Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Nobody's Boy & His Pals: The Story of Jack Robbins and the Boys' Brotherhood Republic

Nobody's Boy & His Pals: The Story of Jack Robbins and the Boys' Brotherhood Republic

Hartog, Hendrik

Hardcover

Biographies General20th Century United States HistoryGeneral Law

ISBN10: 0226834352
ISBN13: 9780226834351
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: Jul 5 2024
Pages: 328
Weight: 1.50
Height: 0.94 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
An engaging account of social reformer Jack Robbins, the Boys' Brotherhood Republic, and their legacy.

In 1914, social reformer Jack Robbins and a group of adolescent boys in Chicago founded the Boys' Brotherhood Republic, an unconventional and unusual institution. During a moral panic about delinquent boys, Robbins did not seek to rehabilitate and/or punish wayward youths. Instead, the boys governed themselves, democratically and with compassion for one another, and lived by their mantra So long as there are boys in trouble, we too are in trouble. For nearly thirty years, Robbins was their supervisor, and the will he drafted in the late 1950s suggests that he continued to care about forgotten boys, even as the political and legal contexts that shaped children's lives changed dramatically.

Nobody's Boy and His Pals is a lively investigation that challenges our ideas about the history of American childhood and the law. Scouring the archives for traces of the elusive Jack Robbins, Hendrik Hartog examines the legal histories of Progressive reform, childhood, criminality, repression, and free speech. The curiosity of Robbins's story is compounded by the legal challenges to his will, which wound up establishing the extent to which last wishes must conform to dominant social values. Filled with persistent mysteries and surprising connections, Nobody's Boy and His Pals illuminates themes of childhood and adolescence, race and ethnicity, sexuality, wealth and poverty, and civil liberties, across the American Century.

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