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.
Download or read book Childhood and Innocence in American Culture written by James M. Curtis and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2023 with total page 183 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection approaches the deconstruction of American "childhood" from a wide variety of critical, interdisciplinary lenses and gestures toward the construction of a more realistic, twenty-first century definition of "childhood"--one which is defined by the real-life struggles of childhood and not by romanticized notions of "innocence."
Download or read book Childhood and Innocence in American Culture written by James M. Curtis and published by Children and Youth in Popular Culture. This book was released on 2023 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection approaches the deconstruction of American "childhood" from a wide variety of critical, interdisciplinary lenses and gestures toward the construction of a more realistic, twenty-first century definition of "childhood"-one which is defined by the real-life strugg...
Download or read book The Children s Culture Reader written by Henry Jenkins and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 1998-10 with total page 542 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A reader on children's culture
Download or read book Erotic Innocence written by James Russell Kincaid and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores the current preoccupation with child molesting and children's sexuality and the ways that this degree of fascination is itself suspect.
Download or read book The Cute and the Cool written by Gary Cross and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2004-04-01 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The twentieth century was, by any reckoning, the age of the child in America. Today, we pay homage at the altar of childhood, heaping endless goods on the young, reveling in memories of a more innocent time, and finding solace in the softly backlit memories of our earliest years. We are, the proclamation goes, just big kids at heart. And, accordingly, we delight in prolonging and inflating the childhood experiences of our offspring. In images of the naughty but nice Buster Brown and the coquettish but sweet Shirley Temple, Americans at mid-century offered up a fantastic world of treats, toys, and stories, creating a new image of the child as "cute." Holidays such as Christmas and Halloween became blockbuster affairs, vehicles to fuel the bedazzled and wondrous innocence of the adorable child. All this, Gary Cross illustrates, reflected the preoccupations of a more gentle and affluent culture, but it also served to liberate adults from their rational and often tedious worlds of work and responsibility. But trouble soon entered paradise. The "cute" turned into "cool" as children, following their parental example, embraced the gift of fantasy and unrestrained desire to rebel against the saccharine excesses of wondrous innocence in deliberate pursuit of the anti-cute. Movies, comic books, and video games beckoned to children with the allures of an often violent, sexualized, and increasingly harsh worldview. Unwitting and resistant accomplices to this commercial transformation of childhood, adults sought-over and over again, in repeated and predictable cycles-to rein in these threats in a largely futile jeremiad to preserve the old order. Thus, the cute child-deliberately manufactured and cultivated--has ironically fostered a profoundly troubled ambivalence toward youth and child rearing today. Expertly weaving his way through the cultural artifacts, commercial currents, and parenting anxieties of the previous century, Gary Cross offers a vibrant and entirely fresh portrait of the forces that have defined American childhood.
Download or read book Innocent Experiments written by Rebecca Onion and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2016-10-04 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the 1950s to the digital age, Americans have pushed their children to live science-minded lives, cementing scientific discovery and youthful curiosity as inseparable ideals. In this multifaceted work, historian Rebecca Onion examines the rise of informal children's science education in the twentieth century, from the proliferation of home chemistry sets after World War I to the century-long boom in child-centered science museums. Onion looks at how the United States has increasingly focused its energies over the last century into producing young scientists outside of the classroom. She shows that although Americans profess to believe that success in the sciences is synonymous with good citizenship, this idea is deeply complicated in an era when scientific data is hotly contested and many Americans have a conflicted view of science itself. These contradictions, Onion explains, can be understood by examining the histories of popular science and the development of ideas about American childhood. She shows how the idealized concept of "science" has moved through the public consciousness and how the drive to make child scientists has deeply influenced American culture.
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
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 288 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.
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.
Download or read book Racial Innocence written by Robin Bernstein and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "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." -- Publisher's description.
