Imaginary Citizens

No children appear in Imaginary Citizens until chapter 4, and then just barely; their presence would have made this a very different book. Yet they remain central to Courtney Weikle-Mills's argument that during the 250 years after Europeans came to the New World, children and childhood provided real and metaphorical meanings to freedom and citizenship and reflected the ways democratic values could actually be shaped by words. Weikle-Mills has creatively integrated literature studies and legal, family, and children's histories to show the evolution of thinking about democracy, child rearing, education, the development of free-market ideas, and the effects of the Fourteenth Amendment's insistence that birth—not blood—was the chief criterion of citizenship from the colonial period though the nineteenth century. Imaginary Citizens shows how similar questions have threaded through the histories of religion, politics, and family: When does a child attain the capacity for reason? What is a child's capacity for independent thinking? What is the relationship between a child and the larger community? What imperatives should guide that community's raising of its children? “The notion of a child citizen was so powerful in structuring citizenship for all individuals,” Weikle-Mills writes, “because childhood offered a way to explain and balance citizenship's limits and potential as a political means to produce freedom” (p. 7). Along the way she roots her ideas solidly in the work of historians such as Holly Brewer and Michael Grossberg; provides a nuanced reading of John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Washington Irving, and a host of lesser authors; offers useful insights on the histories of reading and printing; and puts forth a provocative interpretation of “faithful slave” stories

Argument (complex analysis · Citizenship · Democracy · Good citizenship · Political science · Politics · Psychoanalysis · Reading (process · Sociology · The Imaginary · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Gender Studies · Law · Psychology · Themes in Literature Analysis

• All Our Children May be Taught of God

  Open Access•Katherine Elise Leal•Church History•2018

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