Child Slavery before and after Emancipation

Anna Mae Duane is Associate Professor of English at the University of Connecticut. She is the author of Suffering Childhood in Early America: Violence, Race and the Making of the Child Victim (2010), the editor of The Children's Table: Childhood Studies and the Humanities (2013), and the co-editor of Who Writes for Black Children?: African American Children's Literature before 1900 (with Katharine Capshaw, forthcoming). She is also the co-editor of Common-place.org.

'These consistently excellent, highly insightful essays compel us to reconsider the problem of slavery as history and also as an agonizing contemporary challenge. The case developed here for a child-centered study of slavery, past and present, is truly compelling.' James Brewer Stewart, Founder, Historians Against Slavery

• Introduction: when is a child a slave? Anna Mae Duane; Part I: Introduction. The child as gift: the logic of the peculium in perpetuating logics of enslavement Anna Mae Duane; 1. 'Remember, dear, when the Yankees came through here I was only ten years old': valuing the enslaved child of the WPA slave narratives Karen Sánchez-Eppler; 2. The slave child as 'gift': involutions of proprietary and familial relations in the slaveholding household before emancipation Sarah Winter; Part II: Introduction. The public's claim to the private child: slaveries defined by a child's value Anna Mae Duane; 3. The white slave: American girlhood, race, and memory at the turn of the century Micki McElya; 4. Child's play: schools not jails Erica Meiners; 5. Born free in the master's house: children and gradual emancipation in the early American North Sarah L. H. Gronningsater; Part III: Introduction. The child as a pivot point between consent and complicity Anna Mae Duane; 6. Protecting the young and the innocent: age and consent in the enforcement of the White Slave Traffic Act Jessica R. Pliley; 7. Slavery and the recruitment of child soldiers David M. Rosen; 8. Notions of African childhood in abolitionist discourses: colonial and post-colonial humanitarianism in the fight against child slavery Audra A. Diptee; Part IV: Introduction. Children's voices, children's freedom Anna Mae Duane; 9. 'If I got a chance to talk to the world': voice, agency, and claiming rights in narratives of contemporary child slavery Anna Mae Duane; 10. Child domestic labor: 'when I play with the master's children, I must always let them win' Jonathan Blagbrough and Gary Craig; 11. The global human rights of modern child slaves John Wall.