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Holly Brewer. By Birth or Consent: Children, Law, and the Anglo-American Revolution in Authority. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. xi + 390 pp; ill. ISBN 0-8078-2950-1 (cl).
Martin Guggenheim. What's Wrong with Children's Rights. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005. xiii + 306. ISBN 0-674-01721-8 (cl).
Steven Mintz. Huck's Raft: A History of American Childhood. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004. xi + 445. ISBN 0-674-01508-8 (cl); 0-674-01998-9 (pb).
Bianca Premo. Children of the Father King: Youth, Authority, and Legal Minority in Colonial Lima. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. xiii + 350 pp; ill. ISBN 0-8078-2954-4 (cl); 0-8078-5619-3 (pb).
Lisa Zunshine. Bastards and Foundlings: Illegitimacy in Eighteenth-Century England. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2005. xi + 228 pp; ill. ISBN 0-8142-0995-5 (cl); ISBN 0-8142-9073-6 (cd).
Ideological revolutions from the Reformation to the 1960s have made past assumptions about childhood, including the legal status of children, seem absurd to those living in the here-and-now. For instance, in the introduction to her By Birth or Consent, historian Holly Brewer observes:
We would not now elect a thirteen-year-old to the House of Representatives (and certainly not have him give a keynote speech on an important bill at fourteen). We would not accept a will signed by a four-year-old. We would not permit a fourteen-year-old, regardless of wealth, to judge (as a juror) someone's guilt or innocence. We would not hang an eight-year-old for arson. We would not permit an eight-year-old to marry. We would not allow a five-year-old to bind himself to labor-and force him to abide by his agreement until he reached twenty-four. Yet the laws and legal guides and judges found these practices acceptable in sixteenth-and seventeenth-century England and Virginia (9).
Like Brewer, the authors of the four other books under review are all interested in recovering lost or overlooked histories of childhood. As historian Bianca Premo observes, "In histories of the colonial period, children occasionally can be spotted, almost as if they were darting in and out of the field of vision of historians whose sights are trained on other subjects, such as the nature of the colonial family or the history of inheritance among propertied elites" (2). Although all these authors agree that the concept...