ESSAY QUESTIONS

QUESTION:

KEY TEXTS (on Special Reserve)

1. What impact did turn-of-the-century social reformers have on the lives of poor, urban children?

Primary Sources:

Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives

Sophonisba Breckinridge and Edith Abbott, The Delinquent Child and the Home

Edwin Markham, Benjamin B. Lindsey, and George Creel, Children in bondage.

Robert H. Bremner, Children and youth in America: a documentary history


Texts:

Viviana Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children

David Nasaw, Children of the City At Work and At Play

Dominick Cavallo , Muscles and morals : organized playgrounds and urban reform, 1880-1920

Kriste Lindemeyer, "A Right to Childhood": The U.S. Children's Bureau and Child Welfare, 1912-1946

Susan Tiffin, In whose best interest?: Child welfare reform in the progressive era

David I. Macleod, Building character in the American boy: the Boy Scouts, YMCA, and their forerunners, 1870-1920

Jay Mechling, On my honor: Boy Scouts and the making of American youth

LeRoy Ashby, Saving the waifs: reformers and dependent children, 1890-1917

Peter C. Holloran, Boston's wayward children : social services for homeless children, 1830-1930

2. What role did teenage girls play in the 'invention' of female adolescence in the early twentieth century?

Primary Sources:

G. Stanley Hall, Adolescence: its psychology, and its relations to physiology, anthropology, sociology, sex, crime, religious and education


Texts:

Mary. Odem, Delinquent Daughters: Protecting and Policing Adolescent Female Sexuality in the United States, 1880-1920

Ruth Alexander, The Girl Problem: Female sexual delinquency in New York, 1900-1930

Jeffrey Moran, Teaching Sex: The Shaping of Adolescence in the 20th Century

Kathleen Jones, Taming the Troublesome Child

Regina Kunzel, Fallen Women, Problem Girls: Unmarried Mothers and the Professionalization of Social Work, 1890-1945

Joseph Kett, Rites of passage : adolescence in America, 1790 to the present

Paula Fass, The damned and the beautiful : American youth in the 1920's

Susan Cahn, "Spirited Youth or Fiends Incarnate: The Samarcand Arson Case and Female Adolescence in the American South," Journal of Women's History 9, 4 (1998): 152-180.

Stephen Robertson, "Age of Consent Law and the Making of Modern Childhood in New York City, 1886--1921," Journal of Social History 35, 4 (Summer 2002): 781-798.

3. To what extent did manufacturers and marketers determine children's desires and the meaning they gave to toys in the twentieth century?

Gary S. Cross, Kids' stuff: toys and the changing world of American childhood

Stephen Kline, Out of the garden: toys, TV, and children's culture in the age of marketing

Henry Jenkins, The Children's Culture Reader

Miriam Formanek-Brunell, Made to play house: dolls and the commercialization of American girlhood, 1830-1930

Bernard Mergen, "Made, Bought, and Stolen: Toys and the Culture of Childhood," in Elliott West and Paula Petrik, eds., Small worlds: children & adolescents in America, 1850-1950

Dan Fleming, Powerplay: toys as popular culture

Henry A. Giroux, The mouse that roared: Disney and the end of innocence

Mary Rogers, Barbie Culture

Ann duCille, "Toy Theory: Black Barbie and the Deep Play of Difference," in Skin Trade

Wendy Varney, "Of Men and Machines: Images of Masculinity in boys' toys," Feminist Studies 28, 1 (Spring 2002).

David Owen, "Where Toys Come From," Atlantic Monthly (October 1986)

 

4. What impact did reforms have on children's experience of schooling in the period before World War Two?

Primary Sources

Robert H. Bremner, Children and youth in America: a documentary history

Sol Cohen, Education in the United States: a documentary history


Texts

Lawrence A. Cremin, American education : the metropolitan experience, 1876-1980

David F. Labaree, The making of an American high school : the credentials market and the Central High School of Philadelphia, 1838-1939

David B. Tyack, The one best system : a history of American urban education

David B. Tyack, Tinkering toward utopia : a century of public school reform

Selma Cantor Berrol, Immigrants at school, New York City, 1898-1914

Michael B. Katz, Reconstructing American education

Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man

Paul Davis Chapman, Schools as sorters : Lewis M. Terman, applied psychology, and the intelligence testing movement, 1890-1930

5. To what extent, in the years before World War Two, did the system of dating give adolescents greater control of their heterosexual relationships?

Primary Sources:

D. A. Thom, Guiding the Adolescent

Winifred Richmond, The Adolescent Boy

Robert S. Lynd & Helen Merrell Lynd, Middletown [chapters on child-rearing and leisure]

Willard Walker, "The Rating and Dating Complex," American Sociological Review 2 (1937): 727-34


Texts

John Modell, Into One's Own: From Youth to adulthood in the U.S., 1920-1975

Beth Bailey, From Front Porch to Back Seat

Grace Palladino, Teenagers

Paula Fass, The damned and the beautiful: American youth in the 1920's

Kevin White, The First Sexual Revolution

Lucy Rollin, Twentieth-century teen culture by the decades: a reference guide

Pamela Haag, "In Search of the "Real Thing": Ideologies of Love, Modern Romance, and Women's Sexual Subjectivity in the United States, 1920-1940," Journal of the History of Sexuality 2, 4 (1992): 547-577

Michael Gordon, "Was Waller Ever Right? The Rating and Dating Complex Reconsidered," Journal of Marriage and the Family 43 (1981): 67-76.

