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American Childhoods
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Book Synopsis An American Childhood by : Annie Dillard
Download or read book An American Childhood written by Annie Dillard and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-10-13 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "An American Childhood more than takes the reader's breath away. It consumes you as you consume it, so that, when you have put down this book, you're a different person, one who has virtually experienced another childhood." — Chicago Tribune A book that instantly captured the hearts of readers across the country, An American Childhood is Pulitzer Prize-winning author Annie Dillard's poignant, vivid memoir of growing up in Pittsburgh in the 1950s and 60s. Dedicated to her parents—from whom she learned a love of language and the importance of following your deepest passions—Dillard's brilliant memoir will resonate with anyone who has ever recalled with longing playing baseball on an endless summer afternoon, caring for a pristine rock collection, or knowing in your heart that a book was written just for you.
Book Synopsis American Childhoods by : Joseph E. Illick
Download or read book American Childhoods written by Joseph E. Illick and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2013-09-04 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title The experiences of children in America have long been a source of scholarly fascination and general interest. In American Childhoods, Joseph Illick brings together his own extensive research and a synthesis of literature from a range of disciplines to present the first comprehensive cross-cultural history of childhood in America. Beginning with American Indians, European settlers, and African slaves and their differing perceptions of how children should be raised, American Childhoods moves to the nineteenth century and the rise of industrialization to introduce the offspring of the emerging urban middle and working classes. Illick reveals that while rural and working-class children continued to toil from an early age, as they had in the colonial period, childhood among the urban middle class became recognized as a distinct phase of life, with a continuing emphasis on gender differences. Illick then discusses how the public school system was created in the nineteenth century to assimilate immigrants and discipline all children, and observes its major role in age-grouping children as well as drawing working-class youngsters from factories to classrooms. At the same time, such social problems as juvenile delinquency were confronted by private charities and, ultimately, by the state. Concluding his sweeping study, the author presents the progeny of suburban, inner-city, and rural Americans in the twentieth century, highlighting the growing disparity of opportunities available to children of decaying cities and the booming suburbs. Consistently making connections between economics, psychology, commerce, sociology, and anthropology, American Childhoods is rich with insight into the elusive world of children. Grounded firmly in social and cultural history and written in lucid, accessible prose, the book demonstrates how children's experiences have varied dramatically through time and across space, and how the idea of childhood has meant vastly different things to different groups in American society.
Book Synopsis The End of American Childhood by : Paula S. Fass
Download or read book The End of American Childhood written by Paula S. Fass and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2017-11-07 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How American childhood and parenting have changed from the nation's founding to the present The End of American Childhood takes a sweeping look at the history of American childhood and parenting, from the nation's founding to the present day. Renowned historian Paula Fass shows how, since the beginning of the American republic, independence, self-definition, and individual success have informed Americans' attitudes toward children. But as parents today hover over every detail of their children's lives, are the qualities that once made American childhood special still desired or possible? Placing the experiences of children and parents against the backdrop of social, political, and cultural shifts, Fass challenges Americans to reconnect with the beliefs that set the American understanding of childhood apart from the rest of the world. Fass examines how freer relationships between American children and parents transformed the national culture, altered generational relationships among immigrants, helped create a new science of child development, and promoted a revolution in modern schooling. She looks at the childhoods of icons including Margaret Mead and Ulysses S. Grant—who, as an eleven-year-old, was in charge of his father's fields and explored his rural Ohio countryside. Fass also features less well-known children like ten-year-old Rose Cohen, who worked in the drudgery of nineteenth-century factories. Bringing readers into the present, Fass argues that current American conditions and policies have made adolescence socially irrelevant and altered children's road to maturity, while parental oversight threatens children's competence and initiative. Showing how American parenting has been firmly linked to historical changes, The End of American Childhood considers what implications this might hold for the nation's future.
