Calvert, K. (1992). Children in the house: The material culture of early childhood, 1600--1900. Boston: Northeastern University Press. An intriguing history of society's perception of early childhood, based on the objects used for child rearing. The author analyzes cultural assumptions about the innocence of children, their need to be protected, and gender roles, based on the clothing and equipment used by parents.

Calusen, J. A. (1993). American lives: Looking back at the children of the great depression. New York: Free Press. An engrossing account of the three major longitudinal studies and their findings of the characteristics that lead to success in life. Richly detailed case histories of happy and successful adults and those whose lives were unhappy and trouble-ridden dramatically illustrates the studies' findings.

Erikson, E. H. (1963). Childhood and society. New York: Norton. A collection of Erikson's writingS that includes the classic "Eight Ages of Man," in which he outlines his theory of psychosocial development from infancy through old age.

Kagan, J. (1984). The nature of child. New York: Basic Books. A beautifully written and compelling argument against the idea of the irreversibility of early experience. Kagan believes that people have the ability to change throughout life and that later events transform early childhood experiences.

Katz, D. (1992). Home Fires: An intimate portrait of one middle-class family in postwar America. New York: Harper Collins. A true story that spans over 40 years (from 1946 through 1992), reads like an epic novel, and dramatically illustrates the ecological theory of development in context. The author integrates the events in the lives of the parents and four children in the Gordon family into an account of American social history, from World War II, through the tumultuous 1960s, up to the last decade of this century.

Shapiro, J. P. (1993). No pity: People with disabilities forging a new civil rights movement. New York: Times Books. A fascinating account of the birth and development of the disability rights movement, which led to the enactment of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1992. The book deals with many of the issues involved in this struggle and includes many personal stories of people with physical, mental, or emotional disabilities who were instrumental in changing the way such people were looked at and treated.