Excluded from favored liberal remedies for
realizing new freedoms in postemancipation
Virginia, children nevertheless shaped broad
Reconstruction contests over the meaning of
freedom. This paper focuses on children in
order to consider whether liberal assumptions
embedded in the idea of agency have excessively
narrowed historians’ analysis of postemancipation
politics.
Sponsored by The Institute for Humanities Research (IHR) at the University of California, Santa Cruz
Catherine Jones is an Assistant Professor of History at UCSC.