Suffering Childhood in Early America
Suffering Childhood in Early America

Author: Anna Mae Duane

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 2011-11-01

Total Pages: 229

ISBN-13: 0820340588

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Nothing tugs on American heartstrings more than an image of a suffering child. Anna Mae Duane goes back to the nation's violent beginnings to examine how the ideal of childhood in early America was fundamental to forging concepts of ethnicity, race, and gender. Duane argues that children had long been used to symbolize subservience, but in the New World those old associations took on more meaning. Drawing on a wide range of early American writing, she explores how the figure of a suffering child accrued political weight as the work of infantilization connected the child to Native Americans, slaves, and women. In the making of the young nation, the figure of the child emerged as a vital conceptual tool for coming to terms with the effects of cultural and colonial violence, and with time childhood became freighted with associations of vulnerability, suffering, and victimhood. As Duane looks at how ideas about the child and childhood were manipulated by the colonizers and the colonized alike, she reveals a powerful line of colonizing logic in which dependence and vulnerability are assigned great emotional weight. When early Americans sought to make sense of intercultural contact—and the conflict that often resulted—they used the figure of the child to help displace their own fear of lost control and shifting power.

Romantic Education in Nineteenth-Century American Literature
Romantic Education in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

Author: Monika M Elbert

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-12-05

Total Pages: 302

ISBN-13: 1317671783

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American publishing in the long nineteenth century was flooded with readers, primers, teaching-training manuals, children’s literature, and popular periodicals aimed at families. These publications attest to an abiding faith in the power of pedagogy that has its roots in transatlantic Romantic conceptions of pedagogy and literacy. The essays in this collection examine the on-going influence of Romanticism in the long nineteenth century on American thinking about education, as depicted in literary texts, in historical accounts of classroom dynamics, or in pedagogical treatises. They also point out that though this influence was generally progressive, the benefits of this social change did not reach many parts of American society. This book is therefore an important reference for scholars of Romantic studies, American studies, historical pedagogy and education.

The Slave's Little Friends
The Slave's Little Friends

Author: Carme Manuel

Publisher: Universitat de València

Published: 2022-04-13

Total Pages: 446

ISBN-13: 8491349618

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The texts included in this anthology illustrate the wide range of possibilities that abolitionist writings offered to American children during the first half of the nineteenth century. Composing their works under the wings of the antislavery movement, authors responded to the unequal and controversial development of abolitionist politics during the decades that led up to the outbreak of the Civil War. These writers struggled to teach children “to feel right,” and attempted to instruct them to actively respond to the injustice of the slavery system as rendered visible by a harrowing visual archive of suffering bodies compiled by both English and American antislavery promoters. Reading was equated with knowledge and knowledge was equated with moral responsibility, and therefore reading about “the abominations of slavery” became an act of emotional personal transformation. Children were thus turned into powerful agents of political change and potential activists to spread the abolitionist message. Invited to comply with a higher law that entailed the breaking of their nation’s edicts, they were morally rewarded by the Christian God and approvingly applauded by their elders for their violation of these same American regulations. These texts enclosed immeasurable value for young nineteenth-century Americans to fulfill a more democratic and egalitarian role in their future. Undoubtedly, abolitionist writings for children took away American children’s innocence and transformed them into juvenile abolitionists and empowered compassionate citizens.

American Literature in Transition, 1770–1828
American Literature in Transition, 1770–1828

Author: William Huntting Howell

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2022-06-23

Total Pages: 672

ISBN-13: 1108617042

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This volume presents a complex portrait of the United States of America grappling with the trials of national adolescence. Topics include (but are not limited to): the dynamics of language and power, the treachery of memory, the lived experience of racial and economic inequality, the aesthetics of Indigeneity, the radical possibilities of disability, the fluidity of gender and sexuality, the depth and culture-making power of literary genre, the history of poetics, the cult of performance, and the hidden costs of foodways. Taken together, the essays offer a vision of a vibrant, contradictory, and conflicted early US Republic resistant to consensus accountings and poised to inform new and better origin stories for the polity to come.

Reading Children
Reading Children

Author: Patricia Crain

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2016-05-02

Total Pages: 280

ISBN-13: 0812292847

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What does it mean for a child to be a "reader" and how did American culture come to place such a high value on this identity? Reading Children offers a history of the relationship between children and books in Anglo-American modernity, exploring long-lived but now forgotten early children's literature, discredited yet highly influential pedagogical practices, the property lessons inherent in children's book ownership, and the emergence of childhood itself as a literary property. The nursery and schoolroom version of the social contract, Crain argues, underwrote children's entry not only into reading and writing but also into a world of commodity and property relations. Increasingly positioned as an indispensable form of cultural capital by the end of the eighteenth century, literacy became both the means and the symbol of children's newly recognized self-possession and autonomy. At the same time, as children's legal and economic status was changing, "childhood" emerged as an object of nostalgia for adults. Literature for children enacted the terms of children's self-possession, often with explicit references to property, contracts, or inheritances, and yet also framed adult longing for an imagined past called "childhood." Dozens of colorful illustrations chart the ways in which early literature for children was transformed into spectacle through new image technologies and a burgeoning marketplace that capitalized on nostalgic fantasies of childhood conflated with bowdlerized fantasies of history. Reading Children offers new terms for thinking about the imbricated and mutually constitutive histories of literacy, property, and childhood in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that ground current anxieties and long-held beliefs about childhood and reading.

