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Podcast: New Books in Education
Episode: Jennifer S. Light, "States of Childhood: From the Junior Republic to the American Republic, 1895-1945" (MIT Press, 2020)
Description: A number of curious communities sprang up across the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century: simulated cities, states, and nations in which children played the roles of legislators, police officers, bankers, journalists, shopkeepers, and other adults. They performed real workāpassing laws, growing food, and constructing buildings, among other tasksāinside virtual worlds. In States of Childhood: From the Junior Republic to the American Republic, 1895-1945 (MIT Press, 2020), Jennifer Light examines the phenomena of ājunior republicsā and argues that they marked the transition to a new kind of āshelteredā childhood for American youth. Banished from the labor fo...