In Childhood in America, Joyce Carol Oates reviews Huck’s Raft:
As Steven Mintz argues in this often fascinating and massively documented exploration of four centuries of American childhood, ?there has never been a time when the overwhelming majority of American children were well cared for and their experience idyllic. Nor has childhood ever been an age of innocence, for most children?.
How bad was it in Huck’s Missouri?
In Hannibal, Missouri, in Huck?s time, before the Civil War destroyed Southern slavery, life for many Americans was likely to be nasty, brutish and short: even among the middle class, approximately one child in four died in infancy, and one individual in two before his or her twenty-first birthday. The notion of a lengthy childhood, ?devoted to education and free from adult responsibilities, is a very recent invention, and one that became a reality for a majority of children only after World War II?.
The myths have clouded public thinking about the history of American childhood:
These are: the myth of the ?happy childhood?; the myth of ?home as a haven and bastion of stability in an ever-changing world?; the myth that childhood ?is the same for all children, a status transcending class, ethnicity, and gender?; the myth that the United States is a ?peculiarly child-friendly society, when in actuality Americans are deeply ambivalent about children?; and the most prevalent myth, ?the myth of progress, and its inverse, a myth of decline?.