By Mary Zaborskis
Criminalized children were one group of children excluded from twentieth-century and contemporary cultural narratives that have viewed children as sexually innocent, deserving of protection, and beneficiaries of the future. I’m interested in how promises of recuperation, protection, and futurity to criminalized children actually enabled the continued denial of each. Read More
By Sarah E. Chinn
“This article explores how thinking about the time of childhood through the lens of US slavery forces us to rethink both phenomena.” Read More
By Lindsey Elizabeth Jones
“A closer look at the practice of domestic parole complicates the neat distinctions between education and incarceration, protection and punishment that the women of the Virginia State Federation made in their public discourse about the school.” Read More
By Emily Hainze
“Dreiser and Du Bois embrace and exploit the possibilities for social transformation inherent in the period’s moral panic over the working-class adolescent girl’s “incorrigibility,” reframing the uncertain trajectory and liminal position of the wayward girl in modernizing American society as an opportunity to radically reimagine newly modern social life in the second decade of the twentieth century.” Read More
By Sara Lindey
“Mid-nineteenth-century fictional girls play powerful roles in the era’s political activism as sentimental sisters and redemptive daughters. This essay maps sentimental and redemptive girlhood discourses in an antislavery picture book that attempts to cast its heroine as both kinds of girls at once.” Read More
By Kyla Schuller
“This article explores the enabling intimacy between sentimentalism and biopolitics by turning to a less-than-obvious and yet characteristic example of the sentimental mode: the ubiquitous orphan tale of the mid- to late nineteenth century.” Read More