“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

“The threat and use of violence as a control strategy are deeply rooted in U.S. racial history. Generations of black Americans have been subjected to intentional inflictions of pain as control measures, through whipping and other means, especially in the southeastern United States, where the violence of enslavement and subsequent Jim Crow era were concentrated.” Read More