Book Synopsis States of Childhood by : Jennifer S. Light
Download or read book States of Childhood written by Jennifer S. Light and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2020-07-14 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A number of curious communities sprang up across the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century: simulated cities, states, and nations in which children played the roles of legislators, police officers, bankers, journalists, shopkeepers, and other adults. They performed real work—passing laws, growing food, and constructing buildings, among other tasks—inside virtual worlds. In this book, Jennifer Light examines the phenomena of “junior republics” and argues that they marked the transition to a new kind of “sheltered” childhood for American youth. Banished from the labor force and public life, children inhabited worlds that mirrored the one they had left. Light describes the invention of junior republics as independent institutions and how they were later established at schools, on playgrounds, in housing projects, and on city streets, as public officials discovered children's role playing helped their bottom line. The junior republic movement aligned with cutting-edge developmental psychology and educational philosophy, and complemented the era's fascination with models and miniatures, shaping educational and recreational programs across the nation. Light's account of how earlier generations distinguished "real life" from role playing reveals a hidden history of child labor in America and offers insights into the deep roots of such contemporary concepts as gamification, play labor, and virtuality.
Book Synopsis African American Childhoods by : W. King
Download or read book African American Childhoods written by W. King and published by Palgrave Macmillan. This book was released on 2008-10-17 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: African American Childhoods seeks to fill a vacuum in the study of African American children. Recovering the voices or experiences of these children, we observe nuances in their lives based on their legal status, class standing, and social development.
Book Synopsis Beyond the Boundaries of Childhood by : Crystal Lynn Webster
Download or read book Beyond the Boundaries of Childhood written by Crystal Lynn Webster and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2021-04-27 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For all that is known about the depth and breadth of African American history, we still understand surprisingly little about the lives of African American children, particularly those affected by northern emancipation. But hidden in institutional records, school primers and penmanship books, biographical sketches, and unpublished documents is a rich archive that reveals the social and affective worlds of northern Black children. Drawing evidence from the urban centers of Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, Crystal Webster's innovative research yields a powerful new history of African American childhood before the Civil War. Webster argues that young African Americans were frequently left outside the nineteenth century's emerging constructions of both race and childhood. They were marginalized in the development of schooling, ignored in debates over child labor, and presumed to lack the inherent innocence ascribed to white children. But Webster shows that Black children nevertheless carved out physical and social space for play, for learning, and for their own aspirations. Reading her sources against the grain, Webster reveals a complex reality for antebellum Black children. Lacking societal status, they nevertheless found meaningful agency as historical actors, making the most of the limited freedoms and possibilities they enjoyed.
Book Synopsis American Childhood by : Anne Scott MacLeod
Download or read book American Childhood written by Anne Scott MacLeod and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 1995-10-01 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this collection of fourteen essays, Anne Scott MacLeod locates and describes shifts in the American concept of childhood as those changes are suggested in nearly two centuries of children's stories. Most of the essays concern domestic novels for children or adolescents--stories set more or less in the time of their publication. Some essays also draw creatively on childhood memoirs, travel writings that contain foreigners' observations of American children, and other studies of children's literature. The topics on which MacLeod writes range from the current politicized marketplace for children's books, to the reestablishment (and reconfiguration) of the family in recent children's fiction, to the ways that literature challenges or enforces the idealization of children. MacLeod sometimes considers a single author's canon, as when she discusses the feminism of the Nancy Drew mystery series or the Orwellian vision of Robert Cormier. At other times, she looks at a variety of works within a particular period, for example, Jacksonian America, the post-World War II decade, or the 1970s. MacLeod also examines books that were once immensely popular but currently have no appreciable readership--the Horatio Alger stories, for example--and finds fresh, intriguing ways to view the work of such well-known writers as Louisa May Alcott, Beverly Cleary, and Paul Zindel.
