Across the metropole, the colonies, and the wider eighteenth-century world, French children and youth participated in a diverse set of state-building initiatives, social reform programs, and imperial expansion efforts. Young Subjects explores the lives and experiences of these youth, revealing their role as active and vital agents in the shaping of early modern France.Through a set of regional case studies, Julia Gossard demonstrates how thousands of children and youth wer...

Engaging Children in Vast Early America examines the often overlooked roles that children played in moments of contact between Indigenous groups, Europeans, and Africans in North and South America over the course of the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries.Adulthood is the default lens through which most of history is examined. This is because so few historians analyze the age or life stage of those they study. As a result, people of the past are often assumed to be ad...