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Events
Jun. 30 | 2012 Bode-Pearson Prize
Nominations for the 2012 Bode-Pearson Prize for Outstanding Contributions to American Studies due
Jun. 30 | 2012 Mary C. Turpie Prize
Nominations for the 2012 Mary C. Turpie Prize for Outstanding Contributions to American Studies Teaching, Advising, and Program Development due
Oct. 1 | Travel Grants for Graduate Students
For submission guidelines, click here
Resources: Abstracts of American Studies Dissertations
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Mickenberg, Julia L. "Educating Dissent: Children’s Literature and the Left, 1935-1965," University of Minnesota, July 2000.
The ways in which the Cold War and McCarthyism circumscribed dissent are well known; less documented are the opportunities they inadvertently created. My work uses children’s literature as a lens to explore the pedagogical aspects of the popular front. It suggest the left’s far-reaching influence, through children, on post-war America. Through extensive archival research and dozens of interviews with former writers, editor, librarians and other practitioners, I document the institutional apparatus of children’s book publishing and the extent to which individuals and organizations on the left shaped its history. I discovered hundreds of children’s books by members of the popular-front left that were popular even during the McCarthy era. Twentieth-century discourses around childhood, socialization and education reveal, in fact, a left-of-center consensus around children, even as the wider political and cultural center of gravity shifted right in the mid-twentieth century. “Juvenile” writers, editors, librarians and clerks in children’s bookstores-almost all women-were part of a mid-century progressive formation that was generally ignored, and overlooked, by policers of culture. Although their work was devalued in a broader cultural hierarchy, these cultural workers had tremendous autonomy and authority within their limited sphere because of their presumably natural, “maternal” sense of what was “good” and “appropriate” for children. Thus, “patriotic” groups rarely scrutinized trade books, which were available through school libraries, despite right-wing crusades against “subversive” school textbooks. Cold War educational imperatives-stemming from Sputnik, the space race, and the need to distinguish “Americanism” from Communism-created demand for children’s books about science and history, subjects with particular appeal to the left. Since the early 1900s, socialists and others on the left wrote science books for children so that they might understand and someday control the means of production; many best-selling books published in the post-Sputnik panic were by Marxists. Similarly, Communists and other “progressives,” capitalizing on the demand of anti-Communist “civic-education” programs created for children’s books about American history, wrote counter-“consensus” biographies focused not on the “great men” of history but on African Americans, the working class and women. Sweeping changes in children’s literature and education after 1965 are their legacy.
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