A 400-year history of America shaped by the labor, exploitation, and resistance of children

“This important book exposes the lie at the heart of the American Dream and forces a more honest accounting of how freedom for some has always depended on the repression of the young.”
—Stacey Patton, author of Strung Up: How White America Learned to Lynch Black Children

The first book on the four-hundred-year formation of the US told from the perspective of children, Dr. Rollo argues that US history cannot be understood without recognizing how deeply it depended on the domination and exploitation of children. From the earliest settler colonies to modern schooling, children’s labor, obedience, and discipline were central to economic growth, political order, and nation-building. Rollo shows how farms, factories, mines, and households depended on children's work, even as stories about independence and self-reliance pushed that reality out of America's collective memory.

Competing adult groups—parents, industrialists, workers, and reformers—fought over control of children, each claiming to act in their and the nation’s interest. Rollo contrasts Indigenous child-rearing traditions with the harsher discipline of settler colonists, tracing how ideas about childhood evolved over time. In doing so, he reveals how race shaped these systems, with Black, Indigenous, immigrant, poor, and disabled children facing greater control, exclusion, and violence.

Rollo documents that despite all these aggressions, children resisted exploitation and mistreatment through work slowdowns, strikes, defiance, and protest. From the 1836 mill girls strike in Lowell, Massachusetts, to the high school anti-war movements of the 1960s and 1970s and the increasing visibility of youth at the forefront of today's environmental justice crusades, he documents their revolt and resilience from below and how today’s youth movements continue this tradition, challenging a society that professes to protect them, while sacrificing their futures. A History of Childhood in the United States blows the lid off the sentimental mythology we’ve imbibed about protecting childhood and exposes the dark underbelly of adult ambition.