Suffering Childhood in Early America

Suffering Childhood in Early America PDF Author: Anna Mae Duane
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820340588
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 229

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Book Description
Nothing tugs on American heartstrings more than an image of a suffering child. Anna Mae Duane goes back to the nation's violent beginnings to examine how the ideal of childhood in early America was fundamental to forging concepts of ethnicity, race, and gender. Duane argues that children had long been used to symbolize subservience, but in the New World those old associations took on more meaning. Drawing on a wide range of early American writing, she explores how the figure of a suffering child accrued political weight as the work of infantilization connected the child to Native Americans, slaves, and women. In the making of the young nation, the figure of the child emerged as a vital conceptual tool for coming to terms with the effects of cultural and colonial violence, and with time childhood became freighted with associations of vulnerability, suffering, and victimhood. As Duane looks at how ideas about the child and childhood were manipulated by the colonizers and the colonized alike, she reveals a powerful line of colonizing logic in which dependence and vulnerability are assigned great emotional weight. When early Americans sought to make sense of intercultural contact—and the conflict that often resulted—they used the figure of the child to help displace their own fear of lost control and shifting power.

Suffering Childhood in Early America

Suffering Childhood in Early America PDF Author: Anna Mae Duane
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820340588
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 229

Get Book Here

Book Description
Nothing tugs on American heartstrings more than an image of a suffering child. Anna Mae Duane goes back to the nation's violent beginnings to examine how the ideal of childhood in early America was fundamental to forging concepts of ethnicity, race, and gender. Duane argues that children had long been used to symbolize subservience, but in the New World those old associations took on more meaning. Drawing on a wide range of early American writing, she explores how the figure of a suffering child accrued political weight as the work of infantilization connected the child to Native Americans, slaves, and women. In the making of the young nation, the figure of the child emerged as a vital conceptual tool for coming to terms with the effects of cultural and colonial violence, and with time childhood became freighted with associations of vulnerability, suffering, and victimhood. As Duane looks at how ideas about the child and childhood were manipulated by the colonizers and the colonized alike, she reveals a powerful line of colonizing logic in which dependence and vulnerability are assigned great emotional weight. When early Americans sought to make sense of intercultural contact—and the conflict that often resulted—they used the figure of the child to help displace their own fear of lost control and shifting power.

Suffering Childhood in Early America

Suffering Childhood in Early America PDF Author: Anna Mae Duane
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820341983
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
Nothing tugs on American heartstrings more than an image of a suffering child. Anna Mae Duane goes back to the nation’s violent beginnings to examine how the ideal of childhood in early America was fundamental to forging concepts of ethnicity, race, and gender. Duane argues that children had long been used to symbolize subservience, but in the New World those old associations took on more meaning. Drawing on a wide range of early American writing, she explores how the figure of a suffering child accrued political weight as the work of infantilization connected the child to Native Americans, slaves, and women. In the making of the young nation, the figure of the child emerged as a vital conceptual tool for coming to terms with the effects of cultural and colonial violence, and with time childhood became freighted with associations of vulnerability, suffering, and victimhood. As Duane looks at how ideas about the child and childhood were manipulated by the colonizers and the colonized alike, she reveals a powerful line of colonizing logic in which dependence and vulnerability are assigned great emotional weight. When early Americans sought to make sense of intercultural contact—and the conflict that often resulted—they used the figure of the child to help displace their own fear of lost control and shifting power.

Engaging Children in Vast Early America

Engaging Children in Vast Early America PDF Author: Julia M. Gossard
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040124852
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
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 centuries. 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.

Growing Up with America

Growing Up with America PDF Author: Emily A. Murphy
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820357790
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
When D. H. Lawrence wrote his classic study of American literature, he claimed that youth was the “true myth” of America. Beginning from this assertion, Emily A. Murphy traces the ways that youth began to embody national hopes and fears at a time when the United States was transitioning to a new position of world power. In the aftermath of World War II, persistent calls for the nation to “grow up” and move beyond innocence became common, and the child that had long served as a symbol of the nation was suddenly discarded in favor of a rebellious adolescent. This era marked the beginning of a crisis of identity, where literary critics and writers both sought to redefine U.S. national identity in light of the nation’s new global position. The figure of the adolescent is central to an understanding of U.S. national identity, both past and present, and of the cultural forms (e.g., literature) that participate in the ongoing process of representing the diverse experiences of Americans. In tracing the evolution of this youthful figure, Murphy revisits classics of American literature, including J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye and Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, alongside contemporary bestsellers. The influence of the adolescent on some of America’s greatest writers demonstrates the endurance of the myth that Lawrence first identified in 1923 and signals a powerful link between youth and one of the most persistent questions for the nation: What does it mean to be an American?

Child Slavery before and after Emancipation

Child Slavery before and after Emancipation PDF Author: Anna Mae Duane
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107127564
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 325

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Book Description
An innovative, interdisciplinary anthology arguing that we are unable to fully understand slavery - then and now - without attending to children's roles in slavery's machinations.

