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

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Hendrik Hartog

Nobody's Boy and His Pals

The Story of Jack Robbins and the Boys’ Brotherhood Republic

Hendrik Hartog

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English

University of Chicago Press
16 July 2024

Biography: general; History of the Americas; 20th century history: c 1900 to c 2000; Legal history

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.

By: Hendrik Hartog
Imprint: University of Chicago Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm, Spine: 23mm
Weight: 481g
ISBN: 9780226834375
ISBN 10: 0226834379
Pages: 336
Publication Date: 16 July 2024
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Hendrik Hartog is Princeton University’s Class of 1921 Bicentennial Professor in the History of American Law and Liberty, Emeritus. For more than a decade, he directed Princeton’s American Studies program. He is the author of Man and Wife in America, Someday All This Will Be Yours, and The Trouble with Minna, among other books.

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

"""With his characteristic eye for the telling tale, Hartog traces the life of a self-governing republic of boys and its enigmatic creator, Jack Robbins, from Progressive Era Chicago to Cold War era Los Angeles. Hartog's account is as revelatory in its unexpected turns as in its deep reflection on adolescent selfhood, freedom, governance, and law. It offers a model and a critical reminder that law and legal history belong as much to the young, to wrongdoers and wronged, and to idiosyncratic figures who dare to think and live against the grain as it does to those with economic and political power.""--Barbara Y. Welke, author of 'Law and the Borders of Belonging'"