NEWSLETTER

Society for the History of Children and Youth

News from the Field
Compiled by Nancy Zey, Sam Houston State University

SHCY Members in New Places:

Hamilton Cravens reports. "I was fortunate enough to spend the spring 2007 semester at the Roosevelt Study Center, in Middelburg, The Netherlands, as the Fulbright-Dow distinguished chair in American history. I was paid a handsome stipend by the Dutch Fulbright organization, and all I had to do was to work on my own research and writing.While there, I completed a synthetic history of the American social and behavioral sciences."

The Roosevelt Study Center is dedicated to the promotion of the study of American history in the period of the lives of the three Roosevelts, Theodore, Franklin, and Eleanor, whose ancestors hail from the area, and to Dutch-American relations ever since John Adams presented his diplomatic credentials at The Hague in 1783. This is a golden opportunity for a scholar who has a project in draft form to write, or to use the rather impressive resources of the R.S.C. and of the Dutch university libraries, which have ample resources, especially secondary materials, for the study of American history. More information is available on the website of the Council for the International Exchange for Scholars -- the American Fulbright organization.

Joanna B. Michlic has been appointed Associate Professor in the Department of History and Chair in Holocaust and Ethical Values at Lehigh University, a position that commences this summer.

Jacqueline Olich has accepted a new position as Associate Director of the Center for Slavic, Eurasian and East European Studies at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. She has also begun a new research project on representations of the Slavic world in the work of J.K. Rowling.

In May, Janet McShane Galley completed her Ph.D. in American History with a dissertation entitled "Infanticide in the American Imagination, 1860-1920.  She will begin teaching as a sessional instructor at the University of Guelph in Ontario in September.

Ben Jordan is starting a new job as a Visiting Instructor in the History Department at Kenyon College in Ohio.

This fall Adam Golub begins a new position in the American Studies Department at California State University, Fullerton.  Among the courses he will be teaching are "Childhood and Family in American Culture" and "The Teenager in America."   

Marie Jenkins Schwartz, Ph.D. has been appointed Chair of the History Department at the University of Rhode Island.

In May 2007, Valentina Boretti completed her Ph.D. at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, with a thesis entitled "Playing for Keeps: The Toy Culture in China, 1895-1949".

E. Wayne Carp (Pacific Lutheran University) has been selected as a Fulbright Distinguished Lecturer to Korea beginning in March 2008, where he will teach for a semester at Yonsei University.  One of the courses Wayne will teach will be Children and Families in American History, 1607 to the present.

And finally, Nancy Zey completed her Ph.D. in History at the University of Texas at Austin in May 2007 with a dissertation entitled “Rescuing Some Youthful Minds: Benevolent Women and the Rise of the Orphan Asylum as Civic Household in Early Republic Natchez.”  This upcoming academic year, she will be a visiting assistant professor in the Department of History at Sam Houston State University.

CONGRATULATIONS, ALL!!

New Member Spotlight:

José Bustamante Vismara is a doctoral candidate in El Colegio de Mexico, and his thesis project is about elementary schools in Mexico and Argentina in the first half of the nineteenth century.  He is interested in hearing from others who work on the history of children in different regions of Latin America as well as sharing information about his own research.  Feel free to contact him at jovisma@mdp.edu.ar.  Welcome, José!

News from the Field:

Elise Ciregna (Doctoral Candidate, University of Delaware and Curator of Historical Collections at Forest Hills Cemetery in Boston) will be giving a talk on children's memorials in Bath, England at a conference sponsored by the Centre for Death and Society at the University of Bath from 12-15 September, 2007.  The talk is entitled "Sleeping Cherubs, Marble Lambs, and Empty Cradles: Children's Memorials in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century America and England."  More information about the conference can be found at http://www.bath.ac.uk/cdas/news/conferences/index.html.

Miroslava Chavez-Garcia (University of California-Davis) has organized a roundtable session for the upcoming American Studies Association Annual Conference, Oct. 11-14, 2007 in Philadelphia, PA, to discuss Anthony M. Platt's work and its influence in the field.  The session is also designed to talk about future directions and the areas of study sorely needed, such as race and juvenile justice.  "Forty Years of Juvenile Justice Studies: Revisiting Anthony M. Platt's /The Child Savers/" includes the following participants: Mary Odem, Tamara Myers, Geoff Ward, William Bush (ASA's Youth and Childhood Studies Caucus co-founder/co-leader), Anthony Platt, with Miroslava serving as chair.

Ben Jordan (Kenyon College) will be presenting a paper entitled, "Savages and the 'SHE PERIOD': The Boy Scouts of America’s younger and older boy problems, 1910-1930" at Scouting: A Centennial Symposium.  This history conference is being sponsored by Johns Hopkins University in February 2008.

Patrizia Guarnieri (University of Florence) would like to bring to members’ attention the following symposium on schoolbooks: "Quaderni di scuola," which will take place in Macerata from 26-29 September 2007.  For more information, please email Jury Meda at scientificboard1@unimc.it

Publications by SHCY Members:

Miroslava Chavez-Garcia (University of California-Davis) has authored, "In Retrospect: Anthony M. Platt's /The Child Savers: The Invention of Delinquency/," which will appear in the September 2007 issue of Reviews in American History. This essay examines the influence of Platt's work on the field of juvenile justice in history in the last forty years and argues that, despite great strides in the field, works that examine race and ethnicity are still wanting.
           
Andrew Hartman (Illinois State University) has a book coming out.  Education and the Cold War will be published in April 2008 by Palgrave Macmillan.

This September, Stanford University Press will be publishing Turning to Nature in Germany: Hiking, Nudism, and Conservation, 1900-1940 by John A. Williams (Bradley University).  The book examines, among other things, organized youth hiking.

Melissa Klapper (Rowan University) has a new book out.  Small Strangers: The Experiences of Immigrant Children in America, 1880-1925 is a volume in the American Childhoods series edited by Jim Marten, and it is now available from Ivan R. Dee, Publisher.

In the spring of 2008, New York University Press will publish Julie Miller’s (Bernard and Irene Schwartz Postdoctoral Fellow, New-York Historical Society) new book, tentatively titled Abandoned:  Foundlings in Nineteenth-Century New York City.

In April 2007,The University Press of Mississippi republished The Circle of Guilt (1956) by the psychiatrist Fredric Wertham, about a teenage murder in New York City in 1955, which includes a new historical introduction written by William Bush (University of Nevada Las Vegas). Here is a link to the book description: http://www.upress.state.ms.us/catalog/spring2007/the_circle_of_guilt.html
Bill reports that he is also completing a book manuscript for the University of Georgia Press entitled "The Origins of the Super-Predator: Race and Juvenile Delinquency in Twentieth-Century Texas". Should be under review by the end of summer.

Recommended Websites:

Anne Rubin (University of Maryland, Baltimore County) worked with students enrolled in her course on the American South to create a website on child labor using the photographs of Lewis Hine. The collection is available at:
http://www.research.umbc.edu/~arubin/HIST402_SP2007/index.php.

For those who have not yet seen it, Jacqueline Olich (University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill) recommends the following website featuring a digital exhibition entitled "Children's Books of the Early Soviet Era": http://digital.library.mcgill.ca/Russian/.

Sharon McQueen (University of Wisconsin-Madison) would like to point out the Alise Youth Services SIG website:
https://mywebspace.wisc.edu/smcqueen/web/alise/youth_services/history.htm.