Slavery in American Children's Literature, 1790-2010
Slavery in American Children's Literature, 1790-2010

Author: Paula T. Connolly

Publisher: University of Iowa Press

Published: 2013-07-01

Total Pages: 303

ISBN-13: 1609381785

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Long seen by writers as a vital political force of the nation, children’s literature has been an important means not only of mythologizing a certain racialized past but also, because of its intended audience, of promoting a specific racialized future. Stories about slavery for children have served as primers for racial socialization. This first comprehensive study of slavery in children’s literature, Slavery in American Children’s Literature, 1790–2010, also historicizes the ways generations of authors have drawn upon antebellum literature in their own re-creations of slavery. It examines well-known, canonical works alongside others that have ostensibly disappeared from contemporary cultural knowledge but have nonetheless both affected and reflected the American social consciousness in the creation of racialized images. Beginning with abolitionist and proslavery views in antebellum children’s literature, Connolly examines how successive generations reshaped the genres of the slave narrative, abolitionist texts, and plantation novels to reflect the changing contexts of racial politics in America. From Reconstruction and the end of the nineteenth century, to the early decades of the twentieth century, to the civil rights era, and into the twenty-first century, these antebellum genres have continued to find new life in children’s literature—in, among other forms, neoplantation novels, biographies, pseudoabolitionist adventures, and neo-slave narratives. As a literary history of how antebellum racial images have been re-created or revised for new generations, Slavery in American Children’s Literature ultimately offers a record of the racial mythmaking of the United States from the nation’s beginning to the present day.

The Children's Table
The Children's Table

Author: Anna Mae Duane

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 2013-06-01

Total Pages: 277

ISBN-13: 0820345598

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Like the occupants of the children's table at a family dinner, scholars working in childhood studies can seem sidelined from the "adult" labor of humanities scholarship. The Children's Table brings together scholars from architecture, philosophy, law, and literary and cultural criticism to provide an overview of the innovative work being done in childhood studies—a transcript of what is being said at the children's table. Together, these scholars argue for rethinking the academic seating arrangement in a way that acknowledges the centrality of childhood to the work of the humanities. The figure we now recognize as a child was created in tandem with forms of modernity that the Enlightenment generated and that the humanities are now working to rethink. Thus the growth of childhood studies allows for new approaches to some of the most important and provocative issues in humanities scholarship: the viability of the social contract, the definition of agency, the performance of identity, and the construction of gender, sexuality, and race. Because defining childhood is a means of defining and distributing power and obligation, studying childhood requires a radically altered approach to what constitutes knowledge about the human subject. The diverse essays in The Children's Table share a unifying premise: to include the child in any field of study realigns the shape of that field, changing the terms of inquiry and forcing a different set of questions. Taken as a whole, the essays argue that, at this key moment in the state of the humanities, rethinking the child is both necessary and revolutionary. Contributors: Annette Ruth Appell, Sophie Bell, Robin Bernstein, Sarah Chinn, Lesley Ginsberg, Lucia Hodgson, Susan Honeyman, Roy Kozlovsky, James Marten, Karen Sánchez-Eppler, Carol Singley, Lynne Vallone, John Wall.

Invisible Masters
Invisible Masters

Author: Elisabeth Ceppi

Publisher: Dartmouth College Press

Published: 2018-07-03

Total Pages: 296

ISBN-13: 1512602973

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Invisible Masters rewrites the familiar narrative of the relation between Puritan religious culture and New England's economic culture as a history of the primary discourse that connected them: service. The understanding early Puritans had of themselves as God's servants and earthly masters was shaped by their immersion in an Atlantic culture of service and the worldly pressures and opportunities generated by New England's particular place in it. Concepts of spiritual service and mastery determined Puritan views of the men, women, and children who were servants and slaves in that world. So, too, did these concepts shape the experience of family, labor, law, and economy for those men, women, and children - the very bedrock of their lives. This strikingly original look at Puritan culture will appeal to a wide range of Americanists and historians.

Like Children
Like Children

Author: Camille Owens

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2024-07-30

Total Pages: 340

ISBN-13: 1479812919

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"A history of childhood that revises the story of manhood, race, and human hierarchy in America"--