States of Childhood: From the Junior Republic to the American Republic, 1895-1945 (The MIT Press)

How "virtual adulthood"—children's role play in simulated cities, states, and nations—helped construct a new kind of "sheltered" childhood for American young people.

A number of curious communities sprang up across the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century: simulated cities, states, and nations in which children played the roles of legislators, police officers, bankers, journalists, shopkeepers, and other adults. They performed real work—passing laws, growing food, and constructing buildings, among other tasks—inside virtual worlds. In this book, Jennifer Light examines the phenomena of "junior republics" and argues that they marked the transition to a new kind of "sheltered" childhood for American youth. Banished from the labor force and public life, children inhabited worlds that mirrored the one they had left.