Guest Lecture: Layla Koch (Heidelberg Center of American Studies), “‘O that our Children:’ Childrearing Discourses, Early U.S. Periodicals, and The Missionary Herald

Nov 25, 2025

The Panoplist, later renamed to The Missionary Herald, was more than a magazine detailing the projects of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. In the early 1800s, countless Protestant Americans relied on the popular monthly periodical to stay informed about broader benevolence in the Early Republic, establish affective, evangelistic communities, and discuss the most anxiety-inducing responsibility of the time: raising the first generation of U.S. Americans. By discussing childraising discourses in The Missionary Herald, this talk will demonstrate how early U.S. magazineseffectively tied together the concerns of their readership and their own specialized interests at the dawn of the nineteenth-century print revolution.

Layla Koch is a third-year PhD candidate in American studies at the University of Heidelberg under the supervision of Jan Stievermann. Her project explores U.S. children’s roles and shifting understandings of childhood in the U.S. foreign missionary movement, 1810-1866. Layla has studied abroad at Yale Divinity School and Uppsala University, Sweden. Currently, she serves as the editor of Digital Childhoods, the companion blog of the Society for the History of Children and Youth.

For bio and research see: https://www.hggs.uni-heidelberg.de/en/about- us/members/layla-marie-koch

https://www.hca.uni-heidelberg.de/en/about-the- hca/people/layla-koch

You can download the flyer here.