Our modern conception of childhood as a time of education and innocence began to emerge in the eighteenth century, but it wasn’t until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that such ideas influenced the lives of children of all classes in the western world.  How and why did this happen?

Marnie Hay is a historian and the author of Bulmer Hobson and the Nationalist Movement in Twentieth-Century Ireland (2009). Her current research relates to the history of Irish nationalist children and youth in the early twentieth century

Recorded at Terenure Library on 26 September 2016.