author

Oscar Chrisman

1855–1929

A pioneering thinker in the study of childhood, this early 20th-century writer argued that children deserved to be studied from many angles, not just through education alone. His work opened up a broader, more humane way of thinking about childhood and its place in history.

1 Audiobook

The Historical Child

The Historical Child

by Oscar Chrisman

About the author

Born in 1855 and active as a professor of paidology and psychology at Ohio University, Oscar Chrisman is remembered for helping launch the idea of paidology—the interdisciplinary study of children. His work treated childhood as a serious subject in its own right, drawing on psychology, education, history, and culture rather than limiting it to one field.

His best-known book, The Historical Child. Paidology; The Science of the Child (1920), surveys childhood across a wide range of societies and historical periods. In it, he explored how children were raised, understood, and represented in places including ancient Mexico, Peru, Egypt, India, China, Greece, Rome, Europe, and the United States.

Chrisman died in 1929. While he is not widely known today, his writing captures an ambitious moment in the history of psychology and education, when scholars were trying to understand childhood as a rich human experience shaped by many different cultures and traditions.