News from the Field

compiled by Nancy Zey, University of Texas at Austin

Member News:

E. Wayne Carp, Benson Family Chair in History and Professor of History at Pacific Lutheran History, was a keynote speaker in July 2006 at the 2^nd International Conference on Adoption Research at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England.  His lecture, “A History of the Movement to Open Adoption Records: An International Perspective,” discussed the history of adoption records in three Anglophone countries: the United States, England, and New Zealand. (See his conference report below).

Congratulations to Kriste Lindenmeyer, who was promoted to full professor and named chair of the Department of History at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County in May, 2006.

Amanda Littauer recently completed the Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley and will soon assume a position as assistant professor of History and Women's Studies at Saint Mary's College in Notre Dame, IN.

Don Romesburg received his Ph.D. in History and a Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender and Sexuality from the University of California, Berkeley in May 2006, after completing his dissertation, entitled “Arrested Development: Homosexuality, Gender, and American Adolescence, 1890-1930.”  He is currently an adjunct professor at Sonoma State University in the history and women/gender studies departments.

Kudos to Hamilton Cravens, Professor of History at Iowa State University, who was recently selected as Distinguished Scholar in Arts and Humanities by the University's Center for Excellence in the Arts and Humanities, which gives him the fall 2006 semester free of normal teaching duties.  He has also been appointed as the Fulbright-Dow Distinguished Chair at the Roosevelt Study Center, Middelburg, the Netherlands, for the spring, 2007 semester. He will use this year's leave to work on a book on changing notions and events with respect to race in post-Reconstruction America, focusing in particular on popular culture, science, and politics and the law.

Meredith Eliassen, San Francisco State University, presented a paper "The San Francisco Experiment:  The Children's Year, 1918" at the annual conference of the Organization of American Historians in Washington, D.C. in April 1996.  Her paper focused on the career of Dr. Adelaide Brown, who organized the Children's Year program in California that resulted in the establishment of Children's Health Centers, consequently leading to a significant reduction of the infant mortality rate in the state.

Kudos to Ellen L. Berg, who will be a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Rothermere American Institute, University of Oxford, for the academic year 2006-2007.  She is working on a book based on her dissertation, "Citizens in the Republic of Childhood: Immigrants and the American Kindergarten, 1880-1920" (University of California-Berkeley, 2004).

Congratulations to Susan Ferentinos, who has completed her PhD in History at Indiana University. Her dissertation is entitled, "An Unpredictable Age: Sex, Consumption, and the Emergence of the American Teenager, 1900-1950."  She continues in her position as the public history manager for the Organization of American Historians.

As part of the OAH Distiguished Lecture Series, James Marten delivered "No Medals, No Monuments: Children during the Civil War" at the Civil War on the Western Frontier Days in Lawrence, Kansas, in August 2006.  He is also editor of an anthology of original essays, Children in Colonial America, to be published by NYU Press late this year.

Tamara Myers has recently moved to the History Department at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. Her book, Caught:  Montreal's Modern Girls and the Law, 1869-1945, will be published this autumn with University of Toronto Press.

Kathleen W. Jones has been named an AdvanceVT Fellow for the fall semester 2006. AdvanceVT is a 4-year NSF-funded grant to support and promote women in the sciences and engineering. Virginia Tech has expanded the mission to include recruitment and retention of women and minorities in all areas of the university. As an AdvanceVT fellow, Jones is creating a mentoring handbook to provide departments with information about best practices, successful programs, and procedures to avoid in developing ways to support junior faculty. She would appreciate hearing from SHCY members who have had experience as mentors, have created formal or informal mentoring programs, or have been the recipients of successful or unsuccessful mentoring. Contact her at kjwj@vt.edu

New Member Spotlight:

Welcome to those who have recently joined the SHCY!

Susan Pearson is an assistant professor of history at Northwestern University.  She specializes in 19th and early 20th century history, and is currently working on her first book, which examines the institutional and cultural linkages between animal and child protection organizations (SPCAs, SPCCs, and Humane Societies) from 1865 to 1920.  She has also written about better baby contests, early 20th century baby health contests modeled on livestock shows.  Furthermore, she is the founding editor of H-Animal, the H-Net Network on Animal Studies.  Anyone who wants to reach Susan can do so at: sjp@northwestern.edu.

