AHR Exchange

Getting Personal with Our Sources: A Response

SARAH MAZA

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HISTORY HAS A STRANGE WAY of sometimes overtaking historians. Over the course of the
months my essay was winding its way through the editorial process, Greta Thunberg
emerged as the voice and face of worldwide youth activism against ecological catastro-
phe. In my article, I argued that since what we call historical agency involves a group
or its members acting on behalf of an imagined (however vaguely) collective future,
children could not exert such agency since childhood is the one identity fated to disap-
pear over time. But what if the young are faced with the possibility that they, as a
group, will not get a chance to vanish into adulthood, as Bengt Sandin’s opening quote
suggests? While I still stand by my original argument, I have come to think that the
world may now be encountering an unprecedented instance of age-based historical
agency: young people mobilizing based on a vision of the future that threatens the de-
fining quality of childhood, namely its metamorphosis into something else.
I thank Robin P. Chapdelaine, Nara Milanich, Steven Mintz, Ishita Pande, and
Bengt Sandin for their thoughtful responses to my essay, for the substantial biblio-
graphic information they provide, and especially for their disagreements with my vari-
ous points. Mintz notes, apparently with some chagrin, that my article is “thesis driven
and polemical,” to which I happily respond: guilty as charged! The tired cliché has it
that vigorous dissent generates more heat than light, but heat is not always a bad thing,
and it is my hope that in our collectively cranking up the temperature, this exchange
might convince historians in other fields that it is well worth everyone’s time to focus
on, and argue about, children in history.
First, however, the responses give me an opportunity to clear up some residual mis-
understandings. Mintz claims that I describe classic approaches to the history of child-
hood as “atheoretical,” “overly sentimental,” “shallow,” and “unsophisticated.” Those
are his words, not mine. Sandin goes on the defensive about the field’s accomplish-
ments, but “success” and “failure” are not my terms either; my purpose is diagnostic,
not judgmental. Mintz’s claim that my argument privileges “studies that focus on the
imagined child” gives me a chance to stress once again that, as Nara Milanich correctly
notes, I am not promoting a cultural approach to the history of childhood over other
methods. I do write admiringly of the work of cultural historians like Gail Bederman,
Robin Bernstein, and Sabine Frühstück, but I also showcase the crucial contributions of
scholars like Milanich, Emmanuelle Saada, Tara Zahra, and others whose approaches
combine social, political, and legal history. Finally, it is not the case that I assign prob-

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1317
1318 Sarah Maza

lems in the field to a lack of sources, as Mintz and, to a lesser extent, Chapdelaine seem
to believe. Mintz seems to have missed in my essay statements such as “the problem is
not, it should be stressed one more time, one of sources.” In fact, I argue explicitly that
the issue of sources, while certainly not negligible, has functioned as something of a
red herring when diagnosing the field’s difficulties. Ishita Pande has it right when she
points out that the strategies of reading “against the archival grain” successfully prac-

