(Riis, J. “Hester Street”)

The construction of childhood is intertwined with the construction of society as a whole. One of the greatest changes to society in the early 20th century was the acceptance of cars and driving into mainstream culture, beginning in the early 1900s and ramping up throughout the 1930s and beyond. Car culture drastically changed the landscape surrounding children, especially in urban environments. My research focuses on how urban children’s childhood experiences shifted due to a change in societal norms regarding streets as a result of rising car usage. To research this topic I synthesized information from primary sources and scholarly work in order to create a well-rounded picture of urban children’s relationship to cars.