Suchergebnisse

In the early twentieth century, Americans often waxed lyrical about "Mother Love," signaling a conception of motherhood as an all-encompassing identity, rooted in self-sacrifice and infused with social and political meaning. By the 1940s, the idealization of motherhood had waned, and the nation's mothers found themselves blamed for a host of societal and psychological ills. In Mom, Rebecca Jo Plant traces this important shift by exploring the evolution of maternalist politics, changing perceptions of the mother-child bond, and the rise of new approaches to childbirth pa

Of Age is the first study to focus on underage enlistment in the US Civil War. By tracing the heated conflicts between parents who sought to recover their sons and military and federal officials who resisted their claims, this book exposes larger, underlying struggles over the centralization of wartime legal and military power.

In the aftermath of the Civil War, state judges lost their long-held right to inquire into the legality of federal detentions. Habeas corpus—once almost solely the business of state courts—was largely transformed into a federal remedy. We argue that the wartime furor surrounding underage enlistees was a key factor in driving this legal change. Whereas scholarship on the use of habeas corpus at this time generally concentrates on cases involving freedom of speech or political association, thousands of parents and guardians also petitioned Union authorities and state courts to retrieve children who had enlisted without their consent. Parents, who understood their control over the personhood and labor of minors as one of the bedrocks of American liberty, angrily protested the state's abrogation of their rights, while state court judges fought to retain their jurisdiction over such cases. We illuminate these conflicts by drawing on a rich array of sources that capture the perspectives of federal and state court judges, Lincoln Administration officials, elected representatives, military officers and parents, and minors themselves. In the process, we show the halting, contested nature of debates over habeas corpus, the outcome of which ultimately redefined the relationship between American citizens and their government, preventing aggrieved parents from using state courts to safeguard their rights against federal and military authorities, and blocking state courts from querying the legality of federal detentions of any kind.

The 20th century, declared at its start to be the "Century of the Child" by Swedish author Ellen Key, saw an unprecedented expansion of state activity in and expert knowledge on child-rearing on both sides of the Atlantic. Children were seen as a crucial national resource whose care could not be left to families alone. However, the exact scope and degree of state intervention and expert influence as well as the rights and roles of mothers and fathers remained subjects of heated debates throughout the century. While there is a growing scholarly interest in the history of childhood, research in the field remains focused on national narratives. This volume compares the impact of state intervention and expert influence on theories and practices of raising children in the U.S. and German Central Europe. In particular, the contributors focus on institutions such as kindergartens and schools where the private and the public spheres intersected, on notions of "race" and "ethnicity," "normality" and "deviance," and on the impact of wars and changes in political regimes