Huck's Raft

Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood is a comprehensive and important history of American children and their varied experiences.

By synthesizing a large literature in engaging prose, Mintz introduces readers to children’s lives across four centuries of the American past, starting in the seventeenth century and reaching into the present. Mintz strives to encompass different racial, class, and gender experiences. 

This is the best book to begin exploring the new field of children’s studies.

My childhood has shaped who I am and my research interests. Children have been viewed as many things across American History, from sinful creatures to a productive workforce, from coddled innocents to drivers of consumption. This book traces the adventurous, hazardous, and sometimes perilous transition from childhood to adulthood, in all its many forms, through the development of the American experiment. I like to see how broader trends impact how we think of and raise children.

Your schoolbooks left them out, but young people are American history makers and they have been so for over 300 years. Huck’s Raft presents the way children shaped the American experience and how their lives evolved over time. You’ll meet young people here from the seventeenth-century port cities to the nineteenth-century slave plantations to the Depression-era hobo camps and on to the end of the twentieth century. It’s history you need to know and will have fun learning.