Beyond the Boundaries of Childhood
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A01=Crystal Webster
abolitionist movement
African American
African American childhood
African American women
African Americans in Boston
African Americans in New York
African Americans in Philadelphia
antebellum
antebellum north
Author_Crystal Webster
black
Black feminism
Black Laws
Black motherhood
Black orphanages
Category=JBSL
Category=JBSP1
Category=NHK
childhood
Civil War
crime
domestic labor
education
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
Frederick Douglass
fugitive slaves
gradual emancipation
Harriet Jacobs
history of American childhood
house of refuge
indentured servitude
James McCune Smith
juvenile delinquency
Maria Stewart
Massachusetts
New York
New York Manumission Society
Pennsylvania
Pennsylvania Abolitionist Society
Quakers
slavery
slavery in the North
Sojourner Truth
William Cooper Nell
Product details
- ISBN 9781469663227
- Weight: 465g
- Dimensions: 155 x 233mm
- Publication Date: 30 Jun 2021
- Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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For all that is known about the depth and breadth of African American history, we still understand surprisingly little about the lives of African American children, particularly those affected by northern emancipation. But hidden in institutional records, school primers and penmanship books, biographical sketches, and unpublished documents is a rich archive that reveals the social and affective worlds of northern Black children. Drawing evidence from the urban centers of Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, Crystal Webster's innovative research yields a powerful new history of African American childhood before the Civil War. Webster argues that young African Americans were frequently left outside the nineteenth century's emerging constructions of both race and childhood. They were marginalized in the development of schooling, ignored in debates over child labor, and presumed to lack the inherent innocence ascribed to white children. But Webster shows that Black children nevertheless carved out physical and social space for play, for learning, and for their own aspirations.
Reading her sources against the grain, Webster reveals a complex reality for antebellum Black children. Lacking societal status, they nevertheless found meaningful agency as historical actors, making the most of the limited freedoms and possibilities they enjoyed.
Reading her sources against the grain, Webster reveals a complex reality for antebellum Black children. Lacking societal status, they nevertheless found meaningful agency as historical actors, making the most of the limited freedoms and possibilities they enjoyed.
Crystal Webster is assistant professor of history at The University of Texas, San Antonio.
