Hendrik Hartog - "Nobody's Boy and His Pals" - Farah Peterson

An engaging account of social reformer Jack Robbins, the Boys’ Brotherhood Republic, and their legacy.

Hendrik Hartog will discuss Nobody's Boy and His Pals: The Story of Jack Robbins and the Boys' Brotherhood Republic. He will be joined in conversation by Farah Peterson.

At the Co-op

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About the Book

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. 

About the Author

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.

About the Interlocutor

Farah Peterson is a legal historian who focuses on the early American republic. Her scholarship on statutory interpretation and constitutional law has appeared or is forthcoming in the Yale Law Journal, Columbia Law Review, Virginia Law Review, and elsewhere.