Cradle of Liberty

“Imaginatively combining history, literature, politics, visual culture, and transnational American studies, Cradle of Liberty’s interdisciplinary exploration of the role of the child in the American imaginary offers some intriguing insights into the intersections of race, nation, and ideas of ‘belonging.’”—Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Stanford University

“In this rich combination of cultural history, literary criticism, and social critique, Caroline F. Levander argues that the idea of childhood has figured centrally in American liberalism’s entanglement with racial inequality. Levander reveals that from the late eighteenth century to the present, the belief in a natural path of human development from childish dependency to adult autonomy has both derived from and contributed to racial and gender hierarchies that have been constitutive of U. S. national identity. Cradle of Liberty takes on an impressive array of writers, including novelists, social theorists, and philosophers, in telling the story not only of those whose engagement with the concept of the child contributed to the nation’s limited conception of liberalism, but also of those whose critiques of prevailing assumptions may provide us with strategies to increase liberalism’s capacity to deliver social justice in our own time.”—Kenneth Warren, University of Chicago

“Cradle of Liberty presents an impressive archive of material, and its strong argument will certainly inspire others to rethink liberal accounts of the relationship between the concept of the child and racial, national, and individual identity.”

“Throughout Cradle of Liberty, Caroline Levander resourcefully and deftly demonstrates the ways that the child has been used to focus debates about race and the function of a liberal democracy, from the early national period through the early twentieth century. . . . One is struck by the creativity of this study, which should be welcome to anyone interested in a sustained investigation of the child and the politically inflected uses with which this figure has been aligned.”