Tutorial Rooms

Tutorial programme

	Week 2: Historians and Childhood	Reading: Llyod Demause, "The Evolution of Childhood," The History of Childhood (NJ: Jason Aronson Inc, 1995).   Linda Pollock, Forgotten Children (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 143-162 & 262-271. Additional Reading	What is DeMause's view of the history of childhood? What are Pollock's criticisms of DeMause? What evidence do DeMause and Pollock rely on to support their arguments? What approach do they take to interpreting that evidence?
	Week 3: The Leopold and Loeb Case	Reading: Paula Fass, "Making and Remaking an Event: The Leopold and Loeb Case in American Culture," Journal of American History 80, 3 (December 1993): 919-940 Doctors White, Healy, Glueck and Hamill, "Joint Medical Report," from Mckernan, The Amazing Crime and Trial of Leopold and Loeb (1924) Additional Reading	What ideas about childhood are evident in the coverage of the Leopold and Loeb case? Why did the case provide an opportunity to disseminate new ideas about childhood? How did Americans respond to the case, and to its implications for understandings of childhood?
	Week 4: Mothers & Childrearing Advice	Letters from Mothers to the U.S. Government Children's Bureau, from Molly Ladd-Taylor, Raising a Baby the Government Way (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1986)	What can we learn about parent-child relations and child-rearing from advice literature? How did American mothers respond to the new experts who appeared in the early twentieth century?
	Week 5: Lewis Hine, Photographs, and the Campaign against Child Labour	Photographs [NOTE: click on the photographs to enlarge them] Alan Trachtenberg, "Camera Work/ Social Work," in Reading American Photographs (New York: Hill and Wang, 1989), 190-209. Additional Reading	What do Hine's photographs tell us about children's experience of work? What ideas about childhood do the photographs reflect? How did the photographs contribute to the political campaign against child labour?
	Week 6: Schooling & Americanization	Mary Antin, 'The schools of an immigrant Russian girl, c.1894' Leonard Covello, 'An Italian immigrant boy in NYC school, c.1900' Don Talayesva, 'A Hopi boy at an Indian School, c.1899' Polingaysi Qoyawayma, 'A Hopi girl's schooling, c1906' [All from Robert H Bremner (ed), Children and Youth in America: A documentary History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971)]	What ideas about childhood underlay efforts to Americanize school children at the turn of the twentieth century? How did children respond to schooling intended to Americanize them? Were the experiences of immigrant and Native American children different?
	Week 7: Children and the Movies	Paul Cressey, The Community ~ A Social Setting for the Motion Picture (c1930), in Garth Jowlett et al, Children and the Movies: Media Influence and the Payne Fund Controversy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 160-216.     Additional Reading	What role did movie theaters play in children's lives? How did that context influence children's experience of movies? What impact did movies have on children in the 1920s? How important were movies in educating children about topics such as American values, life outside the neighborhood, crime and sex? Read the children's responses apart from Cressey's interpretation -- do they support his argument? Can they be interpreted in other ways?
	Week 8: Shirley Temple	Graham Greene, Review of Wee Willie Winkie, in The Graham Greene Film Reader.   Charles Ekert, "Shirley Temple and the House of Rockefeller," in Stardom: Industry of Desire, ed. Christine Gledhill (New York: Routledge, 1991), pp. 60-73. Lori Merish, "Cuteness and Commodity Aesthetics: Tom Thumb and Shirley Temple," in Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body, ed. Rosemarie Thomson (New York: New York University Press, 1996).	What ideas about childhood are reflected in the figure of Shirley Temple? What did Shirley Temple symbolize for Americans in the 1930s?
	Week 9: Barbie	Erica Rand, "Older Heads on Younger Bodies," in Jenkins, The Children's Culture Reader, 382-93 Wendy Singer Jones, "Barbie's Body Project," 91-107 Yona Zeldis McDonough, "Sex and the Single Doll," 111-13 Ann duCille, "Barbie in Black and White," 127-142 Sherrie Inness, "Barbie Gets a Bum Rap: Barbie's Place in the World of Dolls," 177-81 Meg Wolitzer, "Barbie as Boy Toy," 207-10 (All from Yona Zeldis McDonough, ed., The Barbie Chronicles)	What ideas about childhood are reflected in Barbie? How far is the meaning of Barbie established by the doll's manufacturers and marketers rather than by children? What impact does Barbie have on the children who play with her? What can we learn about the history of childhood from toys?
	Week 10: Adolescents and the Body	Joan Jacobs Brumberg, "Body Projects," from The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls (New York: Random House, 1997), pp. 97-137 & images 22-60. Stephen Hall, "The Bully in the Mirror," New York Times Magazine (22 August 1999).   Additional Reading	What place did the body have in children's experience of adolescence in the twentieth century? Did the body have a different place in the experiences of boys and girls? What place did the body have in expert understandings of adolescence? How far did children, rather than adults, give the adolescent body meaning? What are the strengths and weaknesses of diaries and interviews as evidence of the experience of adolescence?
	Week 11: Watching TV	Joshua Meyrowitz ""The Adultlike Child and the Childlike Adult: Socialization in an Electronic Age," in Growing up in America: historical experiences, ed. Harvey J. Graff (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1987), 612-631. Lynn Spigel "Seducing the Innocent: Childhood and Television in Postwar America," in The Children's Culture Reader, ed. Henry Jenkins (NY: NY University Press, 1998), 110-135. Additional Reading	What impact do adults think that television has had on children? How have those concerned changed since the introduction of television? What ideas about childhood underlie the concerns about the effects of television? What evidence is used to support claims about the effect of television on children? Is television causing childhood to 'disappear?'
	Week 12: Growing Up Black	Anne Moody, Coming of Age in Mississippi, chapters 1, 3, 5, 7-8, 10-11, 13. OR Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, chapters 1-5.   NOTE: Only the first two chapters of each of the assigned readings are in the course reader. The remaining chapters are available in Special Reserve. Additional Reading	What role did race play in how Anne Moody or Malcolm X grew up? How important are gender and environment (the rural south or the urban north) in shaping the experience of growing up black? Do these autobiographies support the argument made in the Brown decision that segregation was harmful to the development of black children? To what extent do the authors' adult attitudes shape their accounts of their childhood?
	Week 13: Why Do They Do It?: Race, Sex and Teenage Pregnancy	Enid Smith, "Analysis and Interpretation of Twenty-five Cases of Unmarried Mothers," from A Study of Twenty-five Adolescent Unmarried mothers in New York City (Salvation Army Women's Home and Hospital, 1935) Kristin Luker, "Why do they do it?" in Dubious Conceptions: The Politics of Teenage Pregnancy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), pp. 134-174. Additional Reading	Why do American teenagers have sex, and become pregnant? How far do teenagers and adults offer the same explanations of teenage sexuality and teenage pregnancy? How far do whites and blacks offer the same explanations of teenage sexuality and teenage pregnancy? How similar are the explanations of teenage sexuality and teenage pregnancy offered in the 1930s to those offered in the 1980s and 1990s?