ABSTRACT
To trace the history of rural childhood is to trace the changing fortunes of the American countryside. At the beginning of the history of the United States, the average American child was a rural child, no matter what part of the country that child called home. While the contours of a child’s life varied with place, gender, and his or her family’s economic status, he or she still lived in the country and under a particular set of cultural constraints, the primary one being that work dominated family life. Rural children in this era were economic assets, and adults reaped the benefits of their labor. This central fact, and its near-universal acceptance in this era, lent coherence to the lives of rural and farm children on a national level.