Download or read book Huck’s Raft written by Steven Mintz and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2006-04-30 with total page 472 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Like Huck’s raft, the experience of American childhood has been both adventurous and terrifying. For more than three centuries, adults have agonized over raising children while children have followed their own paths to development and expression. Now, Steven Mintz gives us the first comprehensive history of American childhood encompassing both the child’s and the adult’s tumultuous early years of life. Underscoring diversity through time and across regions, Mintz traces the transformation of children from the sinful creatures perceived by Puritans to the productive workers of nineteenth-century farms and factories, from the cosseted cherubs of the Victorian era to the confident consumers of our own. He explores their role in revolutionary upheaval, westward expansion, industrial growth, wartime mobilization, and the modern welfare state. Revealing the harsh realities of children’s lives through history—the rigors of physical labor, the fear of chronic ailments, the heartbreak of premature death—he also acknowledges the freedom children once possessed to discover their world as well as themselves. Whether at work or play, at home or school, the transition from childhood to adulthood has required generations of Americans to tackle tremendously difficult challenges. Today, adults impose ever-increasing demands on the young for self-discipline, cognitive development, and academic achievement, even as the influence of the mass media and consumer culture has grown. With a nod to the past, Mintz revisits an alternative to the goal-driven realities of contemporary childhood. An odyssey of psychological self-discovery and growth, this book suggests a vision of childhood that embraces risk and freedom—like the daring adventure on Huck’s raft.
Book Synopsis A Lucky American Childhood by : Paul Engle
Download or read book A Lucky American Childhood written by Paul Engle and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 1996-05 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Born in 1908, Paul Engle grew up the son of a livery stable keeper. As he writes in his dedication to this loving account, "I had a lucky life. Such a way will never be lived here again. It has gone with the wild buffalo skinners and the Indian fighters, with my mother's hands whose tough calluses tore the sheets as she made my bed, with that marvelous rich reek of harnesses and saddle leather, of horse manure and sweat which I happily breathed each day". The anecdotes are rich and captivating. As a boy Engle sold newspapers to factory workers at Quaker Oats and followed his route out to the city limits where coyotes howled in the woods. He helped his father break and train gaited saddle horses in all weathers and seasons. From family holidays with lively activities, uncles, aunts, and memorable foods to his job in the neighborhood drugstore dispensing castor oil, sodas, tonics, and linaments, Engle's absorbing stories capture the characters and atmosphere of American life just after the turn of the century.
Book Synopsis South American Childhoods by : Ana Vergara del Solar
Download or read book South American Childhoods written by Ana Vergara del Solar and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-09-06 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edited volume concerns childhood throughout South America after the 1990s, a period and territory of special complexity marked by the beginning—or intensification of—political neoliberalisation throughout the region. The decade also saw the ratification of the International Convention on Rights of the Child and post-dictatorial processes of political and social democratisation. The editors of this book explore the tension this juxtaposition has generated between logics and processes of dissimilar orientations. Within this framework, chapters investigate the neoliberalisation and institutionalisation of children’s rights and consider similarities and differences with respect to other regions. They also explore changes in schools and educational systems, as well as the phenomenon of the internal and external child and family migration.
Download or read book American Chica written by Marie Arana and published by Dial Press. This book was released on 2011-07-06 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In her father’s Peruvian family, Marie Arana was taught to be a proper lady, yet in her mother’s American family she learned to shoot a gun, break a horse, and snap a chicken’s neck for dinner. Arana shuttled easily between these deeply separate cultures for years. But only when she immigrated with her family to the United States did she come to understand that she was a hybrid American whose cultural identity was split in half. Coming to terms with this split is at the heart of this graceful, beautifully realized portrait of a child who “was a north-south collision, a New World fusion. An American Chica.” Here are two vastly different landscapes: Peru—earthquake-prone, charged with ghosts of history and mythology—and the sprawling prairie lands of Wyoming. In these rich terrains resides a colorful cast of family members who bring Arana’s historia to life...her proud grandfather who one day simply stopped coming down the stairs; her dazzling grandmother, “clicking through the house as if she were making her way onstage.” But most important are Arana’s parents: he a brilliant engineer, she a gifted musician. For more than half a century these two passionate, strong-willed people struggled to overcome the bicultural tensions in their marriage and, finally, to prevail.
