Böcker av Hendrik Hartog

An engaging account of social reformer Jack Robbins, the Boys' Brotherhood Republic, and their legacy. In 1914, social reformer Jack Robbins and a group of adolescent boys in Chicago founded the Boys' Brotherhood Republic, an unconventional and unusual institution. During a moral panic about delinquent boys, Robbins did not seek to rehabilitate and/or punish wayward youths. Instead, the boys governed themselves, democratically and with compassion for one another, and lived by their mantra "So long as there are boys in trouble, we too are in trouble." For nearly thirty years, Robbins was their "supervisor," and the will he drafted in the late 1950s suggests that he continued to care about forgotten boys, even as the political and legal contexts that shaped children's lives changed dramatically. Nobody's Boy and His Pals is a lively investigation that challenges our ideas about the history of American childhood and the law. Scouring the archives for traces of the elusive Jack Robbins, Hendrik Hartog examines the legal histories of Progressive reform, childhood, criminality, repression, and free speech. The curiosity of Robbins's story is compounded by the legal challenges to his will, which wound up establishing the extent to which last wishes must conform to dominant social values. Filled with persistent mysteries and surprising connections, Nobody's Boy and His Pals illuminates themes of childhood and adolescence, race and ethnicity, sexuality, wealth and poverty, and civil liberties, across the American Century.

In this intriguing book, Hendrik Hartog uses a forgotten 1840 case to explore the regime of gradual emancipation that took place in New Jersey over the first half of the nineteenth century. Hartog marks how the peculiar language mobilized by the debate - about care as a "mere voluntary courtesy" - became routine in a wide range of subsequent cases about "good Samaritans".

Hartog tells the heartbreaking stories of how families fought over the work of caring for the elderly, and its compensation, in a time before pensions, Social Security, and nursing homes filled this gap. As an explosive economy drew the young away from home, we see how the elderly used promises of inheritance to keep children at their side.

Exploring 150 years of American marriage, Hartog shatters the myth of a golden age of stable marriage in the 19th century. He shows how our own conflicts and confusions about marital roles and identities are rooted in the history of marriage and the legal struggles that defined and transformed it.