Agents of Reform: Child Labor and the Origins of the Welfare State by Elisabeth Anderson (review)

Abstract

of the unaccompanied singing traditions among many Scots Presbyterians). Furthermore, given the importance of the nineteenth century as a period of British mass migrations and imperial expansion, this begs the question as to how such traditions and trends identified here for the English context translated into British settler societies and among Indigenous children who fell within the ambit of British evangelization. There are other tantalizing possibilities. The co-optation of religious song forms by the more secular children’s animal welfare movement in the late 1800s (209–25) potentially complicates notions of a straightforward and all-encompassing secularization of childhood and children’s institutions. Missionary songs and songbooks (184–96) add another parallel dimension to thinking about children’s activism through periodical literature. And this book’s content and argument richly contribute to ongoing discussions about children’s emotional communities, formations, and frontiers. This book has wide appeal and wide significance, helping those of us in other corners of the “children’s history” classroom to think anew about our own understandings, presuppositions, conceptual frameworks, and methodologies.