Huck's Raft

Huck's Raft (2004), a non-fiction book by American author and historian Steven Mintz, provides a history of childhood in America. From the Puritans to the Industrial Revolution and beyond, Huck's Raft gives a clear-eyed and, admittedly, a rather grim portrait of how children lived and died over four centuries on the American continent.

Mintz delineates the history of American children into three distinct eras: the colonial era, or "premodern childhood"; "modern childhood," covering the years between 1750 and 1950; and the "postmodern childhood," covering the period from 1950 to the present. Huck's Raft refers to Huckleberry Finn, the hero of Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Huckleberry Finn represents a rambunctious, yet ultimately innocent, ideal of childhood reflecting imagined ideals of childhood rather than the reality of American children over the past 400 years. The truth of Huck's journey, particularly the perilous trip he takes on the raft, lies in the danger he experiences. Mintz contends, “There has never been a time when the overwhelming majority of American children were well cared for and their experiences idyllic. Nor has childhood ever been an age of innocence, at least not for most children.”

Mintz adds an important caveat to his research before delving into the three chronological differences in how children are thought of and treated: Despite clear differences between these eras, some of the most pronounced differences in the treatment of children exist across socioeconomic lines, such as race and class.



During "premodern childhood," Mintz asserts, Puritan thought heavily influenced the idea of children and childhood. Children were thought of as "adults in training" still fresh from the sting of Original Sin. This is, literally, the opposite of the "innocence" we often attribute to children. According to the Puritans, children were "riddled with corruption" and must be reformed at all costs. However, despite the apparent harshness of this credo, some Puritan ideals had a positive effect on children, albeit belatedly and unintentionally. For example, the idea of public education is rooted in the Puritan notion that an entire community is responsible for reforming children and saving them from sin.

Mintz doesn't limit his discussion of colonial childhood to the Puritans, however. He discusses how the spirit of freedom and innocence could be found in the children of the Native American tribes. In fact, white children who had been kidnapped and raised by these tribes would often refuse to go back to their parents when called upon. Mintz also discusses antebellum slave children at length, though due to the erasure in the history of many of these peoples, Mintz must rely less on personal accounts and more on whatever statistical data still exist from that time, such as childhood mortality rates. Unsurprisingly, the childhood mortality rates among antebellum slaves were very high.

Moving on to the era of "modern childhood," Mintz focuses first on the rise of the "middle-class child." Contrary to rigid Puritan ideals, the creation of a middle class in the wake of the American Revolution looked to its own Revolutionary ideals and the ideals of the Enlightenment in its treatment of children. These parents allowed their children much more freedom, giving them the opportunity to learn about the world on their own. However, the author is careful to note that this idea of "freedom" was afforded only to the middle and upper classes. In fact, with the advent of the Industrial Revolution, the middle and upper classes—children and adults alike—became more dependent than ever before on labor performed by the children of the poor.



Mintz ends with the conundrum of the "postmodern child," children born from 1950 to the present. He holds that postmodern children arguably reflect some of the worst qualities of the two preceding eras of childhood. On one hand, they resemble premodern children because they are often forced to behave like little adults. Thanks to various advents in mass media, digital and analog alike, children are introduced to pop culture and consumer culture earlier than ever before. At the same time, they are still treated like modern children—separate from adults and, therefore, expected to behave with a measure of immaturity. Because of this, children do not receive the necessary preparation and tools to deal with these very adult influences. According to Mintz, “Since we cannot insulate children from all malign influences, it is essential that we prepare them to deal responsibly with the pressures and choices they face.”

With a breadth of detail and analysis, Huck's Raft earns the many plaudits it has received from critics the world over, including H-Net which wrote that the book is "the best single-volume history of its kind."