Hidden Childhoods and Double Ages: An Interview with Dr. Holly White and Dr. Julia Gossard

Welcome back to The Children’s Table! In this third season, we’re thinking about hidden childhoods, and this first episode asks us to think about how age itself is a murkier concept than we might first imagine. We interview Dr. Holly White and Dr. Julia Gossard, who ask us to think about how Americans often impose a sort of “double age” on young people that assigns different meanings to someone’s chronological age depending on their race, class, and gender. After the interview, we think aloud about how we have bent the definitions of childhood for poor children from 19th century London streets to twenty-first century California farms.   

 To learn more about the concept of double age, be sure to check out the special issue of JHCY edited by Dr. White and Dr. Gossard, out the fall of 2022. For a reading list and images related to today’s podcast, please visit  

Dr. Julia M. Gossard is Associate Dean for Research in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences, Associate Professor of History, and Distinguished Associate Professor of Honors Education at Utah State University. A specialist in eighteenth-century childhood and youth, her book, Young Subjects: Children, State-Building, and Social Reform in the 18th-century French World, was published in 2021 with McGill-Queen’s University Press. She currently is working on three additional book projects, including an edited collection, forthcoming from Routledge, titled Encountering Childhood in Vast Early America. That collection is co-edited by our second guest: Dr. Holly N. S. White.  
  

Dr. Holly White is a historian of the social and legal history of childhood, youth, and age in the early republic. She works at the Omohundro Institute for Early American History and Culture as the Assistant Editor of Digital Projects and OI Publications. Her first book, Protecting the Innocents: Legal and Cultural Debates About Age and Ability in the Early United States, is forthcoming with the University of Virginia Press.