The USSC hosted historians Frances Clarke, Michael Green, Michael McDonnell, and Kathryn Schumaker of the University of Sydney and the United States Centre for a lively discussion of Associate Professor Frances Clarke’s award-winning book, Of Age: Boy Soldiers and the American Civil War (Oxford University Press, 2024).

Roughly ten per cent of all soldiers in the American Civil War were underaged. As Clarke and her co-author Rebecca Jo Plant reveal in Of Age, these boys and young men not only contributed vitally to the Union Army, but they also challenged the scope of American federal authority. As boys ran off to join the war effort, their parents often sought to bring them back home. The point at which a father’s authority ended and the United States Government’s began became the subject of intense conflicts over the meanings of childhood, parental rights, and state power in America.

For Of Age, Clarke and Plant received the prestigious 2024 Lincoln Prize, awarded by the Gilder Lehrman Center for the best book on the Civil War, and the Grace Abbott Prize, awarded by the Society for the History of Children and Youth for the best English-language book on the history of children, childhood or youth published in 2023.