Childhood in History, Literature, and Law: Confronting Authority, Illegitimacy, Myth, and Rights

This essay reviews five recent books addressing important aspects of children\u27s status and legal rights across time and cultures: Holly Brewer, By Birth or Consent: Children, Law, and the Anglo-American Revolution in Authority (2005); Martin Guggenheim, What\u27s Wrong with Children\u27s Rights (2005); Steven Mintz, Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood (2004); Bianca Premo, Children of the Father King: Youth, Authority, and Legal Minority in Colonial Lima (2005); and Lisa Zunshine, Bastards and Foundlings: Illegitimacy in Eighteenth-Century England (2005). These books\u27 authors help us to think broadly about the place of childhood in democratic theory and practice. Their books reveal the promise and perils of a deeply-contested concept that has shaped forms of governance, as well as the routines and rituals of everyday life, whether in seventeenth-century England, revolutionary America, colonial Peru, the unmistakable prose of Jane Austen and Mark Twain, or the hallways of Columbine High School