Co-Edited by

Julia M. Gossard & Holly N.S. White

Forthcoming Fall 2024 with Routledge Press

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Engaging Children in Vast Early America examines the often overlooked roles that children played in moments of contact between Indigenous groups, Europeans, and Africans in North and South America over the course of the seventeenth through nineteenth century.

Adulthood is the default lens through which most of history is examined. This is because so few historians analyze the age or life stage of those they study. As a result, people of the past are often assumed to be adults when their actions or experiences align more closely with what modern society deems “adultlike.” Many of these “assumed adults,” however, were agentive children. This collaborative collection is the first of its kind to invite experts in the field of Vast Early America to engage with the history of childhood and youth. The result is nine innovative essays that expand our understanding of childhood and agentive children but also of empire and everyday life in Vast Early America.

This accessible text is a unique resource for undergraduate courses in childhood and youth history, family history, and early American history.

Julia M. Gossard is Associate Professor of History and Associate Dean for Research in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Utah State University. She is co-editor of the Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth and the author of Young Subjects: Children, State-Building, and Social Reform in the Eighteenth-Century French World (2021).

Holly N.S. White is co-editor of the Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth and Adjunct Professor at William & Mary.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Julia M. Gossard and Holly N. S. White

SECTION I: CENTERING UNFREE CHILDREN IN VAST EARLY AMERICA

Section 1 Introduction

Chapter 1: Into the Household of Joseph Bigelow: Growing up Unfree in Colonial New England
Caylin Carbonell

Chapter 2: Marronnage and Childhood in Colonial Haiti
Crystal Nicole Eddins

Chapter 3: Capturing Youth: Reproductive Labor and the Medicalization of Black Girlhood in the Early Nineteenth-Century Spanish Caribbean

Farren Yero

SECTION II: UNCOVERING CHILDHOOD IN NATIVE NORTH AMERICA

Section 2 Introduction         

Chapter 4: “To Have Their Children Trained Up in English Schools”: Native American Childhood and Education in the Early American South
            Brooke M. Bauer

Chapter 5: A Mixture of Nations: English Captive Children and Food in the Eighteenth-Century Northeast
            Carla Cevasco

Chapter 6: “From Their Children Born and Those Yet in the Womb”: Children as Political Actors in Southeastern Native American Petitions, 1600–1730
            Bradley J. Dixon

SECTION III: WHO GOT TO BE A CHILD IN VAST EARLY AMERICA

Section 3 Introduction

Chapter 7: From Girls to Mothers: Children in French Canada
            Julia M. Gossard

Chapter 8: Children in the Margins: Enslaved Children in the Livingston Family Papers

    Nicole Saffold Maskiell

Chapter 9: Sending Children to Alta California: The Lorenzana and Híjar-Padrés Expeditions
            Ea Nicole Madrigal