North/Central America
Operation Babylift
These photographs were taken on April 5, 1975 on one of the Pan Am passenger planes that airlifted Vietnamese orphans and Amerasian children of American servicemen and Vietnamese women for Operation Babylift.
Little Eva, The Flower of the South
Published around 1853, Little Eva, The Flower of the South is an anonymously written children's story based on Eva, the enormously popular character in Harriet Beecher Stowe's anti-slavery novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852).
Italian Mother and Baby
"Italian Mother and Baby" appeared in Jacob Riis's How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York (1890). This image captures the misery of urban poverty as well as the tenacity of life. It is infused with unmistakable sentimentalism and symbolism.
Girls Making Snowman
Motivated by wartime hysteria and racial sentiments following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 that ordered the removal of Japanese Americans on the West Coast to internment camps in the interior.
Last Day of School, Calgary
The children of various ages shown bursting through the doorway of the stone school building in Calgary, Alberta, have just been released for their summer vacation.
Piegan Play Tipi
The photograph, dated 1928, from the well-known ethnographic collection The North American Indian by Edward Edward S. Curtis, is a portrait of a young Piegan girl standing in front of a painted tipi, or conical tent.
Disciplining Children in the Codex Mendoza
Aztec children were valued creations. Language used in rituals compared infants to precious stones and feathers, flakes of stone, ornaments, or sprouts of plants.
Immigrant Crossing Road Sign
Interstate 5 runs from the Mexican/U.S. border crossing at San Ysidro, California, to the Peace Arch Crossing into Canada at Blaine, Washington. This official yellow warning road sign is posted along Interstate 5 near the San Ysidro crossing and north of San Diego.
Birth Rituals in the Codex Mendoza
The image from the Codex Mendoza (produced ca. 1535-1550) describes the Aztec birth ritual of bathing and naming the child, which, according to accounts from the 16th century, was usually held on the fourth day after birth.
Aztec Cradleboard Figurine and Drawing
The ceramic figurine of an infant in a cradle (also called a cradleboard) was created by the Nahua, or Aztec people of Mexico, between 1350 and 1521 CE.