Reviewed by Barry Levy | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 64.3

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Reviewed by Barry Levy | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 64.3 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

Barry Levy, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Children in Colonial America. Edited by James Marten. New York: New York University Press, 2007. 267 pages. $70.00 (cloth), $22.00 (paper). In Pursuit of Liberty: Coming of Age in the American Revolution. By Emmy E. Werner. Westport, Conn.: Praeger Press, 2006. 209 pages. $49.95 (cloth).
Children in Colonial America is a collection of new short essays and familiar and unfamiliar primary documents designed for advanced undergraduate courses. In Pursuit of Liberty tells the stories of children's and youth's exploits on battlefields during the American Revolution, often in their own words. These two books mark a renewal of a conversation about children in early America. But the new conversation breaks significantly from the old.	1
Tellingly, Philip J. Greven supplies the foreword for Children in Colonial America. His The Protestant Temperament was arguably the best word of the previous conversation in the 1970s and 1980s. Yet, except for this foreword, these new books seldom engage Greven's typology of evangelicals, moderates, and genteel Protestant childhoods. They say even less about the work of John Demos or Gloria L. Main and, except for the polite footnote or two, they ignore many other historians of the 1970s and 1980s.¹	2
The main reason for this discontinuity is not stated in either book, though lesser reasons are. James Marten notes that Children in Colonial America gives space to Indian, African American, and Catholic children, rather than Greven's English Protestants. Additionally, notes Marten, the current essays often situate children as autonomous historical actors. And such active, independent children and teenagers compose the cast of In Pursuit of Liberty. In much of the 1970s scholarship, children occasionally resisted adult authority, but they were chiefly characterized as malleable and as victims in the hands of religious adults and their families.	3
Left unsaid is that the landscape of psychological theory and insight, which underlies the history of childhood, has shifted dramatically during the last twenty years. In the 1970s and 1980s, historians were directly or indirectly informed by various psychological theories of ego and self. Historians also believed that early America was filled with exceptional resources and promise. The historians' task seemed to be to explain why early American children failed to grow as happy individualists and autonomous adults. They often found the explanation for failure in religious fervor or premodern thinking out of tune with abundant American land or the best mental-health practices.	4
Since then trauma theory has eclipsed ego psychology, becoming pervasive in popular culture thanks to 9/11 and other catastrophes. The new awareness of traumatic reality is clearly evident in this new work, which portrays a sadder early America where children regularly face potentially traumatizing events and where parents and communities scurry to invent ways of handling their own and their children's desensitizing astonishment and crippling disassociations. At the same time, many children survive and do extraordinary things.	. . .

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