Histories of play

Children, observed Colin Ward in his influential 1978 study, The child in the city, will playanywhere and with anything (1978, p. 86). An apparently universal impulse, play has evenbeen argued by some scholars to transcend history as an activity older than culture (Huizinga,1949, p. 1). The historians natural inclination is to historicise such contentions, alert to factorsof geography as well as chronology and to intersections including age, gender and social class.Building on burgeoning scholarship concerning the construction and experience of childrensplay worlds, this special edition of the International Journal of Play offers soundings of the fieldand an encouragement to venture still deeper in accounting for change through time, the verycurrency of historical enquiry and a potential wide-angle corrective to accounts of play concernedexclusively with contemporary themes.