"They Gave the Children China Dolls": Toys and Enslaved Childhoods on American Plantations

Public Deposited
Analytics

Downloadable Content

Download PDF
Request Version for Screen Reader
Last Modified
  • March 20, 2019
Creator
  • Betti, Colleen
    • College of Arts and Sciences, Department of Anthropology
Abstract
  • The lives of enslaved children are often overlooked in archaeological studies of plantation life and historical discussions of changes in how children were viewed in American society. Using children’s toys from fifty-two slavery related archaeological sites from the United States in the Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery (DAACS), I argue that enslaved children were included within the larger shifts in the ideas surrounding childhood that occurred between the early 18th and mid-19th centuries. This analysis of the types of toys and changes in the amount and types of toys over the 18th and 19th centuries on plantation sites, shows that toys given to enslaved children by white slave owners, and potentially enslaved parents, provided an important source of gendered socialization and are evidence of the inclusion of enslaved children within larger societal shifts in the meaning of childhood.
Date of publication
Keyword
DOI
Resource type
Rights statement
  • In Copyright
Advisor
  • Scarry, C. Margaret
  • McAnany, Patricia
  • Agbe-Davies, Anna
Degree
  • Master of Arts
Degree granting institution
  • University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Graduate School
Graduation year
  • 2017
Language
Date uploaded
  • August 15, 2017

Relations

Parents:

This work has no parents.

Items

Thumbnail Title Date Uploaded Visibility Actions
file details Betti_unc_0153M_17269.pdf August 15, 2017 Public Download