Engaging Children in Vast Early America

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.

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