Huck's Raft: A History of American Childhood

Huck's Raft: A History of American Childhood. Steven Mintz. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 2004. 445 pp. ISBN 0-6740-1508-8. $29.95 (cloth).

Steven Mintz's sweeping history of American childhood, covering the 400-year span from the colonial era to the present, synthesizes a vast and sometimes fragmentary literature into an engaging and coherent narrative. Historians of childhood have produced synthetic treatments of particular eras-the Twayne's History of American Childhood Series is an excellent example-but Mintz's ambitious undertaking represents the first comprehensive treatment to grapple with nearly four decades of research. The result testifies to both the richness of the field and Mintz's talents as a writer and a historian. Full of fascinating details, Huck's Raft will captivate lay audiences while giving specialists much to ponder.

Mintz breaks the history of childhood into three overlapping phases. His first two and a half chapters focus on premodern childhoods in the colonial era, when children were conceived as adults in training, and his final two analyze postmodern childhood, which was shaped in the last quarter of the 20th century by an increasingly intrusive consumer culture and by upheavals in gender roles, family life, and sexual mores. In the 12 intervening chapters, Mintz documents the emergence of modern childhood-the conception of childhood...