Huck's Raft: A History of American Childhood

I initially purchased this book because the subject matter interested me, but lo and behold,subsequently it was the required text for a college history course I was enrolled in. It is a unique and fascinating look at 400 years of childhood in America. Mintz does a great job of explicating the changes that childhood underwent over the years and centuries. For instance: adolescence is a 20th century creation! Also, the Puritans viewed children as little adults and made no exceptions for their age. In the colonial period American Indian children(especially boys) lived such a carefree existence that frequently abducted colonist children refused to be reunited with their white biological parents mainly due to the life of ardous drudgery which constituted childhood in 18th century New England. This fine work is filled with fascinating bits of information as the aforementioned. It spans the period between the 17th century up to the period of the Columbine massacre, showing the myriad changes which accompanied childhood in America. Great reading and great history, highly recommended. If you have an interest in this subject matter you will not be disappointed. READ IT!!!

I overheard an interview with the author of this book on NPR, and I sensed he attributed much of the malaise of modern youth to this same thing that bothers me -- basically a lack of space and flexibility. He ends his book with these sentences. "Who would envy Huck's battered childhood? Yet he enjoyed something too many children are denied and which adults can provide: opportunities to undertake odysseys of self-discovery outside the goal-driven, overstructured realities of contemporary childhood." Hence the title of the book, Huck's Raft, what Mintz regards as the solution to Columbine -- a space where children can drift down a river without being cordoned off into an artifical universe, a place where they can interact meaningfully and creatively in the great, wide world. However, lest I mislead, the book is first and foremost an excellent history. The discussion of Columbine and the hysteria of modern overprotectionism does feel like the culmination of the book, but it occupies only a few pages in the final chapters. The bulk of the book provides a perspective on the modern situation, by relating how it has been, how exactly we have evolved to where we are now. This is an incredibly valuable service. Sometimes I felt he made childhood in America sound overly negative, but on the whole, the book provided a very well researched and balanced account of how life for children has evolved. Especially various facts that he cites stick with me. In the 17th Century in the Chesapeake, over 2/3 of children lost a parent before the age of 21. And as late as the early 20th Century, most parents experienced the death of a child. In the 1600s 2/3 of all immigrants of all races arrived in some form of unfreedom, though black slaves certainly had the worst of it, and the longest and saddest chapter in the book is devoted to children of African descent in bondage. I was surprised to learn that only 4% of slaves brought to the New World were brought to the United States. He traces our gradual attempts to right the wrongs, to introduce children's rights and end their exploitation. But in the process we have lost something as well. Huck in his artificially safe, commercialized, hypersexualized universe has lost touch with his raft.

I used "Huck's Raft" in a senior seminar I taught in the fall 2005 semester on Children's Health, Education & Welfare, and it was one of my students' favorites. It works especially well as a first book in a course, because it is so comprehensive and engrossing. Seldom do academic books read as well as this one. It is literally hard to put it down and, at the same time, one learns so from it much chapter after chapter. For a history of childhood in the U.S., this is probably the best book available. I cannot recommend it more highly.

Delving into the complete history of childhood in America is a huge undertaking, and for the most part Mintz handles the difficulties with detailed aplomb. Surveying the culture of childhood as lived by children and as represented and mythologized by current or later society, Mintz moves from pre-colonial times to the very-near present. With so much to cover, not just chronologically but socially as well (after all, "childhood" isn't the same for all at any given time--race, class, ethnicity, etc. all create separate spheres of childhood rather than an all-conclusive web), one might expect some problems. Luckily, the strongest parts of the book are also those which will probably be most insightful and new to readers. The sections that deal with pre-colonial and colonial times are especially detailed. Richly vivid, they open up a world most people are unfamiliar with or, if they are familiar with it, are so through less-than-accurate myth or romanticism, the kind of "history" we all "know" to be true. As the book progresses, it becomes more and more difficult to keep that level of detail and richness as the topic literally grows larger and larger. Slavery, war, immigration, race, class, economics all force Mintz to deal with different subsets of childhood as well as with the relatively simple chronological changes and so some detail is shed, some richness lost, and the book begins to feel a bit scattershot, a bit unwieldy. By the time we get to the last 20-30 years, one feels Mintz is running to keep in place. The sections are more generalized, the conclusions not so deeply explored. But as nothing really new comes up in these sections in comparison to what one has read in recent articles or books dealing with just this time period, it isn't really much of a loss. It's hard to imagine a longer work, or one more fully documented. And while I personally would have wished the same length but with a narrower focus on the pre-1900's, I can't really fault Mintz for not deciding to write several volumes, say one for each century. So the negatives aren't really much to complain about and are more than overshadowed by the scope of the book as a whole and the depth of the first half. Stylistically, the book is clearly written, if at times dense, and the more personal, anecdotal stories focusing on a single historical individual do a nice job not only of conveying the more academic arguments, but of breaking up some of the factual density. Strongly recommended, especially for its early history sections.

We know that American children these days lack respect for their elders, that they lose their innocence too soon, that they dress inappropriately, that they are sexually promiscuous and violent. We bemoan these changes, and according to Steven Mintz in _Huck's Raft: A History of American Childhood_, we are merely taking part in a tradition that has gone on for over three hundred years. (Mintz doesn't mention it, but the same complaints can be found among the ancient Romans, and probably further back.) You could go back to the Puritans, who believed that children, even infants, were full of the corruption bequeathed to all by Adam and Eve. The Reverend Benjamin Wadsworth sermonized that babies were "filthy, guilty, odious, abominable... both by nature and practice." So, in the beginning there was no "Golden Age of Childhood," the sort of adventure in Eden that the raft supposedly provided to Huckleberry Finn. Mintz points out, for instance, that idealizing childhood in such a way glosses over that Huck was an abused child fleeing his father. Mintz examines fully the myths and nostalgia that have made the longing for an idealized childhood, and the criticism of youth for spoiling it, part of our national character. The Puritans regarded child's play as frivolous and trifling; children were imperfect adults who needed to be subjected to intense moral, religious, and vocational training. For all that, the young people were still addicted to Sabbath-breaking, blasphemy, maypole dancing, and fornication. Mintz explains that the elders' combination of hope and fear about the next generation is a lasting legacy even for us today. Girls and boys took part in roles within the American Revolution, making "sons and daughters of liberty" not just an accidental phrase. With the Revolution over, parental citizens desired to produce good progeny citizens, and at least in the middle class, education was emphasized. At the same time, there was a romantic vision of childhood that insisted that fragile, innocent children had to be sheltered from harsh adult realities. There was no way that the poor, or slaves, could participate in the new romantic view, and Mintz takes care to present their plights, as well as the more general tendency of child-rearing in the nation. During the nineteenth century, children's labor in mills, sweatshops, and mines was the rule. These evils were eventually legislated away because of the pressures from reformers, but child labor laws did not intrude into agriculture. The Depression changed for good the notion that the federal government should stay out of promoting children's welfare (which had been left to families, charities, and local governments). The New Deal included provisions for free school lunches and federal aid to education, as well as the seminal Aid to Dependent Children. Mintz reflects that the universality of high school has made the schools important as placement agencies and leisure organizers. In t