6. What impact did the Depression of the 1930s have on children and/or youth?

Primary Sources:

Letters to Mrs Roosevelt

High Schools Face the Great Depression

Robert S. McElvaine, Down and Out in the Great Depression: Letters from the Forgotten Man

Kathleen Thompson and Hilary Mac Austin, Children of the Depression.

Robert S. Lynd & Helen Merrell Lynd, Middletown in transition: a study in cultural conflicts


Texts

Joseph M. Hawes, Children between the wars: American childhood, 1920-1940

Glen H. Elder, Jr., Children of the Great Depression: social change in life experience

Kriste Lindenmeyer, A right to childhood: the U.S. Children's Bureau and child welfare, 1912-46

John Modell, Into One's Own: From Youth to adulthood in the U.S., 1920-1975

Grace Palladino, Teenagers

Richard A. Reiman, The New Deal & American youth: ideas & ideals in a depression decade

Elizabeth Rose, A mother's job: the history of day care, 1890-1960

Cheryl Lynn Greenberg, "Or does it explode?": Black Harlem in the Great Depression

 

7. Did adolescents in movies become less rebellious after the 1950s?

Primary Sources:

MOVIES ~ -- you choose examples [one set of possibilities are those discussed in the secondary sources]


Texts:

James Gilbert, A cycle of outrage: America's reaction to the juvenile delinquent in the 1950s, chapters 10 & 11.

Jon Lewis, The road to romance & ruin : teen films and youth culture

Ruth M. Goldstein and Edith Zornow, The screen image of youth : movies about children and adolescents

David M. Considine, The cinema of adolescence

Thomas Doherty, Teenagers and teenpics : the juvenilization of American movies in the 1950s

Mark Thomas McGee and R.J. Robertson, The JD Films: Juvenile Delinquency in the Movies

Lesley Speed, "Tuesday's Gone: The Nostalgic Teen Film," Journal of Popular Film and Television 26.1 (Spring 1998): 24-32

Kathleen Sweeney, "Maiden USA: representing teenage girls in the '90s,"Afterimage 26, 4 (Jan-Feb 1999)

R. L. Rutsky. "Surfing the Other," Film Quarterly, 52, 4 (Summer 1999)

8. Why did child abuse re-emerge as a social problem in the post-war United States?

Primary Sources:

Robert H. Bremner, Children and youth in America: a documentary history (vol. 2 & vol. 3)

C. Henry Kempe et al, "The Battered Child Syndrome," Journal of the American medical Association 181, 1 (7 July 1962): 17-24

Leontine Young, Wednesday's Children


Texts

Barbara Nelson, Making an Issue of Child Abuse

Ian Hacking, "The Making and Molding of Child Abuse," Critical Inquiry 17, 2 (Winter 1991)

Lela Costin, Howard Jacob Karger and David Stoesz, The Politics of Child Abuse in America

Linda Gordon, Heroes of Their Own Lives

Elizabeth Pleck, Domestic tyranny: the making of social policy against family violence from colonial times to the present

Philip Jenkins, Moral Panic: Changing Concepts of the Child molester in Modern America

James Kincaid, Erotic Innocence: The Culture of Child Molesting

LeRoy Ashby, Endangered children: dependency, neglect, and abuse in American history

9. Why, in the 1960s, did white, middle-class college students directly challenge the politics and culture of their parents?

Primary Sources:

Free Speech Movement Web Site

The Port Huron Statement of Students for a Democratic Society

The Digger Archives


Texts:

Seymour Lipset, Berkeley student revolt; facts and interpretations

W. J. Rorabaugh, Berkeley at war, the 1960s

James Miller, Democracy is in the streets : from Port Huron to the siege of Chicago

Donald E. Phillips, Student protest, 1960-1970 : an analysis of the issues and speeches

Charles Kaiser, 1968 in America : music, politics, chaos, counterculture, and the shaping of a generation

Maurice Isserman, Michael Kazin, America divided : the civil war of the 1960s

Irwin Unger, The movement: a history of the American New Left, 1959-1972.

Thomas Frank, The conquest of cool: business culture, counterculture, and the rise of hip consumerism

Beth Bailey, Sex in the Heartland

Clayborne Carson, In struggle: SNCC and the Black awakening of the 1960s

Howard Zinn, SNCC, the new abolitionists.

Peter Braunstein and Michael William Doyle, Imagine Nation: The American Counterculture of th 1960s and '70s

Alexander Bloom, Long time gone : sixties America then and now

10. Why did some commentators interpret the changes in children's experiences and behavior in the last quarter of the twentieth century as 'the disappearance of childhood?'

Primary Sources:

Neil Postman, The Disappearance of Childhood

David Elkind, The hurried child: growing up too fast too soon

Marie Winn, Children without childhood

Michael Medved and Diane Medved, Saving Childhood

Tipper Gore, Raising PG kids in an X-rated society


Texts

Henry Jenkins, "Introduction," The Children's Culture Reader

Henry Giroux, Stealing innocence: youth, corporate power, and the politics of culture

Henry Giroux, Channel surfing: race talk and the destruction of today's youth

Ann Higonnet, Pictures of Innocence: The History and Crisis of Ideal Childhood

Alex Kotlowitz, There Are No Children Here

David Buckingham, After the death of childhood: growing up in the age of electronic media

Ron Powers, Tom and Huck don't live here anymore: childhood and murder in the heart of America

Judith Levine, Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex