Children in Colonial America (review)

Do not judge a book by its cover; at least not this book. Children in Colonial America, a new collection of essays on childhood edited by James Marten, is fronted by a conventional seventeenth-century Anglo-American portrait of stiff-backed and maturely-attired white children, the type of picture that once gave rise to the historiographical myth that children were "miniature adults" prior to the eighteenth century. The articles that follow this deceiving cover, however, neither fall prey to such a hoary conceit, nor limit their gaze to privileged white children. Instead, Children in Colonial America brings together a broad range of provocative essays on a diverse cast of children from within and without the British American colonies.

A brief preface by Philip Greven introduces the focus of the collection as the "experiences of children and adolescents in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British American colonies" (ix). Yet the first essay (and one of the most interesting), by Dorothy Tank de Estrada, describes the very un-British childhoods of Indian children in early Mexico. Other contributions that defy Greven's characterization of the volume include an essay on childhood and violence in New Amsterdam, by Mariah Adin, and an essay comparing the experiences of German Catholic girl immigrants to the French Gulf South and the British mid-Atlantic, by Lauren Ann Kattner. A fourth essay, by Audra Abbe Diptee, explores the childhoods of enslaved children in Jamaica. Rounded out by the collection's other studies of children in New England, the Mid-Atlantic, and the Southern colonies, the collection achieves a nice "Atlantic" effect that could have been better introduced and theorized at the outset.

In addition to treating a range of geographical sites, the collection speaks to a diverse population of children. The scholars working within the mainland British colonies take for their subjects the experiences of Indian Children in southern New England (R. Todd Romero), wealthy white children in South Carolina (Darcy Fryer), disabled children in colonial Massachusetts (Parnel Wickham), and working class boys in revolutionary Boston (J.L. Bell). C. Dallett Hemphill includes European-, Indian-, and African-American children in her cross-cultural analysis of sibling relations in early America.

Despite the diversity of the collection's subjects, the essays are united by their social-historical methodology. Historians of childhood often agonize over how to recover the lived experiences of actual children, rather than their representation by adults. Each of the authors in this collection takes seriously the charge to describe children's lives—their work patterns, their religious identities, their relationships with family members, their political identities, and their gender formations. The exception to the pattern is Keith Pacholl's essay on education in colonial Philadelphia, which draws on prescriptive literature and feels less fresh than many of the other pieces. Perhaps the only weakness to the social-historical methodology of the collection is the authors' general failure to address what they mean by the term "child." This question of cultural construction cannot be neglected by historians of childhood as they seek to understand their subjects' lives.

A common analytical theme that runs through the collection is that the history of children should be central to understanding the societies in which they lived. James Marten, in his introduction to the collection, states that the contributors ask not only "how did the colonial experience shape or even alter perceptions and assumptions about children" but how "research on the history of children [can] reorient our knowledge and interpretations of colonial history" 8). R. Todd Romero contends that "Indian children were often at the center of ongoing efforts by Native communities to persist" (33). Darcy R. Fryer argues that "childrearing was a central component of the vast colonial enterprises of estate building and community building" (104). In the most theoretically-attuned essay in the collection, Mariah Adin argues that colonial power relations should be reconceptualized to place those "who often appear powerless, like children, at the very center of the system" (91).

Adin describes children as willful agents...