Children as Rhetorical Advocates in Social Movements

Children as Rhetorical Advocates in Social Movements PDF Author: Luke Winslow
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1003859216
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 175

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Book Description
This book examines “Rhetorical Children” as visible and vocal communicators, shaping public discourse on contentious social issues related to organized labor, civil rights, gun violence, and climate change. This book explores four key social movement case studies: the 1903 Mother Jones-led March of the Mill Children to reform child labor laws, the 1963 Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.,-led Children’s Crusade to end segregation, the 2018 Parkland student-led March for Our Lives movement to end gun violence, and the ongoing struggle for climate change mitigation led by Swedish activist Greta Thunberg. Through these case studies, the book outlines three rhetorical strategies, namely children’s ability to activate adults’ moral obligation; to invoke threats to natality and lost childhood; and to disrupt social order. It enables readers to better understand rhetorical children and the rhetorical tools required for social movements. Assessing the powerful role children play in shaping public discourse, this book will be of interest to students and scholars in the fields of Communication Studies, Rhetoric, Public Address, Social Movements, and Cultural Studies.

Romantic Education in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

Romantic Education in Nineteenth-Century American Literature PDF Author: Monika Elbert
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317671783
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 303

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Book Description
American publishing in the long nineteenth century was flooded with readers, primers, teaching-training manuals, children’s literature, and popular periodicals aimed at families. These publications attest to an abiding faith in the power of pedagogy that has its roots in transatlantic Romantic conceptions of pedagogy and literacy. The essays in this collection examine the on-going influence of Romanticism in the long nineteenth century on American thinking about education, as depicted in literary texts, in historical accounts of classroom dynamics, or in pedagogical treatises. They also point out that though this influence was generally progressive, the benefits of this social change did not reach many parts of American society. This book is therefore an important reference for scholars of Romantic studies, American studies, historical pedagogy and education.

Dependent States

Dependent States PDF Author: Karen Sánchez-Eppler
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226734590
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
Because childhood is not only culturally but also legally and biologically understood as a period of dependency, it has been easy to dismiss children as historical actors. By putting children at the center of our thinking about American history, Karen Sánchez-Eppler recognizes the important part childhood played in nineteenth-century American culture and what this involvement entailed for children themselves. Dependent States examines the ties between children's literacy training and the growing cultural prestige of the novel; the way children functioned rhetorically in reform literature to enforce social norms; the way the risks of death to children shored up emotional power in the home; how Sunday schools socialized children into racial, religious, and national identities; and how class identity was produced, not only in terms of work, but also in the way children played. For Sánchez-Eppler, nineteenth-century childhoods were nothing less than vehicles for national reform. Dependent on adults for their care, children did not conform to the ideals of enfranchisement and agency that we usually associate with historical actors. Yet through meticulously researched examples, Sánchez-Eppler reveals that children participated in the making of social meaning. Her focus on childhood as a dependent state thus offers a rewarding corrective to our notions of autonomous individualism and a new perspective on American culture itself.

The Women's Fight

The Women's Fight PDF Author: Thavolia Glymph
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469653648
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 392

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Book Description
Historians of the Civil War often speak of “wars within a war”—the military fight, wartime struggles on the home front, and the political and moral battle to preserve the Union and end slavery. In this broadly conceived book, Thavolia Glymph provides a comprehensive new history of women’s roles and lives in the Civil War—North and South, white and black, slave and free—showing how women were essentially and fully engaged in all three arenas. Glymph focuses on the ideas and ideologies that drove women’s actions, allegiances, and politics. We encounter women as they stood their ground, moved into each other’s territory, sought and found common ground, and fought for vastly different principles. Some women used all the tools and powers they could muster to prevent the radical transformations the war increasingly imposed, some fought with equal might for the same transformations, and other women fought simply to keep the war at bay as they waited for their husbands and sons to return home. Glymph shows how the Civil War exposed as never before the nation’s fault lines, not just along race and class lines but also along the ragged boundaries of gender. However, Glymph makes clear that women’s experiences were not new to the mid-nineteenth century; rather, many of them drew on memories of previous conflicts, like the American Revolution and the War of 1812, to make sense of the Civil War’s disorder and death.

The Child Gaze

The Child Gaze PDF Author: Amanda M. Greenwell
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 149685456X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 156

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Book Description
The Child Gaze: Narrating Resistance in American Literature theorizes the child gaze as a narrative strategy for social critique in twentieth- and twenty-first-century US literature for children and adults. Through a range of texts, including James Baldwin’s Little Man, Little Man, Mildred D. Taylor’s Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese, and more, Amanda M. Greenwell focuses on children and their literal acts of looking. Detailing how these acts of looking direct the reader, she posits that the sightlines of children serve as signals to renegotiate hegemonic ideologies of race, ethnicity, creed, class, and gender. In her analysis, Greenwell shows how acts of looking constitute a flexible and effective narrative strategy, capable of operating across multiple points of view, focalizations, audiences, and forms. Weaving together scholarship on the US child, visual culture studies, narrative theory, and other critical traditions, The Child Gaze explores the ways in which child acts of looking compel readers to look at and with a child character, whose gaze encourages critiques of privileged visions of national identity. Chapters investigate how child acts of looking allow texts to redraw circles of inclusion around the locus of the child gaze and mobilize childhood as a site of resistance. The powerful child gaze can thus disrupt dominant scripts of power, widening the lens through which belonging in the US can be understood.