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ticed by historians of other subaltern groups are available to those who study children.
On the subject of sources, Chapdelaine calls for us to attend to “little voices,” an ad-
monition that echoes prescriptions for other sidelined historical actors. We are all famil-
iar with the call to recover the words of history’s silenced peoples as a way of making
the past of marginalized groups visible, a first step in constructing their histories. As in
other respects, the history of children is different in that the silence and invisibility of
the young in the past largely depend on their social status and gender: the male children
of elites, a fortiori those of dynastic rulers, have often been distinctly visible and audi-
ble. If, as I argue, children are not in essence an oppressed group, then the voices of
poor, female, or minority children compel us on the basis of class, gender, and race,
with young age adding emotional heft to those attributes. Chapdelaine makes the some-
what puzzling point that historians tend to mistrust the archival voices of children (do
we take any of our sources at their word?), but arguably the reverse is true: we espe-
cially want to believe the rare testimony of the young and disempowered.
Working on children probably intensifies researchers’ responses to their primary
sources and readers’ reactions to the resulting product. Most historians—most people,
perhaps—are deeply affected by a sense of unmediated contact with the past, which is
why manuscript sources typically give us more of a rush than printed ones. In the
archives, writes Arlette Farge, “scraps of lives dredged up from the depths wash up on
the shore before your eyes . . . Their clarity and credibility are blinding.”1 This sense of
hyperreality, which Farge warns us is an illusion prone to vanish once we leave the ar-
chive, is especially acute if children are involved, all the more so if they are in jeopardy.
I am still haunted, years after reading it, by Larry Wolff’s book about eight-year-old
Paolina Lozaro, a poor Venetian child who in 1785 was forced to spend a night in the
bed of a rich elderly patrician man, and whose voice, or a semblance of it, has survived
in the judicial record.2 There are many Paolinas in the archives, imploring us to hear
and remember them, and recording their voices feels like a moral imperative even if the
perils they face are merely the mundane ones of being young and powerless. Their sto-
ries make for riveting reading. But I have yet to encounter a rationale for the collection
of historical “little voices” as an end in itself that does not sound like something of a
tautology: we must attend to children’s voices in order to understand what it was like
for them.3 In calling for scholars who pursue the historical testimony of children to “do
what is reasonable in terms of analysis but stop short of seeking conclusive histories,”
Chapdelaine is surely setting the interpretive bar for the field too low.
I’m glad that most of the respondents addressed the question of agency since child-
1
Arlette Farge, The Allure of the Archives, trans. Thomas Scott-Railton (New Haven, Conn., 2013), 8.
2
Larry Wolff, Paolina’s Innocence: Child Abuse in Casanova’s Venice (Stanford, Calif., 2012).
3
Both Mintz and Sandin argue that documenting the experiences of children in history provides impor-
tant material for policymakers. I find this point intriguing and wish they had included examples, not just
titles in footnotes, to explain how this works.

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ren’s history is one of the most productive areas in which to debate and define what we
mean by the term. Chapdelaine, Mintz, and Sandin make the case that children are in-
deed capable of limited, “partial” forms of agency, which can be the object of histori-
ans’ studies. Sandin argues—though without providing examples in his text—that
children’s actions in the past “left an imprint” on matters ranging from city planning to
consumption, even positing that the young “must not always do something to be

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agents” and can shape the world merely by being present.4 My essay surely made clear
that I agree with William H. Sewell that all humans possess a capacity for agency, al-
beit one that varies sharply according to their social and historical location.5 I never
sought to deny that children have the ability to act on the world around them, that they
can be effective beings, or that there is value in describing historical situations in which
that was the case. My argument is specifically about historical agency, the ability to en-
vision and act, even individually, on an implicitly collective vision of the future. Aside
from Pande, to whose argument I will turn later, the respondents chose not to address
head-on my proposition that the historical agency of children is canceled by their van-
ishing identity, a point about which I would welcome more commentary.
In the meantime, it is interesting to ponder the resistance to questioning the histori-
cal agency of children. Do we believe that if we fail to grant historical agency to chil-
dren in the past, we are not showing them empathy, or are robbing them of their human
dignity? Is recognizing children’s agency supposed to move the needle of our attitudes,
as it does for other groups, from pity to respect or admiration? But are we thereby, to
echo a point famously made by Walter Johnson and reprised here by Pande, imposing
on them Western liberal (in fact, “adult”) standards of autonomy and effective action?6
There seems to be some contradiction, for champions of the field like Mintz, between
on the one hand wanting to grant children their “radical otherness,” their unique, dis-
tinct perspective on the world, and insisting on the other that they must have agential
capacities analogous to those of adults.
The relationship between historians and their subjects seems also to be a subtext of
the resistance to the concept of “history through children” from some of the respon-
dents. We all seem to agree on the conceptual distinction between the histories of chil-
dren and the histories of childhood: children are young human beings, the object of so-
cial histories, whereas “childhood” can be described as the complex of cultural norms,
institutional arrangements, and social practices that frame the experiences of the young.
History through children, as I have defined it, is different from histories of children and
childhood, though I agree entirely with Nara Milanich’s point that this approach always
implies knowing about the social and cultural parameters of childhood in context. His-
tories through children, as I define that expression, can be identified simply by stating
4
This point has been extended to nonhuman beings, material artifacts, and the natural environment in
the context of actor-network theory. See Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to
Actor-Network Theory (Oxford, 2005).
5
William H. Sewell Jr., Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation (Chicago, 2005),
144–145.
6
Walter Johnson, “On Agency,” Journal of Social History 37, no. 1 (2003): 113–124. For a critical
discussion from within the field of childhood history, see Mona Gleason, “Avoiding the Agency Trap:
Caveats for Historians of Children, Youth, and Education,” History of Education 45, no. 4 (2016):
446–459. The preoccupation with agency is not just a Western phenomenon but a specifically American
one. To historians in France, for instance, “agency” is a novel concept for which there is no readily avail-
able idiomatic translation.

