Stolen Childhood: Slave Youth in Nineteenth-Century America (Blacks in the Diaspora) - Tapa dura

King's deeply researched volume on slave children first appeared to rave reviews in 1995 (CH, Apr'96, 33-4719), establishing her as a leading scholar on African American slavery generally and as an authority on slave youth culture. Slavery's all-encompassing veil, she wrote with passion and verve, enveloped bonded children, circumscribing their formative years, transforming them into chattel laborers, and subjecting them to arbitrary, untoward punishment and deleterious separation from families. King (Univ. of Missouri-Columbia) documented the various farm, industrial, and plantation occupations slave youth practiced and contextualized their lives by explicating their educations and leisure activities--elements that enabled them to survive enslavement and fashion new lives as freed men and women. King's second edition more than doubles the size of the original work. Drawing on extensive new scholarship and sources, she adds significant new demographic information regarding slave children and broadens her scope to include slave children born in the North and in urban centers. King also probes interactions between free, freed, and enslaved children across time and place and details the lives of children owned by African American and Native American slaveholders. Finally, her revised edition includes material on the heretofore-ignored role of slave children in the abolition movement. Indispensible. Summing Up: Essential. All levels/libraries. --Choice ***Don't use until May 1, 2012.J. D. Smith, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, May 2012--J. D. Smith, University of North Carolina at Charlotte (01/01/2012)

One of the most important books published on slave society, Stolen Childhood focuses on the millions of children and youth enslaved in 19th-century America. This enlarged and revised edition reflects the abundance of new scholarship on slavery that has emerged in the 15 years since the first edition. While the structure of the book remains the same, Wilma King has expanded its scope to include the international dimension with a new chapter on the transatlantic trade in African children, and the book's geographic boundaries now embrace slave-born children in the North. She includes data about children owned by Native Americans and African Americans, and presents new information about children's knowledge of and participation in the abolitionist movement and the interactions between enslaved and free children.