Download or read book Growing Up with America written by Emily A. Murphy and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2020-09-15 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When D. H. Lawrence wrote his classic study of American literature, he claimed that youth was the “true myth” of America. Beginning from this assertion, Emily A. Murphy traces the ways that youth began to embody national hopes and fears at a time when the United States was transitioning to a new position of world power. In the aftermath of World War II, persistent calls for the nation to “grow up” and move beyond innocence became common, and the child that had long served as a symbol of the nation was suddenly discarded in favor of a rebellious adolescent. This era marked the beginning of a crisis of identity, where literary critics and writers both sought to redefine U.S. national identity in light of the nation’s new global position. The figure of the adolescent is central to an understanding of U.S. national identity, both past and present, and of the cultural forms (e.g., literature) that participate in the ongoing process of representing the diverse experiences of Americans. In tracing the evolution of this youthful figure, Murphy revisits classics of American literature, including J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye and Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, alongside contemporary bestsellers. The influence of the adolescent on some of America’s greatest writers demonstrates the endurance of the myth that Lawrence first identified in 1923 and signals a powerful link between youth and one of the most persistent questions for the nation: What does it mean to be an American?
Download or read book Defenders of Childhood Innocence written by Mark I. West and published by . This book was released on 1983 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Stealing Innocence written by NA NA and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-04-30 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Continuing his ongoing social critique, Henry Giroux now looks at the way corporate culture is encroaching on the lives of children by exploring three myths prevalent in our society: that the triumph of democracy is related to the triumph of the market; that children are unaffected by power and politics; that teaching and learning are no longer linked to improving the world. Looking at childhood beauty pageants, school shootings and the omnipresent nihilistic chic of advertising, Giroux paints a disturbing picture of the world surrounding our children. Ultimately, he turns to the work of Antonio Gramsci, Paulo Freire and Stuart Hall for lessons about how we can reinstitute a realistic childhood for our children.
Download or read book The Rage of Innocence written by Kristin Henning and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2021-09-28 with total page 513 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A brilliant analysis of the foundations of racist policing in America: the day-to-day brutalities, largely hidden from public view, endured by Black youth growing up under constant police surveillance and the persistent threat of physical and psychological abuse "Storytelling that can make people understand the racial inequities of the legal system, and...restore the humanity this system has cruelly stripped from its victims.” —New York Times Book Review Drawing upon twenty-five years of experience representing Black youth in Washington, D.C.’s juvenile courts, Kristin Henning confronts America’s irrational, manufactured fears of these young people and makes a powerfully compelling case that the crisis in racist American policing begins with its relationship to Black children. Henning explains how discriminatory and aggressive policing has socialized a generation of Black teenagers to fear, resent, and resist the police, and she details the long-term consequences of racism that they experience at the hands of the police and their vigilante surrogates. She makes clear that unlike White youth, who are afforded the freedom to test boundaries, experiment with sex and drugs, and figure out who they are and who they want to be, Black youth are seen as a threat to White America and are denied healthy adolescent development. She examines the criminalization of Black adolescent play and sexuality, and of Black fashion, hair, and music. She limns the effects of police presence in schools and the depth of police-induced trauma in Black adolescents. Especially in the wake of the recent unprecedented, worldwide outrage at racial injustice and inequality, The Rage of Innocence is an essential book for our moment.
Download or read book The Queer Aesthetics of Childhood written by Hannah Dyer and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2019-11-08 with total page 171 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 2020 Choice Outstanding Academic Title In The Queer Aesthetics of Childhood, Hannah Dyer offers a study of how children’s art and art about childhood can forecast new models of social life that redistribute care, belonging, and political value. Dyer suggests that childhood’s cultural expressions offer insight into the persisting residues of colonial history, nation building, homophobia, and related violence. Drawing from queer and feminist theory, psychoanalysis, settler-colonial studies, and cultural studies, this book helps to explain how some theories of childhood can hurt children. Dyer’s analysis moves between diverse sites and scales, including photographs and an art installation, children’s drawings after experiencing war in Gaza, a novel about gay love and childhood trauma, and debates in sex-education. In the cultural formations of art, she finds new theories of childhood that attend to the knowledge, trauma, fortitude and experience that children might possess. In addressing aggressions against children, ambivalences towards child protection, and the vital contributions children make to transnational politics, she seeks new and queer theories of childhood.
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.