Book Synopsis The Vietnam War in American Childhood by : Joel P. Rhodes
Download or read book The Vietnam War in American Childhood written by Joel P. Rhodes and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2019 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A sort of nebulous sad thing happening forever and ever : childhood socialization to the Vietnam War -- Why couldn't I fight in a nice, simpler war? : comic books and Mad magazine -- Who bombed Santa's workshop? : militarizing play with commercial war toys -- One of the most agonizing years of my life : knowing someone in Vietnam -- Mom tried to make it for us like he wasn't even gone : father separation and reunion -- God bless dad wherever you are : POW/MIA -- How come the flags around town aren't flying at half-mast? : Gold Star children -- Yes, I am My Lai, but My Lai is better than Viet Cong! : Vietnamese adoptees and Amerasians.
Book Synopsis Racial Innocence by : Robin Bernstein
Download or read book Racial Innocence written by Robin Bernstein and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2011-12 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner, Outstanding Book Award, Association for Theatre in Higher Education Winner, Grace Abbott Best Book Award, Society for the History of Children and Youth Winner, Book Award, Children's Literature Association Winner, Lois P. Rudnick Book Prize, New England American Studies Association Winner, IRSCL Award, International Research Society for Children's Literature Runner-Up, John Hope Franklin Publication Prize, American Studies Association Honorable Mention, Book Award, Society for the Study of American Women Writers Part of the American Literatures Initiative Series In Racial Innocence, Robin Bernstein argues that the concept of "childhood innocence" has been central to U.S. racial formation since the mid-nineteenth century. Children--white ones imbued with innocence, black ones excluded from it, and others of color erased by it--figured pivotally in sharply divergent racial agendas from slavery and abolition to antiblack violence and the early civil rights movement. Bernstein takes up a rich archive including books, toys, theatrical props, and domestic knickknacks which she analyzes as "scriptive things" that invite or prompt historically-located practices while allowing for resistance and social improvisation. Integrating performance studies with literary and visual analysis, Bernstein offers singular readings of theatrical productions from blackface minstrelsy to Uncle Tom's Cabin to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz literary works by Joel Chandler Harris, Harriet Wilson, and Frances Hodgson Burnett; material culture including Topsy pincushions, Uncle Tom and Little Eva handkerchiefs, and Raggedy Ann dolls; and visual texts ranging from fine portraiture to advertisements for lard substitute. Throughout, Bernstein shows how "innocence" gradually became the exclusive province of white children--until the Civil Rights Movement succeeded not only in legally desegregating public spaces, but in culturally desegregating the concept of childhood itself. Check out the author's blog for the book here.
