Ring Around the Maple

Explores the condition of children in Canada from roughly 1850 to 2000, a time during which ‘the modern’ increasingly disrupted traditional ways. Cynthia Comacchio and Neil Sutherland trace the lives of children over this ‘long century’, synthesizing the rich interdisciplinary, often multi-disciplinary, literature that has emerged since the 1970s.

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).
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 published articles, reviews and a number of books on the history of children in Canada.