This course focuses on the lived experiences of children and traces the emergence of a new "ideology of childhood" in the early modern world (c. 1300 to 1800). The course examines the major social, political and economic changes that unfolded throughout this period, including related programs of religious, scientific, and educational reform, and studies how these changes affected children's roles or status within families and communities-in-transition. It also asks whether a fundamental change in the meaning of childhood by 1800 corresponded to the emergence of an increasingly global, colonial, and industrial world order. Open only to first-year students and sophomores.