Book Synopsis Innocent Weapons by : Margaret Peacock
Download or read book Innocent Weapons written by Margaret Peacock and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2014 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Innocent Weapons: The Soviet and American Politics of Childhood in the Cold War
Book Synopsis A Disease Called Childhood by : Marilyn Wedge
Download or read book A Disease Called Childhood written by Marilyn Wedge and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2015-03-24 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A surprising new look at the rise of ADHD in America, arguing for a better paradigm for diagnosing and treating our children In 1987, only 3 percent of American children were diagnosed with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, also known as ADHD. By 2000, that number jumped to 7 percent, and in 2014 the number rose to an alarming 11 percent. To combat the disorder, two thirds of these children, some as young as three years old, are prescribed powerful stimulant drugs like Ritalin and Adderall to help them cope with symptoms. Meanwhile, ADHD rates have remained relatively low in other countries such as France, Finland, and the United Kingdom, and Japan, where the number of children diagnosed with and medicated for ADHD is a measly 1 percent or less. Alarmed by this trend, family therapist Marilyn Wedge set out to understand how ADHD became an American epidemic. If ADHD were a true biological disorder of the brain, why was the rate of diagnosis so much higher in America than it was abroad? Was a child's inattention or hyperactivity indicative of a genetic defect, or was it merely the expression of normal behavior or a reaction to stress? Most important, were there alternative treatments that could help children thrive without resorting to powerful prescription drugs? In an effort to answer these questions, Wedge published an article in Psychology Today entitled "Why French Kids Don't Have ADHD" in which she argued that different approaches to therapy, parenting, diet, and education may explain why rates of ADHD are so much lower in other countries. In A Disease Called Childhood, Wedge examines how myriad factors have come together, resulting in a generation addictied to stimulant drugs, and a medical system that encourages diagnosis instead of seeking other solutions. Writing with empathy and dogged determination to help parents and children struggling with an ADHD diagnosis, Wedge draws on her decades of experience, as well as up-to-date research, to offer a new perspective on ADHD. Instead of focusing only on treating symptoms, she looks at the various potential causes of hyperactivity and inattention in children and examines behavioral and environmental, as opposed to strictly biological, treatments that have been proven to help. In the process, Wedge offers parents, teachers, doctors, and therapists a new paradigm for child mental health--and a better, happier, and less medicated future for American children
Book Synopsis Unequal Childhoods by : Annette Lareau
Download or read book Unequal Childhoods written by Annette Lareau and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2003-09-11 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Class does make a difference in the lives and futures of American children. Drawing on in-depth observations of black and white middle-class, working-class, and poor families, Unequal Childhoods explores this fact, offering a picture of childhood today. Here are the frenetic families managing their children's hectic schedules of "leisure" activities; and here are families with plenty of time but little economic security. Lareau shows how middle-class parents, whether black or white, engage in a process of "concerted cultivation" designed to draw out children's talents and skills, while working-class and poor families rely on "the accomplishment of natural growth," in which a child's development unfolds spontaneously—as long as basic comfort, food, and shelter are provided. Each of these approaches to childrearing brings its own benefits and its own drawbacks. In identifying and analyzing differences between the two, Lareau demonstrates the power, and limits, of social class in shaping the lives of America's children. The first edition of Unequal Childhoods was an instant classic, portraying in riveting detail the unexpected ways in which social class influences parenting in white and African-American families. A decade later, Annette Lareau has revisited the same families and interviewed the original subjects to examine the impact of social class in the transition to adulthood.
Book Synopsis Little Cold Warriors by : Victoria M. Grieve
Download or read book Little Cold Warriors written by Victoria M. Grieve and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-06-21 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Both conservative and liberal Baby Boomers have romanticized the 1950s as an age of innocence--of pickup ball games and Howdy Doody, when mom stayed home and the economy boomed. These nostalgic narratives obscure many other histories of postwar childhood, one of which has more in common with the war years and the sixties, when children were mobilized and politicized by the U.S. government, private corporations, and individual adults to fight the Cold War both at home and abroad. Children battled communism in its various guises on television, the movies, and comic books; they practiced safety drills, joined civil preparedness groups, and helped to build and stock bomb shelters in the backyard. Children collected coins for UNICEF, exchanged art with other children around the world, prepared for nuclear war through the Boy and Girl Scouts, raised funds for Radio Free Europe, sent clothing to refugee children, and donated books to restock the diminished library shelves of war-torn Europe. Rather than rationing and saving, American children were encouraged to spend and consume in order to maintain the engine of American prosperity. In these capacities, American children functioned as ambassadors, cultural diplomats, and representatives of the United States. Victoria M. Grieve examines this politicized childhood at the peak of the Cold War, and the many ways children and ideas about childhood were pressed into political service. Little Cold Warriors combines approaches from childhood studies and diplomatic history to understand the cultural Cold War through the activities and experiences of young Americans.
