays in my introductions. I would also like to thank Jeanine Graham and Tom Cardoza for offering suggestions on how to improve the general introduction.
In order to include a greater variety of pieces, Jennifer and I determined to include as many of the original proposals as possible, which meant that authors would have to write essays somewhat shorter than those found in most collections and with rather less room for citations and other scholarly equipage. This choice created countless dilemmas for the authors, who had to endure a brutal word limit and a sometimes ruthless editor in choosing which snippets of prose, which points of analysis, which pieces of evidence to omit. For their unfailingly cheerful acceptance of this challenge I extend a hearty thanks. The shared determination of these junior and senior scholars, who hail from five countries, several disciplines, and numerous subspecialties, allowed us to create a lean, useful anthology that was sent to the publisher only a couple of months late!
Robert Coles, whose work on children in conflict and in crisis has inspired and informed scholars in so many disciplines, deserves special thanks for taking the time to read the manuscript and to write the moving and thoughtful foreword.
At NYU Press, I’d like to thank Jennifer Hammer for asking me to do this book, for her insights on managing the process, and for her suggestions on the introductions, as well as Despina Papazoglou Gimbel and the rest of the staff for smoothing the production process.
Even as this book goes to press in late October 2001, thousands of children and their parents, siblings, relatives, and friends have become victims of terrorist attacks on the United States, attacks that reflect the crumbling distinction between home front and battle front, attacks that remind Americans that war in the twenty-first century ignores national boundaries as well as victims’ ages and economic status. In the days after the attacks, broadcast reports and articles in the print media frequently referred to the necessity of explaining the events of September 11 to children, acknowledging that even those children living far from the disaster, called an “act of war” by the nation’s political and military leaders, would be frightened and enraged, mobilized and depressed, confused and focused by the events that changed their worlds forever.
As the opening of the beloved children’s play and story, Peter Pan, goes, “All this has happened before. And all this will happen again.” In the context of the Darling children’s bittersweet journey to Neverland, that possibility is a little haunting, a little exciting, but ultimately comforting. That it can also be applied to the pain and suffering and dislocation inflicted on children around the world by war is no fairy tale, but a stark fact, unfortunately, of so many children’s lives.