Cradle of Liberty: Race, the Child, and National Belonging from Thomas Jefferson to W. E. B. DuBois, and: In Pursuit of Liberty: Coming of Age in the American Revolution (review)

In recent years, childhood studies has moved in two opposing directions. One approach, rooted largely in the disciplines of history and sociology, has sought to recover children's voices, perceptions, behavior, and experiences, and has focused on the highly specific circumstances in which children have grown up, emphasizing differences rooted in class, ethnicity, gender, region, and era. This approach treats children as agents who play an active role in their own social, cognitive, physical, and moral development, in constructing their cultural and social identities, and in reshaping cultural sensibilities.

The other approach, derived largely from literary studies, focuses on childhood as a cultural category that reflects adult nostalgia, anxieties, expectations, and desires, and which is imposed on children. Less concerned with the experience of individual children than with cultural symbolism and representation, this approach explores the shifting divide between adults and children, the representation of childhood in literary and visual culture and social and political discourse, and how artists, educators, psychologists, physicians, and poets came to classify childhood in essentialist terms, as a sacred, symbolic category, defined in opposition to adulthood, yet embodying adult preoccupations with asexual innocence, organic wholeness, vulnerability, spontaneity, intuitive, malleability, and connections with nature.

Superficially, the two approaches could scarcely be more divergent, one dealing with "real" children, the other with adult representations. In fact, the approaches are only superficially contradictory, since cultural conceptions inevitably color observations of children's behavior and shape the institutions and practices that structure children's lives.

The two books under review—serious works of history written by non-historians—reveal the twin currents in recent childhood studies. Emmy Werner, a developmental psychologist, has devoted much of her career to studying resilience in children. Caroline Field Levander, a literary scholar at the forefront of efforts to promote a transnational, interdisciplinary approach to literary and cultural studies, has looked, in her recent work, at how representations of the child reflect and codify the prevailing ideologies of particular cultural periods.

Levander demonstrates that since its inception, the American nation has been imagined as a child and that this rich metaphor has been invoked repeatedly to understand the country's genealogy, its revolution against a "corrupt parent" (in Thomas Paine's words), and its national character. In the nineteenth century, the metaphor helped obscure anxieties surrounding national unity and expansion; in the twentieth, the notion of the innocent, vulnerable, and malleable child played a pivotal role in arguments in behalf of an expanded welfare state and school desegregation. What makes childhood an especially compelling metaphor, she shows, is that it is open-ended: It is an "empty or loaded cipher," associated with innocence, vulnerability, and dependence, but also emblematic of nature, recklessness, and the promise of independence.

Drawing upon a wide range of archival sources as well as literary and political texts, she shows how the child metaphor played a crucial role in social and political discourse, informing the ways that nineteenth-century America imagined race, gender, and national expansion, helping, for example, to reinforce an association of women with the private sphere, and naturalizing racial and gender hierarchies by configuring the "national child" as implicitly white and male. Yet she also shows how the dominant nineteenth-century configuration of the child metaphor was contested in abolitionist fiction, the sentimental novel, regional writing, and anti-imperialist commentary, and how the child as "a rich site of cultural meaning and social inscription" was used by figures as diverse as William Wells Brown, Charles Sumner (in the 1849 Massachusetts school segregation case, Sarah Roberts v. City of Boston), Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Henry James, W. E. B. DuBois, and K. Anthony Appiah. This impressive work covers such diverse topics as the uses of the...