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1320 Sarah Maza

their central topic: Milanich’s work is about the articulation of family and class hierar-
chies in modern Chile, Brewer’s about the rise of reasoned consent as the basis for au-
thority in early modern Europe, Zahra’s about ideologies and practices of familialism
in European postwar nation building. Children are present in these studies, in the flesh
and in spirit, but they are not the analytical end point.
Sandin may well be correct that this approach is older and more widespread than I

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state in my essay: my knowledge of the field comes nowhere near his. But the discom-
fort expressed by some of the respondents, as well as other readers, with the idea of his-
tory through children invites further reflection. A good case can be made in theory that
if we subordinate children to normative adult questions about class, nation, and law, we
lose the radical otherness of the child’s perspective. The problem in practice is that his-
torians have not yet, to the best of my knowledge, produced studies that explicitly and
rigorously use the child’s perspective to challenge or recast dominant histories centered
on adults. But I also wonder whether resistance to the idea of history through children
is yet another instance of the ways in which we personalize our relationship to our sources.
Just as we recoil at the exploitation of children in real life, it might seem somehow unethi-
cal or hard-hearted to “use” children in historical analysis for ends other than themselves.
That historians might have moral responsibilities toward their most vulnerable and elusive
subjects is an intriguing proposition, but one most often implied rather than articulated
and examined.
But who exactly is “a child”? Two of the respondents, Sandin and Pande, take me
to task for adopting an essentialist and universalist definition of the child.7 On the con-
trary: in my essay, I describe age as “a wildly variable marker,” allude to historical con-
texts where adults are infantilized and children “adultified,” and cite a range of work
from that of Corinne T. Field in U.S. history to that of Paul Ocobock in Kenyan history,
which pointedly questions and historicizes the relationship between biological and so-
cial maturity.8 I have neither the scientific nor the philosophical chops to wade into the
question of whether biological infancy and youth are distinct, observable phenomena,
but I share with most historians since Ariès the assumption that childhood is as con-
structed as any other social category. Ishita Pande complains that I overlook the ways
in which our dominant views of childhood are shaped by Western “Enlightenment (and
race) science,” “liberal jurisprudence,” and “normative sexuality,” but the works I cite
by Gail Bederman, Holly Brewer, and James Kincaid, respectively, are devoted to dem-
onstrating exactly that point.
I would therefore dispute Pande’s critiques that I conflate childhood with age or am
oblivious to the role of Western ideologies in the construction of its characteristic fea-
tures. But I also believe that she is entirely right when she points out that I essentialize
childhood by defining it as a vanishing identity: this is a thought-provoking observa-
tion. How beholden to Western thought, going back to Enlightenment stadial theories
7
The point I make in passing (jokingly) that children’s history should be more conspicuous since ev-
eryone has been a child is not at all central to my discussion. Pande at many points seems to be arguing
less with me than with Paula Fass’s remark that because childhood is a universal experience, its history
might “heal the rifts” in the profession opened up by studies of race, ethnicity, class, gender, and so
on—a view I do not share.
8
Corinne T. Field, The Struggle for Equal Adulthood: Gender, Race, Age, and the Fight for Citizen-
ship in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2014); Paul Ocobock, “Earning an Age: Migration and
Maturity in Colonial Kenya, 1895–1952,” African Economic History 44, no. 1 (2016): 44–72.

