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When a four-year-old California girl died on March 9, 1984, the state charged her mother with involuntary manslaughter because she failed to provide her daughter with medical care, choosing instead to rely on spiritual healing. During the next few years, a half dozen other children of Christian Science parents died under similar circumstances. The children's deaths and the parents' trials drew national attention, highlighting a deeply rooted, legal/political struggle to define religious freedom.

Through close analysis of these seven cases, legal historian Alan Rogers explores the conflict between religious principles and secular laws that seek to protect children from abuse and neglect. Christian Scientists argued—often with the support of mainline religious groups—that the First Amendment's “free exercise” clause protected religious belief and behavior. Insisting that their spiritual care was at least as effective as medical treatment, they thus maintained that parents of seriously ill children had a constitutional right to reject medical care.

Congress and state legislatures confirmed this interpretation by inserting religious exemption provisos into child abuse laws. Yet when parental prayer failed and a child died, prosecutors were able to win manslaughter convictions by arguing—as the U.S. Supreme Court had held for more than a century—that religious belief could not trump a neutral, generally applicable law. Children's advocates then carried this message to state legislatures, eventually winning repeal of religious exemption provisions in a handful of states.

A study that challenges our notions about citizenship and judgment by considering the place of children in historical and contemporary legal discourse.

Many of the most controversial political issues of our time focus on the actions and well-being of children such as Greta Thunberg’s climate movement; youth activists standing up for racial justice, safe schools, and an equitable economy; and the furor over separating migrant children from their families. When do we treat children as competent citizens, when do we treat them as dependents in need of protection, and why?

The Child before the Court: Judgment, Citizenship, and the Constitution provides answers to these foundational questions. It analyzes landmark US Supreme Court cases involving children’s free speech and due process rights and argues that our ideas about civic and legal judgment are deeply contested concepts instead of simple character traits. These cases serve as analytic touchstones for these problems, and the Court’s opinions seemingly articulate clear rules through a pragmatic balancing of interests.

Timothy Barouch shows how these cases continually reshape constitutional thought, breaking from a vocabulary of wardship and recasting the child as a liberal individual. He analyzes these legal opinions as judicial novelizations and focuses on their rhetorical markers: the range of tropes, idioms, figures, and arguments that emerge across nearly two centuries of jurisprudence in this important but oft-neglected area. The careful and subtle readings of these cases demonstrate how judicial representations of the child provide key resources for thinking about the child as citizen and, more broadly, citizenship itself. It serves as a bold call to think through the relationship between the liberal individual and the problem of civic judgment as it manifests in public culture in a wide array of contexts at a time when liberal democracy is under siege.
 

How popular debates about the so-called digital generation mediate anxieties about labor and life in twenty-first-century America
 

“The children are our future” goes the adage, a proclamation that simultaneously declares both anxiety as well as hope about youth as the next generation. In The Digital Is Kid Stuff, Josef Nguyen interrogates this ambivalence within discussions about today’s “digital generation” and the future of creativity, an ambivalence that toggles between the techno-pessimism that warns against the harm to children of too much screen time  and a techno-utopianism that foresees these “digital natives” leading the way to innovation, economic growth, increased democratization, and national prosperity.  

Nguyen engages cultural histories of childhood, youth, and creativity through chapters that are each anchored to a particular digital media object or practice. Nguyen narrates the developmental arc of a future creative laborer: from a young kid playing the island fictions of Minecraft, to an older child learning do-it-yourself skills while reading Make magazine, to a teenager posting selfies on Instagram, to a young adult creative laborer imagining technological innovations using design fiction. 

Focusing on the constructions and valorizations of creativity, entrepreneurialism, and technological savvy, Nguyen argues that contemporary culture operates to assuage profound anxieties about—and to defuse valid critiques of—both emerging digital technologies and the precarity of employment for “creative laborers” in twenty-first-century neoliberal America. 

Finalist for the 2025 SHARP Book History Book Prize

Winner of the 2025 Justin G. Schiller Prize for Bibliographical Work on Children’s Books from The Bibliographical Society of America

By the close of the eighteenth century, learning to read and write became closely associated with learning about the material world, and a vast array of games and books from the era taught children how to comprehend the physical world of “things.” Examining a diverse archive of popular science books, primers, grammars, toys, manufacturing books, automata, and literature from Maria Edgeworth, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Anna Letitia Barbauld, The Education of Things attests that material culture has long been central to children’s literature.

Elizabeth Massa Hoiem argues that the combination of reading and writing with manual tinkering and scientific observation promoted in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain produced new forms of “mechanical literacy,” competencies that were essential in an industrial era. As work was repositioned as play, wealthy children were encouraged to do tasks in the classroom that poor children performed for wages, while working-class children honed skills that would be crucial to their social advancement as adults.

Thought-provoking and original, The Global History of Black Girlhood opens up new possibilities for understanding Black girls in the past while offering useful tools for present-day Black girls eager to explore the histories of those who came before them.

Contributors: Janaé E. Bonsu, Ruth Nicole Brown, Tara Bynum, Casidy Campbell, Katherine Capshaw, Bev Palesa Ditsie, Sarah Duff, Cynthia Greenlee, Claudrena Harold, Anasa Hicks, Lindsey Jones, Phindile Kunene, Denise Oliver-Velez, Jennifer Palmer, Vanessa Plumly, Shani Roper, SA Smythe, Nastassja Swift, Dara Walker, Najya Williams, and Nazera Wright

How the construction of Muslim boys as proto-terrorists is integral to the story of American racial capitalism

How do we understand an incident where a five-year-old Muslim boy arrives at Dulles airport and is preemptively detained as a “threat”? To answer that question, Shenila Khoja-Moolji examines American public culture, arguing that Muslim boyhood has been invented as a threat within an ideology that seeks to predict future terrorism. Muslim boyhood bridges actual past terrorism and possible future events, justifying preemptive enclosure, surveillance, and punishment. Even in the occasional reframing of individual Muslim boys as innocent, Khoja-Moolji identifies a pattern of commodity antiracism, through which elites buy public goodwill but leave intact the collective anti-Muslim notion that fuels an expanding carceral and security state. Framing Muslim boyhood as a heuristic device, she turns to a discussion of Hindutva ideology in India to show how Muslim boyhood may be resituated in global contexts.

