This innovative book reveals children's experiences and how they became victims and actors during the twentieth century's biggest conflicts.

Introduction: more than victims: framing the history of modern childhood and war Mischa Honeck and James Marten; Part I. Inspiring and Mobilizing: 1. Patriotic fun: toys and mobilization in China from the Republican to the Communist era Valentina Boretti; 2. Forging a patriotic youth: penny dreadfuls and military censorship in WWI Germany Kara Ritzheimer; 3. Recruiting Japanese boys for the pioneer youth corps of Mongolia and Manchuria L. Halliday Piel; 4. Defining the ideal Soviet childhood: reportage about child evacuees from Spain as didactic literature Karl Qualls; 5. Learning more than letters: alphabet books in the Soviet Union and the United States during World War II Julie K. deGraffenried; 6. Boys and girls in the service of total war: defense service training in Swedish schools during World War II Esbjörn Larsson; 7. Good soldiers all? Democracy and discrimination in the Boy Scouts of America, 1941-5 Mischa Honeck; Part II. Adapting and Surviving: 8. Combatant children: ideologies and experiences of childhood in the Royal Navy and British Army, 1902-18 Kate James; 9. Drawing the Great War: children's personal representations of war and violence in France, Germany, and Russia Manon Pignot; 10. Bellicists, feminists, and deserters: youth, war, and the German youth movement, 1914-18 Antje Harms; 11. Boys without a country: Ottoman orphans in Germany during the First World War Nazan Maksudyan; 12. In their own words: children in the world of the Holocaust Patricia Heberer Rice; 13. The dark side of the 'good war': children and medical experimentation in the United States during World War II Birgitte Søland; 14. Attacking children with nuclear weapons: the centrality of children in American understandings of the bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki Robert Jacobs.