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of history or even further, is the assumption that the evolution from biological and so-
cial dependency to independence is on the one hand a radical “vanishing act” and on
the other a matter of progress? I entirely agree as a matter of theory with Pande’s argu-
ment that defining childhood (even if one chooses to celebrate or idealize it) as a radi-
cally separate and lesser prologue to adulthood partakes of the sort of unitary, linear
conception of time we associate with ideologies of modernization. The question is,

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then: Where does this leave us in practice? Do there exist histories of children and
childhood outside Euro-America that explicitly confound Western understandings of
“growing up”? Are there studies of racism and colonialism within African or Asian so-
cieties that demonstrate the absence of infantilization in ideologies of domination in
those contexts? I wish that Pande had provided in the text of her discussion some exam-
ples of studies that “fracture” or “radically contaminate” dominant views of childhood
as defined by linear time. Along similar lines, Mintz demands that I cite books in the
field that “challenge Whiggish theories of modernization” or approach Western child-
hood in a cross-cultural perspective that counters such theories, but he fails to offer
references to examples at those junctures.9 A practical issue in wrestling with Euro-
centrism when discussing histories of children and childhood is the absence, as far as I
am aware, of a landmark synthetic book or essay challenging the Western interpretive
frameworks that dominate the field.10 My hope is that Pande or someone else with her
analytical skills might soon provide a full-length discussion to that effect.
In the course of a seminar where I presented my essay, a graduate student posed a
simple but fundamental question that had me momentarily stumped: What is the pur-
pose, she asked, of arguing that a field of study should move out of the margins? Isn’t
marginality a valid and even positive position in itself? There are two main ways,
I think, in which to answer that question. Most of us are embarrassed to admit to the
most obvious rationale for edging into the mainstream, namely that it opens the door to
professional achievement in the form of grants, publications, jobs, and wider readership
and recognition. Let she who thinks this is a trivial matter cast the first stone. The intel-
lectual rationales for doing so are, however, at least as compelling, starting with a point
most of us would acknowledge—the power of margins to reshape a field’s core.11 His-
torical analysis revolves around temporality, and looking at past actors’ ideas of and
strategies around children offers historians a radical new perspective on familiar ques-
tions: access to the intimate roots and repercussions of well-known historical trans-
formations. If the response is to ask why we should care about those familiar main-
stream questions rather than bypass them, I would propose changing the topographical
9
The issue is obviously not the lack of excellent histories of childhood in such places as India or Af-
rica, many of which are cited in my essay and the responses. The question is whether, and if so, exactly
how, any such item advances a compelling methodological or interpretive challenge to Western explana-
tory categories.
10
The closest item I know of is Nara Milanich’s excellent discussion of family history from a Latin
Americanist’s perspective: “Whither Family History? A Road Map from Latin America,” American His-
torical Review 112, no. 2 (2007): 439–458. I could not locate, and my essay’s many readers did not direct
me to, an analogous synthetic, methodologically specific discussion of childhood history challenging
Western frameworks. This may be the place to protest that I am in no way, per Pande, dismissing global
history as a “distraction,” but rather describing an alternate and entirely compatible way of thinking about
disciplinary innovation.
11
For an eloquent discussion of this point, see Daniel Immerwahr, “Writing the History of the Greater
United States: A Reply to Paul Kramer,” Diplomatic History 43, no. 2 (2019): 400–403.

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1322 Sarah Maza

metaphor. Maybe we should think of the core of the historical field not as a mighty
“mainstream” with small tributary rivers vanishing into it but as a crossroads: a place
where we meet, learn one another’s languages, and enrich our collective conversation.

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Sarah Maza is Jane Long Professor in the Arts and Sciences and Professor of
History at Northwestern University. Her most recent books are Thinking about
History (University of Chicago Press, 2017) and Violette Nozière: A Story of Mur-
der in 1930s Paris (University of California Press, 2011).

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW OCTOBER 2020