Huck’s Raft

An impeccably researched, four-century sweep of American childhood that dismantles the nostalgic myth of a universally golden past with evidence rather than polemics. Harvard University Press and a chorus of leading scholars agree this is the definitive single-volume treatment of the subject, and the dossier bears that out. It is long and academically dense, but readers willing to work with it will emerge with a fundamentally richer understanding of how childhood became what it is today.