ABSTRACT Infant and child mortality in the United States are at an all-time low, but 150 years ago an infant had a 1 in 4 chance of dying in their first year of life, and older children had only slightly better odds of surviving to adulthood. Scholars have questioned parental emotional investment in periods of high infant and child mortality, but few have considered how children understood mortality and the possibility of their own deaths. Adults in the nineteenth century used a variety of mechanisms to engage children with ideas of death and dying including visits to cemeteries, photography with deceased siblings, literature and poetry, and funeral play with dolls. Sources about these various practices are combined to present a case study in how children in nineteenth Century America may have come to understand death and dying in fundamentally different ways than children in the contemporary, western world.

中文翻译：

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如何死得好好的：在 19 世纪的美国教导幼儿有关死亡的知识

摘要 美国的婴儿和儿童死亡率处于历史最低水平，但 150 年前，婴儿在出生后第一年死亡的几率为四分之一，而年龄较大的儿童存活到成年的几率仅略高. 学者们质疑在婴儿和儿童死亡率高的时期父母的情感投资，但很少有人考虑过儿童如何理解死亡率以及他们自己死亡的可能性。19 世纪的成年人使用各种机制让儿童了解死亡和临终的想法，包括参观墓地、与已故兄弟姐妹的摄影、文学和诗歌以及玩娃娃的葬礼游戏。