So many aspects of childhood feel universal, from school-yard games like hopscotch and hide-and-seek to getting in trouble with rule-obsessed adults. But how did children’s experiences differ ...

“It is a fallacy to think we protect children from the world around them,” Todd Brewster writes in AMERICAN CHILDHOOD: A Photographic History (Scribner, $36).

It is hard to imagine a world without books for children. There have been children’s stories and folk-tales ever since man first learned to speak. “Many of them,” in Thackeray’s words ...