NEWSLETTER

Society for the History of Children and Youth

	SHCY Publications Awards Go to Mickenberg and Myers
Julia Mickenberg		Tamara Myers

At its recent meeting the Society for the History of Children and Youth made two awards for outstanding publications, the Grace Abbott Book Prize made possible by a grant from former SHCY president, Joe Hawes, and the SHCY Award for the best article in English on the history of children, childhood, or youth (broadly construed) and published in a print or on-line journal during the prior two years.  Julia Mickenberg, associate professor of American Studies, University of Texas at Austin, was awarded the Book Prize; the article prize went to Tamara Myers, assistant professor of History, University of British Columbia.

Best Article Award

The committee responsible for the 2005-2006 SHCY Best Article award consisted of Joe Austin (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee), Heather Munro Prescott (Central Connecticut State University), and Birgitte Soland (Ohio State University); they received 20 submissions from 16 different journals, an increase of roughly 25 percent over the previous submissions. The competition for the 2005-2006 award was sharp, and required significant discussion among the committee to select a winner.  Among the several excellent submissions at the top of the list, the committee selected Myers's article "Embodying Delinquency: Boys' Bodies, Sexuality, and Juvenile Justice History in Early-Twentieth-Century Quebec" for the award.  The winning article was published in the Journal of the History of Sexuality (14: October 2005, 383-414).  According to the committee, Myers's article displayed exemplary scholarly form and clarity, as well as a thoughtful and grounded approach to the archival evidence.  Joe Austin, chair of the awards committee, stated that the committee was particularly impressed with Meyer’s careful analysis of the structural forces shaping the experiences of children and youth in the court, weighed against the traces of children’s own historical agency. "I recommend this article to all scholars in our field," Austin said.

Grace Abbott Book Prize

Members of the Grace Abbott Book Prize committee, chair, Miriam Forman-Brunell  (University of Missouri at Kansas City), Gary Cross (Penn State University) and Dewar Macleod (William Patterson University) reviewed 18 books concerned with the history of childhood and youth across the globe (though admittedly mostly in the US and Canada) that were published in the past two years by a wide variety of North American presses. Julia L. Mickenberg's Learning from the Left: Children‚s Literature, the Cold War, and Radical Politics in the United States (Oxford, 2006) was selected as this year's winner.  According to committee members, Mickenberg offers a subtle and well-researched analysis of how the American left, especially during the postwar period of McCarthyite persecution, provided a rich array of messages in children's books, promoting racial understanding, critical and scientific thinking, peaceful solutions to problems, and respect for labor that eluded repression and created a set of values that may have laid the groundwork for the social activism of those children when they grew up in the 1960s.  Altogether, the book offers a fresh look at children's literature and its relationship to society. 

The committees invite SHCY members to keep an open eye for articles and book worthy of nomination for awards (for publications from 2007-2008) to be made at the next SHCY meeting.