Number 4

Summer 2004

NEWS FROM THE FIELD: News from Members

Janet Golden, Editor

On the move. Harvey Graff is moving to Columbus, Ohio, where he will be Eminent Scholar in Literacy Studies, and Professor of English and History, an endowed, interdisciplinary position. Congratulations Harvey!

Birgitte Soland sent this announcement of her forthcoming work: Mary Jo Maynes, Birgitte Soland and Christina Benninghaus (eds.): Secret Gardens, Satanic Mills: Placing Girls in European History, 1750 – 1960 (Indiana University Press, 2004).The book includes contributions from 19 European and North American historians and should be of interest to many SHCY members.

Welcome home. Paula Fass has just returned from Sweden where she spent the better part of a week speaking with the faculty and students of the Center for Children's Studies at the University of Linkoping, hosted by Bengt Sandin. She reports: "the students there were terrific and the experience really an outstanding one. It was great to see hear about the work being done on children elsewhere. It is important that we in the United States become fully aware of the important work being done by European colleagues in this field."

Homework time! Steven Schlossman of Carnegie Mellon University has the following recent publication: "Villain or Savior? The American Discourse on Homework, 1850-2003," Theory into Practice, Summer 2004, co-authored with Brian Gill and the two have also authored, "My Dog Ate My Homework," Los Angeles Times, December 11, 2003 and "A Nation at Rest: The American Way of Homework," Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, Fall 2003. Another of his articles, co-authored with David Wolcott is "Punishing Serious Juvenile Offenders: Crime, Racial Disparity, and the Incarceration of Adolescents in Adult Prison in Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Pennsylvania," in Joan McCord, ed., Beyond Empiricism: Institutions and Intentions in the Study of Crime, Transaction Publishing, 2004.

Kudos to Richard I. Jobs (Rick) of Pacific University in Oregon for winning the 2004 Koren Prize of the Society for French Historical Studies for the best 2003 article in French history of any time period in any American, Canadian or European Journal. The article is “Tarzan Under Attack: Youth, Comics, and Cultural Reconstruction in Postwar France.” French Historical Studies Vol. 26, No. 4 (Fall 2003). Rick has also recently published “Building Community and Reconstructing Citizenship in the Youth and Culture Houses of Postwar France” Nordic Journal of Youth Research Vol. 12, No. 3 (December 2004). Rick was a featured guest on "Odyssey" hosted by Gretchen Helfrich, a nationally syndicated radio show produced by Chicago Public Radio on a show entitled "The Category of Youth. Archived April 20, 2004.

More congratulations: Mary Niall (Molly) Mitchell was awarded an Oscar Handlin Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies for 2004-2005. She will be using her leave from the University of New Orleans to complete research and writing for her manuscript "Raising Freedom's Child: The Black Child and Visions of Freedom in 19th-Century America."

E. Wayne Carp recently published, Adoption Politics: Bastard Nation and Ballot Initiative 58 (University Press of Kansas, 2004). This book is a history of Oregon's ballot initiative 58, when for the first time in U.S. history a grassroots initiative restored the legal right of adopted adults to request and receive their original birth certificates. For more information about the book go to: http://www.kansaspress.ku.edu/carado.html.

Julia Grant has an article in the June issue of the Journal of Social History, "A `Real Boy' and Not a Sissy: Gender, Childhood, and Masculinity, 1890-1940." Check it out.

It's on to Cambridge, Massachusetts for Miriam Forman-Burnell who was awarded a research grant from the Schlesinger Library on the History of American Women at Radcliffe/Harvard to support her book-length study: I WAS DIFFERENT! The Ideals, Identity and Imagination of Ruth Handler and the Barbie Doll.

