This 13-essay collection on childhood in Latin American history proposes to develop two themes that have received scant attention in recent historiography: childhood and youth. The editors make clear that these two cycles in human life are not necessarily similar in either their nature or their treatment. While childhood evokes innocence, youth (after age 12) evokes rebellion and transgression. Each phase was dealt with differently by the Latin American states. This book does not attempt a general history of childhood or youth but rather represents an interdisciplinary effort to spotlight some issues at various historical points. The essays seek to underline the intersection of the state, the family, individual parenthood, childhood, and youth, and they underscore the tensions created by state intervention in the realm of family and parenting at different periods in the nineteenth an twentieth centuries. The contributors are mostly historians, but the last four essays shift the...

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