1st Edition
Engaging Children in Vast Early America
Engaging Children in Vast Early America examines the often overlooked roles that children played in moments of contact between Indigenous groups, Europeans, and Africans in North and South America over the course of the seventeenth through nineteenth century.
Adulthood is the default lens through which most of history is examined. This is because so few historians analyze the age or life stage of those they study. As a result, people of the past are often assumed to be adults when their actions or experiences align more closely with what modern society deems “adultlike.” Many of these “assumed adults,” however, were agentive children. This collaborative collection is the first of its kind to invite experts in the field of Vast Early America to engage with the history of childhood and youth. The result is nine innovative essays that expand our understanding of childhood and agentive children but also of empire and everyday life in Vast Early America.
This accessible text is a unique resource for undergraduate courses in childhood and youth history, family history, and early American history.
Introduction
Julia M. Gossard and Holly N.S. White
Section 1: Centering Unfree Children in Vast Early America
1. Into the Household of Joseph Bigelow: Growing up Unfree in Colonial New England
Caylin Carbonell
2. Marronnage and Childhood in Colonial Haiti
Crystal Nicole Eddins
3. Capturing Youth: Reproductive Labor and the Medicalization of Black Girlhood in the Early Nineteenth-Century Spanish Caribbean
Farren Yero
Section 2: Uncovering Childhood in Native North America
4. “To Have Their Children Trained Up in English Schools”: Native American Childhood and Education in the Early American South
Brooke M. Bauer
5. A Mixture of Nations: English Captive Children and Food in the Eighteenth-Century Northeast
Carla Cevasco
6. “From Their Children Born and Those Yet in the Womb”: Children as Political Actors in Southeastern Native American Petitions, 1600–1730
Bradley J. Dixon
Section 3: Who Got to Be a Child in Vast Early America
7. From Girls to Mothers: Children in French Canada
Julia M. Gossard
8. Children in the Margins: Enslaved Children in the Livingston Family Papers
Nicole Saffold Maskiell
9. Sending Children to Alta California: The Lorenzana and Híjar-Padrés Expeditions
Ea Nicole Madrigal
Biography
Julia M. Gossard is Associate Professor of History and Associate Dean for Research in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Utah State University. She is co-editor of the Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth and the author of Young Subjects: Children, State-Building, and Social Reform in the Eighteenth-Century French World (2021).
Holly N.S. White is an Adjunct Professor of History at William & Mary. She is co-editor of the Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth.
"Young people – Indigenous, African, and European -- played pivotal yet overlooked roles in the early history of the Americas. As active agents who performed essential labor, cultural intermediaries who bridged societal divides, and bearers and innovators in cultural practices, the young were instrumental in the colonizing and nation-building process. Challenging adult-centric perspectives that marginalize the young, this groundbreaking collection offers a more inclusive narrative that not only honors their memory, but provides a fresh lens on the social dynamics and cultural exchanges that shaped life in the Western hemisphere from the 17th to the early 19th centuries. Highly attentive to race, class, and gender, the authors draw on previously untapped sources to recover the experiences and historical significance of young people in the collision of cultures that created a new world in the early Americas."
Steven Mintz, Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin, US, and the author of Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood
