Examines the agenda behind the shaping of nineteenth-century children's perceptions and world views and the transmission of civic duties and social values to children by adults. This book reveals the contradictions involved in the perceptions of children as active or passive, as receptacles of the transmitted values of their parents.

Series Editor’s ForewordList of FiguresIntroductionMonika Elbert1. Civic Duties and Moral Pitfalls"A Just, A Useful Part": Lydia Huntley Sigourney and Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s Contributions to The Juvenile Miscellany and The Youth’s Companion Lorinda B. CohoonCharitable (Mis)givings and the Aesthetics of Poverty in Louisa May Alcott’s Christmas StoriesMonika Elbert"Hints Dropped Here and There": Constructing Exclusion in St. Nicholas, Volume IMelissa Fowler and Janet Gray "One extra little girl": Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s OrphansRoxanne Harde2. Politicizing Children: "Normalization" and the Place of the Marginalized Child"A is an Abolitionist": The Anti-Slavery Alphabet and the Politics of LiteracyMartha SledgeOvercoming Racism in Jacob Abbott’s Stories of Rainbow and Lucky and in Antebellum AmericaJeannette Barnes Lessels and Eric Sterling "I am your slave for love": Race, Sentimentality, and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Fiction for ChildrenLesley GinsbergShut-ins, Shut-outs, and Spofford’s Other Children: The Hester Stanley Stories Rita Bode3. Sentimental and Realistic Constructs of ChildhoodRobinson Crusoe and the Shaping of Masculinity in Nineteenth-Century AmericaShawn Thomson"the cleverest children’s book written here": Elizabeth Stoddard’s Lolly Dinks’s Doings and the Subversion of Social ConventionsMaria Holmgren Troy A Sentimental Childhood: The Unlikely Memoirs of Realist-Era WritersMelanie DawsonThe Cultural Work of Kate Douglas Wiggin: Cultivating the Child’s GardenAnne Lundin4. Education and Shifting Paradigms of the Child’s Mind"Heroes of the Laboratory and the Workshop": Invention and Technology in Books for Children, 1850-1990Eric S. HintzNatural History for Children and the Agassiz AssociationJ.D. StahlGood Masters: Child-Animal Relationships in the Writings of Mark Twain and G. Stanley Hall Joan MenefeeChild Consciousness in the American Novel: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), What Maisie Knew (1897), and the Birth of Child PsychologyHolly BlackfordContributorsBibliographyIndex

"...the essays are well-researched and well-written...the volume includes 18 black-and-white period illustrations and a thorough bibliography." -- E.R. Baer, Choice"Readers will learn more about old favorites such as Stowe, Alcott, and Twain, discover new areas for research, and develop new perspectives on nineteenth-century American children's literature…this is an important contribution to American children's literature scholarship, one that should be in every university library. The authors and the editor are to be commended for their work; I look forward to seeing how their scholarship shapes and inspires additional research on both nineteenth- and twentieth-century American children's literature." --Anne K. Phillips, Children’s Literature