Childhood in the Promised Land

"This is a marvelous book, written with the analytic power and sensitivity to human experience that only the finest practitioners of the historian's craft manage to combine. Laura Lee Downs takes us deep into the complexities of the "colonies des vacances" to reveal a world of working-class childhood that has largely been closed to us until now. She also provides a brilliant history of the grown-ups--Catholic, Socialist, and Communist--who created the "colonies" with competing political agendas, even as they shared pedagogical convictions that summertime play held a key to nothing short of human freedom. The result is an arresting reexamination of working-class life and social reform that will make this book a milestone in the literature on twentieth-century France."--Herrick Chapman, New York University

Laura Lee Downs is Director d'Etudes, Centre de Recherches Historiques, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, in Paris.