Today I’m starting a series of posts that will explore a place that abounds with information, digital information. One of the best parts of this digital information, though, is the fact that it started life as printed material, some of it a great many years ago.

What I’m talking about is the Digital Collections at the University of Florida.

Included in the larger collection is a list of many collections that are very diverse and very information rich. These are a boon to researchers from all disciplines; from history buffs to genealogists, students to authors. If you’re interested in Florida’s past as well as some of its present, you really need to wade into these “stacks” and see all that it holds for you.

But it’s not just about Florida either, these collections are each a doorway into different places as well as different times. As I said, there are many different collections housed here and from time to time, I will be taking a closer look to give you a better understanding of all that’s available.

The first collection I want to share with you is The Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature. Part of the online description of the collection explains its source;

“The product of Ruth Baldwin’s 40-year collection development efforts, this vast assemblage of literature printed primarily for children offers an equally vast territory of topics for the researcher to explore: education and upbringing, family and gender roles, civic values, racial, religious, and moral attitudes, literary style and format, and the arts of illustration and book design.”

With over 100,000 volumes, you could wander through here for days. But one of the more interesting things about this collection is the multiple editions of the same stories and books. Some of these editions were published in the United States, some in Great Britain as early as the 1700s. There are 300 editions of Robinson Crusoe alone.

One of the more startling aspects of this collection to me, is the vast difference in what was then and is now considered acceptable language, slang and basic attitude toward both sexism and racism. It’s hard to believe that some of what you’ll find here was considered appropriate for children’s books during the different generations covered.

Some of the things you’ll find will surprise you with there seemingly insensitive and brutal depictions of what may have been their present day reality. Sometimes their attempts to scare children into good behavior are as obvious as they are callous as in the example below taken from the 1881 edition of “A Bad Boy’s First Reader” by Frank Bellew.

If your interests lie more towards what was taught to children in say, the 1870s and 1880s, then page through a volume like “Young Folks’ Cyclopedia of Common Things”, where among many other things, the workings of an alcohol still are graphically explained. (See below)

Of course, I’m trying to show you a couple of the more amusing or humorous examples but these are still only a couple of the jewels you’ll find if you take the time to step back in time as a child of the 1700 - early 1900s. Take the time, it will be more than worth it.