Because childhood is not only culturally but also legally and biologically understood as a period of dependency, it has been easy to dismiss children as histori

Nineteenth-century middle-class Protestant women were fervent in their efforts to "do good." Rhetoric--especially in the antebellum years--proclaimed that virtu

This is a soul-stirring era," remarked the Reverend William Mitchell in 1835, "and will be so recorded in the annals of time." Countless antebellum reformers ag