Engaging Children in Vast Early America

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 an Adjunct Professor of History at William & Mary. She is co-editor of the Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth and author of Negotiating American Childhood: Age-based Laws and the Illusion of Protection in the Early United States (2025).

Introduction Section 1: Centering Unfree Children in Vast Early America 1. Into the Household of Joseph Bigelow: Growing up Unfree in Colonial New England 2. Marronnage and Childhood in Colonial Haiti 3. Capturing Youth: Reproductive Labor and the Medicalization of Black Girlhood in the Early Nineteenth-Century Spanish Caribbean Section 2: Uncovering Childhood in Native North America 4. “To Have Their Children Trained Up in English Schools”: Native American Childhood and Education in the Early American South 5. A Mixture of Nations: English Captive Children and Food in the Eighteenth-Century Northeast 6. “From Their Children Born and Those Yet in the Womb”: Children as Political Actors in Southeastern Native American Petitions, 1600–1730 Section 3: Who Got to Be a Child in Vast Early America 7. From Girls to Mothers: Children in French Canada 8. Children in the Margins: Enslaved Children in the Livingston Family Papers 9. Sending Children to Alta California: The Lorenzana and Híjar-Padrés Expeditions