Taking Children

"Taking Children provocatively argues that the United States has taken children for political ends for four hundred years. Black children, Native children, Latinx children, and the children of the poor have all been seized from their families. As Laura Briggs's sweeping but concise narrative shows, the practice existed on the auction block, in the boarding schools that were designed to pacify the Native American population, in the foster care system that was used to put down the Black freedom movement, in the United States' anti-Communist coups in Central America, and in the moral panic about…