Elena Jackson Albarrán is a doctoral student at the University of Arizona, currently doing dissertation research in Mexico City on the social and cultural history of childhood in Mexico from 1920-1940. She is interested in the ways that revolutionary governments reconstructed the category of childhood through international conferences, reconstruction of public space, new means of communication like radio. In addition, she is interested in the contributions of the commercial sphere in creating a new culture of childhood in an increasingly consumer-based society. Her email address is: fijate@hotmail.com.

Tom Poulton, MD, is Adjunct Professor of Pediatrics at Indiana University School of Medicine and a clinician caring for children in hospice and other settings.  He recently received a Wood Library-Museum Fellowship from the American Society of Anesthesiologists to conduct archival research dealing with the early administration of anesthesia to children.  His research focuses on the mid-nineteenth century in Western Europe and North America, exploring culturally based attitudes toward the pain, suffering, and death of infants and children and how those attitudes informed the applications of anesthesia for young patients.  Tom would value hearing from members whose interests overlap his (tpoulton@gmail.comaq )

Martha Saxton is delighted to be a new member of the SHCY.  She is in the History and Women's and Gender Studies Departments at Amherst College and has written about women and girls the pre-Civil War era (Being Good: Women's Moral Values in Early America) and a biography of Louisa May Alcott. She may be contacted at: msaxton@amherst.edu.

Miroslava Chavez-Garcia is an Associate Professor in the Chicana/o Studies Program at UC Davis. Her first book, Negotiating Conquest: Gender and Power in California, 1770s to 1800s (Univ. of Arizona Press, 2004) examined the lives of Mexican women in a turbulent period of social, economic, political, and cultural change.  She is presently working on the lives of Mexican, Mexican American, and African American males whose lives for one reason or another intersected with the emerging juvenile justice system in California.  Of particular interest in her research are the Whittier State School (which later became the Fred C. Nelles School for Boys) and the Preston School of Industry. She is also considering the Ventura School for Girls and the experiences of the girls at that school. In addition, she is planning to conduct some interviews: with Anthony M. Platt, author of /The Childsavers: The Invention of Delinquency/ (Chicago, 1969, 1977), in which we will discuss his work and its impact on the larger field of juvenile delinquency as well as with former wards of Whittier State School and the Preston School of Industry. Anyone interested in putting together panels, sharing work, or advice, please contact her at chavezgarcia@ucdavis.edu.

News from the Field:

Books

Lydia Murdoch, Assistant Professor in History at Vassar College., has a new book out.  Imagined Orphans: Poor Families, Child Welfare, and Contested Citizenship in London (Rutgers University Press, 2006), is a volume in The Rutgers Series in Childhood Studies, edited by Myra Bluebond-Langner.  In it, she examines why Victorian reformers typically represented poor children who were institutionalized as orphans or "waifs and strays," when in fact most of these children had at least one living parent who often maintained contact.  She argues that the discrepancy between the representation and  the reality of children's experiences within welfare institutions stemmed from conflicts over middle and working-class notions of citizenship that arose in Britain during the 1870s and persisted until the First World War.

Kriste Lindenmeyer, Professor and Chair of the Department of History at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, has recently published The Greatest Generation Grows Up: American Childhood in the 1930s (Ivan Dee, 2005). The book examines family life, popular culture, education, health, and public policy directed at children and teens in the United States during the Great Depression and New Deal. The 1930s marked an important watershed in the universalization of the modern American ideal of childhood that has a legacy within the United States and beyond.

