“In one sense, these works illustrate the role of numerical archives in consolidating power, noting that the formal work of a numerical archive lies in not only its claim to precision but also the prescriptive rigidity in categories that such precision requires. Read together, though, they also undercut the reputation of bureaucratic data as the exclusive space of obscure and remote power, insisting that even children were deputized or conscripted in its collection and interpretation.” Read More

“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

“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

“La Flesche’s writings from 1876 to 1881 suggest an Omaha framework for reconsidering the figural role of Native children in debates about race, belonging, and American citizenship.” Read More

“To overlook childhood, then, is to overlook one of the most significant moments in the reproduction of patri­archy.” Read More

“The effeminate boy and his queer counterparts are now central to much queer and transgender theory. Even more, queer kids are increasingly celebrated by the same institutions, for instance psychiatry, that very recently stigmatized them. Although acceptance in this case, like that of any marginalized group, is precarious and contingent on shifting socio-political context, there has been a clear shift towards affirmation.” Read More