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.
Exploring the entire scope of American history from the perspective of children and adolescents and their experiences, a study of American childhood revisits an alternative to the goal-driven realities of contemporary childhood and suggests ...
This new book is [Annie Dillard's] best, a joyous ode to her own happy childhood." — Chicago Tribune A book that instantly captured the hearts of readers across the country, An American Childhood is Pulitzer Prize-winning author Annie ...
11 Susan Ware, Holding Their Own: American Women in the 1930s (Boston, 1982), 8, 9; Caplow et al., Middletown Families, 66,105, 120; Wecter, Age of the Great Depression, 3132. 12 Refer to note 11; Samuel A. Stouffer, Research Memorandum ...
Beidler explains why this matters and describes the other rivercraft that appear in the book.
Free Teacher's Guide available for Childhood in America! Childhood in America is a unique compendium of sources on American childhood that has many options for classroom adoptions and can be tailored to individual course needs.
Robert W. Wells, This Is Milwaukee (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1970), 238–39. 15. ... James G. Cibulka and Frederick I. Olson, “The Organization and Politics of the Milwaukee Public School System, 1920–1986,” in Rury and Cassell, ...
poker-faced man and the unruffled woman echoed earlier cultural anxieties about “confidence men” and “painted women” in antebellum America. Much like the trickster figure of various folk cultures, the confidence man was the seducer who ...
As the hopes and expectations of the home front children changed, so did their country's. In telling the story of a generation, Tuttle provides a vital missing piece of American cultural history.
... for the historical background; and Franklin E. Zimring, American Juvenile Justice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), for the legal framework. 91. Rickie Solinger, Wake Up Little Susie: Single Pregnancy and Race before Roe v.
Identifying Information: View-Master Maker: William Gruber and Harold Graves Manufacturer: Sawyer's, GAF, View-Master Ideal, Tyco Toys, Fisher-Price Date: 1939 Collection of Susan A. Fletcher ...