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Sugar Production Stories for Children and the History of Slavery

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  • Production stories for children
    A collection of children's books featuring examples of "production stories," a nonfiction, multi-media genre that explains how commodities are made, transported, and consumed in an industrial global economy.
  • Abolitionist literature
    A collection of works created with abolitionist messages and written by abolitionist authors or publishers.
  • Proslavery production stories
    A collection of production stories that defend slavery or the slave trade, usually by minimizing the cruelty of slavery, spreading racist stereotypes of enslaved persons, or spreading misinformation.
  • Contemporary children's production stories
    A collection of production stories published or sold in the 21st C, including works from the 20th C that remain popular and available for purchase.
  • Article images for "The Progress of Sugar"
    The items below are analyzed in "The Progress of Sugar: Consumption as Complicity in Children’s Books about Slavery and Manufacturing, 1790-2015," by Elizabeth Massa Hoiem, now available through advanced digital publication in the academic journal Children's Literature in Education (2020). The item descriptions can be read independently and provide visual analysis not covered in the article. For those without journal access, a manuscript of "The Progress of Sugar" is available through IDEALS, the open-source repository for the University of Illinois. “The Progress of Sugar” examines the historical origins of production stories for children, written in English and published in the United States and Great Britain. During the 18th and 19th C, privileged children and their parents greatly increased their consumption of sugar, coffee, cotton, and rum—all commodities eaten or worn on the body and produced by enslaved persons. To prepare children for this new industrial global economy, parents educated their children about how and where things were made, using a new kind of information book. When writing the story of these commodities, authors of these early economics and manufacturing textbooks had to make ethical choices about whether to disclose to children the human costs behind their clothing and treats. While abolitionists used the production story to expose the horrors of slavery and encourage children to join boycotts or sign petitions, proslavery authors celebrated the pleasures of affordable goods and circulated lies and misrepresentations. Still other authors avoided the subject of slavery altogether by focusing on the science, technology, statistics, and machines used to make these products, to the near exclusion of the people who did the work. The production story is a result of this troubled history. To this day, the production story tends to cover how things are made separately from who makes things and under what conditions. One aim of this exhibit is to encourage librarians, educators, and readers to look for production stories that faithfully tell the human story behind making things and to recognize when production stories resist the legacies of slavery, resource extraction, and child labor that the genre was once designed to hide.
  • Early production stories
    A collection of pre-1950 production stories, featuring works of historical interest, which children today are unlikely to find available.