Category Archives: Scholarship

ARTICLE | “I, Young in Life”: Phillis Wheatley and the Invention of American Childhood | Early American Literature | by Camille S. Owens

“Placing Wheatley at the center of the early American epistemic, pedagogical, and political struggle over childhood’s meaning, this essay traces the dominant racial politics of childhood that came to diminish Wheatley—as either a childlike poet or an exceptional child—in dialogue with Wheatley’s own invocations of childhood, family, knowledge, and freedom in her personal writings and published work.” Read More

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ARTICLE | “Principally Children”: Kidnapping, Child Trafficking, and the Mission of Early National Antislavery Activism | The Journal of American History | by Richard Bell

“Specifically, this essay demonstrates that demand for malleable and submissive young laborers in the cotton kingdom quickly rising along the nation’s southwest border in the three decades following the end of the War of 1812 was robust and sustained and that, in order to participate in and profit from that lucrative market, gangs of child snatchers turned the early republic’s northern towns and cities into their hunting grounds.” Read More

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