Gael Graham, Associate Professor of History at Western Carolina University, has a new book out. Young Activists: American High School Students in the Age of Protest (Northern Illinois University Press, 2006) looks at how the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, and the antiauthoritarian spirit that was so pervasive on college campuses in the 1960s infiltrated American public high schools and created student activists.  Utilizing the memories of students and educators as well as education journals, magazines, and court cases, Graham provides an insider's look at the diverse issues that mobilized the era's students. Graham demonstrates that, although teenagers were indisputably influenced by the events reshaping the wider world, they were neither pawns nor mere mimics of their elders. Rather, they drew upon the rhetoric and strategies available to them in the 1960s to promote their own interests.

Rodney Hessinger is Associate Professor of History at Hiram College where he specializes in teaching the history of gender, sexuality, the family, and religion in early America.  He recently published Seduced, Abandoned, and Reborn: Visions of Youth in Middle-Class America, 1780-1850 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), an examination of the reaction of reformers to empowered young adults in the early American republic.  He is now at work on a study of sexual honor in the early republic, focusing in particular on the 1843 murder trial of Singleton Mercer.

Barry Moreno, research librarian at the Ellis Island Immigration Museum (http://www.ellisisland.com/ellis_home.html), announces that the museum has recently published Children of Ellis Island, a heavily illustrated volume in Arcadia’s “Images of America” series.  He would also like to make SHCY members aware of the museum’s Ellis Island Oral History Interviews, which are largely the reminiscences of elderly Americans who passed through Ellis Island as children.  More information can be obtained by calling 212-363-5807 or emailing STLI_LIbrary@nps.gov.

Recently Published Articles

Miroslava Chavez-Garcia, Associate Professor in the Chicana/o Studies Program at UC Davis, has two new journal publications: “Youth, Evidence, and Agency: Mexican and Mexican American Youth at Whittier State School, 1890-1920,” /Aztlan: A Journal of Chicano Studies/ 32 (Fall 2006), 55-83; and “Male Youth, Race, and Science: The Uses and Abuses of Intelligence Testing at Whittier State School, 1890 to 1920,” /Pacific Historical Review/ (forthcoming).

Members may be interested in the August 2006 issue of Slavery and Abolition (vol. 27, no. 2).  This is a Special Issue entitled "Children in European Systems of Bondage", guest edited by Gwyn Campbell, Suzanne Miers and Joseph C. Miller.

Museums and Exibitions:

The exhibition “Maman Disait” runs from July 2006 till November 2006 at the Hudson Museum, University of Maine, Orono, 3rd Floor Exhibit Space.  Using collages of mixed media, Rhea Cote explores the proverbs and saying of her maman (mother). Her mother, one of 17 children, used proverbs-spoken in both French and English-to give insight into the daily life of her family. This exhibit shares these family traditions and curriculum material linked to Maine Learning Resuilts are available for teachers.  See the following websites for more information: http://www.umaine.edu/hudsonmuseum/exhi.php and http://www.fawi.net/proverbes/MamanDisait.html.

The Library of Congress site has an interesting exhibit up, "The Empire that was Russia:  The Prokudin-Gorskii Photographic Record Recreated." Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii (1863-1944) was commissioned by Czar Nicholas II to photograph the Russian Empire in 1909-1912.  He recorded life in eleven regions on glass plates, in a patented process that involved color images (before color photography as we know it today was invented).  The plan was to use the images to make color slides for classroom use.  Among the images, are a striking 1911 photograph of Jewish boys gathered around their teacher in Samarkand; a group of boys in Samarkand, also studying outdoors with their teacher c. 1910; and architectural views of schools.  The search page for these images may be found at: http://lcweb2.loc.gov/pp/prokquery.html.

“Offspring: Representations of Children in Contemporary Visual Culture” is on view at the Boston University Art Gallery from September 5, 2006- October 8, 2006.  Investigating a range of representations, “Offspring” hopes to clarify our real and imagined perceptions of children and childhood at the turn of the twenty first century. Artists include:  Stephen Chalmers, Christin Couture, Nicky Hoberman, Jill Greenberg, Melora Kuhn, Loretta Lux, Maria Marshall, Nicholas Prior, Jane Smaldone.  All exhibitions and gallery events are free and open to the public. Visit the website at http://www.bu.edu/ART for hours and a schedule of related programs.