A 400-year history of America shaped by the labor, exploitation, and resistance of children
“This important book exposes the lie at the heart of the American Dream and forces a more honest accounting of how freedom for some has always depended on the repression of the young.”—Stacey Patton, author of Strung Up: How White America Learned to Lynch Black Children
The first book on the 400-year formation of the US told from the perspective of children, Dr. Rollo argues that US history cannot be understood without recognizing how deeply it depended on the domination and exploitation of children. From the earliest settler colonies to modern schooling, children’s labor, obedience, and discipline were central to economic growth, political order, and nation-building. Rollo shows how farms, factories, mines, and households depended on children’s work, even as stories about independence and self-reliance pushed that reality out of America’s collective memory.
Competing adult groups—parents, industrialists, workers, and reformers—fought over control of children, each claiming to act in their and the nation’s interest. Rollo contrasts Indigenous child-rearing traditions with the harsher discipline of settler colonists, tracing how ideas about childhood evolved over time. In doing so, he reveals how race shaped these systems, with Black, Indigenous, immigrant, poor, and disabled children facing greater control, exclusion, and violence.
Rollo documents that despite all these aggressions, children resisted exploitation and mistreatment through work slowdowns, strikes, defiance, and protest. From the 1836 mill girls strike in Lowell, Massachusetts, to the high school anti-war movements of the 1960s and 1970s and the increasing visibility of youth at the forefront of today’s environmental justice crusades, he documents their revolt and resilience from below and how today’s youth movements continue this tradition, challenging a society that professes to protect them, while sacrificing their futures. A History of Childhood in the United States blows the lid off the sentimental mythology we’ve imbibed about protecting childhood and exposes the dark underbelly of adult ambition.
“A History of Childhood in the United States matters because it forces a truth American history has long evaded: You cannot understand the making of this country without examining how it was built, not only through the exploitation of labor, land, and bodies but through the exploitation of children. From colonial households to plantations, factories, and classrooms, children were disciplined, worked, and shaped to sustain the American project. By centering childhood as a site of power and extraction, Toby Rollo forces an honest reckoning with how freedom for some has always depended on the repression of the young.”
—Stacey Patton, author of Strung Up: How White America Learned to Lynch Black Children
“This book dismantles one of the country’s most enduring myths: that the history of childhood is a steady advance from labor, patriarchal authority, and religious discipline toward protection, freedom, and rights. The history it uncovers is far more unsettling. Childhood was never simply a sheltered world of play and innocence. It was one of the principal means by which the nation sorted children into unequal futures by race, class, and gender. As physical labor receded, commercial culture, schools, juvenile courts, families, and welfare agencies imposed new forms of discipline, surveillance, and expectation. The book asks readers to abandon comforting claims about a nation that loves its children and confronts how unequally this country has distributed safety, autonomy, and opportunity among the young.”
—Steven Mintz, professor of history, The University of Texas at Austin and author of Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood