Beyond the Boundaries of Childhood: Black Children's Cultural and Political Resistance

This talk examines the lives of African American children in Philadelphia, New York, and Boston during the late-18^th to early-20^th centuries by focusing on Black children's labor, play, and schooling. It argues that northern Black children intersected shifting constructions of race and childhood, as a group upon which society experimented with treatments of the newly recognized social category of the child, and came to terms with the social and economic place of the nascent free Black community.