Childhood design. Toys and material culture of childhood from 1700 to this day

How did the material culture of childhood change in the last three hundred years changed and how tasks have changed? The collection "Childhood Design", including the works of European and American historians, anthropologists and art historians, tells how the most popular and iconic toys and household items arose - from puppet houses and soldiers to the LEGO designer. In modern times, childhood was first realized as a unique and most important period of human life, and then included in the orbit of consumption, moral philosophy and ideology. Both the leading artists and the latter -consumer factories, both capitalist and socialist countries, were engaged in the material content of childhood, and hot pedagogical battles and advertising campaigns unfolded around the ways of playing and the national character of toys. Not always they took into account the interests of the child himself - and the authors of the book do not bypass this issue by the side. Paris of a beautiful era, English settlements in New Zealand, experiments of Bauhaus, the USSR of the 1920s, socialist Czechoslovakia - analyzing a number of countries and periods, the book shows us the hidden, unobvious side of the history of toys