Tracing the cultural history of play—from Fluxus to SimCity

Games and gamified activities have become ubiquitous in many adults’ lives, and play is widely valued for fostering creativity, community, growth, and empathy. But how did we come to our current understanding of what it means to play? The Impossible Reversal charts the transformation of notions of playfulness beginning in the second half of the twentieth century, when a legion of artists, academics, and engineers developed new ways of theorizing, structuring, and designing ludic activity.

Through examples ranging from experimental Fluxus games to corporate role-playing exercises and from the Easy Bake Oven to Tetris, The Impossible Reversal presents four styles of playfulness characteristic of the “era of designed play”: the impossible reversal, which puts a player in a seemingly hopeless scenario they must upend with a tiny gesture; expending the secret, which involves silly rules that gain an obscure power and require players to embrace failure; simulated freedom, a satiric criticism of the ordinary world; and oblique repetition, a way of playing that stumbles toward unimaginable outcomes through simple, meaningless, and endlessly iterated acts.

A unique genealogical account of play as both concept and practice, The Impossible Reversal illuminates how playfulness became essential for understanding cultural, technical, and economic production in the United States.

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Despite efforts to abolish slavery throughout Africa in the nineteenth century, the coercive labor systems that constitute “modern slavery” have continued to the present day. To understand why, Robin Phylisia Chapdelaine explores child trafficking, pawning, and marriages in Nigeria's Bight of Biafra, and the ways in which British colonial authorities and Igbo, Ibibio, Efik, and Ijaw populations mobilized children's labor during the early twentieth century. Drawing on a wealth of primary sources that include oral interviews, British and Nigerian archival materials, newspaper holdings, and missionary and anthropological accounts, Chapdelaine argues that slavery's endurance can only be understood when we fully examine “the social economy of a child”—the broader commercial, domestic, and reproductive contexts in which children are economic vehicles.

The Persistence of Slavery provides an invaluable investigation into the origins of modern slavery and early efforts to combat it, locating this practice in the political, social, and economic changes that occurred as a result of British colonialism and its lingering effects, which perpetuate child trafficking in Nigeria today.

When inclusion into the fold of citizenship is conditioned by a social group’s conceit to ritual violence, humiliation, and exploitation, what can anti-citizenship offer us?
 

The Promise of Youth Anti-citizenship argues that Black youth and youth of color have been cast as anti-citizens, disenfranchised from the social, political, and economic mainstream of American life. Instead of asking youth to conform to a larger societal structure undergirded by racial capitalism and antiblackness, the volume’s contributors propose that the collective practice of anti-citizenship opens up a liberatory space for youth to challenge the social order.

The chapters cover an array of topics, including Black youth in the charter school experiment in post-Katrina New Orleans; racial capitalism, the queering of ethnicity, and the 1980s Salvadoran migration to South Central Los Angeles; the notion of decolonizing classrooms through Palestinian liberation narratives; and more. Through a range of methodological approaches and conceptual interventions, this collection illuminates how youth negotiate and exercise anti-citizenship as forms of either resistance or refusal in response to coercive patriotism, cultural imperialism, and predatory capitalism.

Contributors: Karlyn Adams-Wiggins, Portland State U; Ariana Brazier; Julio Cammarota, U of Arizona; Michael Davis, U of Wisconsin–Madison; Damaris C. Dunn, U of Georgia; Diana Gamez, U of California, Irvine; Rachel F. Gómez, Virginia Commonwealth U; Luma Hasan; Gabriel Rodriguez, Iowa State U; Christopher R. Rogers, U of Pennsylvania; Damien M. Sojoyner, U of California, Irvine.

This book investigates the way that corporations are strategically shaping children to be under-aged hyperconsumers as well as the submissive employees and uncritical citizens of the future.

Sharon Beder shows how marketers and advertisers are targeting ever younger children in a relentless campaign, transforming children's play into a commercial opportunity and taking advantage of childish anxieties. 

Beder investigates the corporate relations and ideals that infiltrate every aspect of our lives. She presents an alarming picture of how a child's social development -- through education, health care and nutrition -- has become an ordered conveyor belt of consumerist conditioning. Focusing on education in particular, Beder explains how businesses are taking control of more and more aspects of schooling, not only for profit but to erode state schooling and promote business values. Similarly, she shows how 'difficult' children are taught from an early age that pharmaceuticals can be used to discipline them or to make them 'happy'.

As a Black child adopted out of the New York foster care system as a toddler and raised by white evangelical parents, Rhonda Roorda had to learn how to walk in two different worlds. She often questioned “whether my skin was too dark” and if she “acted too white.” She recalls being haunted by feelings of shame and not being enough. Torn from the Root is her illuminating story of identity, belonging, and purpose and lays bare the deep pain she felt navigating life as a vulnerable Black girl and how she healed herself.

Roorda suffered trauma and abuse in her youth, but she also developed resilience. Eventually, she resolves to find her birth family and takes readers on her exciting and agonizing journey.

Torn from the Root thinks critically about the child welfare system and the long-term impacts of transracial adoption. Roorda helps readers understand her experience, posing necessary questions about the challenges of transracial adoption. Her emotional story, full of wisdom and reflection, recounts how she accepted the truth of her adoption and found balance, not discomfort, in her own skin.