New Book: Three SHCY members, Janet Golden, Richard A. Meckel and Heather Munro Prescott have recently published their edited volume Children and Youth in Sickness and Health: A Historical Handbooks and Guide (Greenwood Press). The book is the first comprehensive history of child health in the United States. There are six original essays--from the editors and from Kathleen Jones, Kriste Lindenmeyer and Elizabeth Toon--that show how changing patterns of health and disease have responded to and shaped notions of childhood and adolescence as life stages. The book also includes numerous primary sources and an extensive bibliography. For more information see: http://www.greenwood.com/books/BookDetail.asp?dept_id=1&sku=GR3041

Back in print! David I. Macleod's Building Character in the American Boy: The Boy Scouts, YMCA, and Their Forerunners, 1870-1920 is being reissued in paperback in the fall by the University of Wisconsin Press. For catalog information see: http://www.wisc.edu/wisconsinpress/books/Fall04.html#anchor275912

Just published: Thomas E. Bergler, “’I Found My Thrill’: The Youth For Christ Movement and the Transformation of American Congregational Singing, 1940-1970” in Richard J. Mouw and Mark A. Noll, eds., Wonderful Words of Life: Hymns in American Protestant History and Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s, 2004): 123-149.

Congratulations to Colleen Vasconcellos who will receive her Ph.D. in August with a dissertation entitled "'And a Child Shall Lead Them?': Slavery, Childhood, and African Cultural Identity in Jamaica, 1750-1838." At the January AHA meeting she presented a paper entitled "Children and African Survivals in Jamaica."

Recently published was a book drawn from the International Symposion about Children and Childhood, which took place in September 2001 at the Johannes-Gutenberg-Universität, Mainz, Germany: Alt KW/Kemkes-Grottenthaler, A (eds) (2002): Kinderwelten. Anthropologie - Geschichte - Kulturvergleich. Köln Weimar Wien: Böhlau Verlag.

Just out: Gary Cross, The Cute and the Cool: Wonderous Innocence and Modern American Children's Culture (Oxford, 2004). The cute child -- spunky, yet dependent, naughty but nice -- is largely a 20th-century invention. This book, examines how that look emerged in American popular culture and how the cute turned into the cool, seemingly its opposite, in stories and games. Cross shows how adults have created the ideal of the innocent childhood and have used this to project adult needs and frustrations rather than concerns about protecting and nurturing the young -- and how the images, goods, and rituals of childhood have been co-opted by the commercial world. Magazine and TV ads, articles from the popular press, comic strips, movies, radio scripts, childrearing manuals, and government publications support this argument and the book is illustrated with cartoons, toys, ads, and photos. Go to: http://www.oup.co.uk/isbn/0-19-515666-8

Another new book: Carolyn Cocca, Jailbait: The Politics of Statutory Rape Laws in the United States (SUNY Press, 2004). The book investigates the double-edged nature of the laws as both protecting and punishing adolescent sexuality, and explores cultural narratives of gender, race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, and nation underlying sexual politics and morality policymaking in the United States.

Congratulations to Holly Blackford on her recently published book, Out of this World: Why Literature Matters to Girls (Teachers College Press, 2004), her grant from the International Reading Association for study of responses to and reception history of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and To Kill A Mockingbird and her recent paper "The Wandering Womb at Home in The Red Tent: A Discussion of the Novel and Teen Readers newly initiated into its Cave of Wonders," at the Children's Literature Association conference.

Roe-Min Bok recently completed her Ph.D. at Harvard University. Her dissertation (2003) on nineteenth-century music and childhood is entitled “Romantic Childhood, Bourgeois Commercialism and the Music of Robert Schumann.” She now teaches music history at McGill University in Montreal.

Michael Zukerman (U. of Pennsylvania) and Willem Koops (U. of Utrecht) are co-conveners of a panel at the biennial meeting of the International Society for the Study of Behavioral Development (ISSBD), in Ghent, Belgium, this July 15. The panel is on History of Childhood and Developmental Psychology. The papers are: Zuckerman: "Coming of Age in the American Revolution." Koops, "The Consequences of the Disappearance of Traditional Childhood"; Ellie Singer (U. of Amsterdam), "The Historical Roots of Blindness to Peer Relationships among Young Children"; and Micha de Winter (U. of Utrecht), "The History of Aimless Socializatioon and the Future of its Opposite." The commentator is Ross Parke (U. of California, Riverside). For more information: http://www.issbd.org/

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