HIST 460/560, CHILDHOOD
Recommended Readings

Demography, Theory, and General Texts with an Overview of the Field

Children's Defense Fund, “The State of America's Children Yearbook” (Washington, DC: Children's Defense Fund).

Paula S. Fass, ed., Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood, 3 vols. (New York: Macmillan Reference, 2003).

Allison James, Chris Jenks, and Alan Prout, Theorizing Childhood (New York: Teachers College Press, 1998).

Alan Prout and Allison James, “A New Paradigm for the Sociology of Childhood? Provenance, Promise and Problems,” in Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood: Contemporary Issues in the Sociological Study of Childhood (London: Falmer Press, 1990), 7-34.

Arlene Skolnick, ed., “Introduction” in Rethinking Childhood: Perspectives on Development and Society (Boston: Little, Brown, 1976), 1-15.

History (mostly modern U.S.)

Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood, trans. Robert Baldick (New York: Vintage Books, 1962).

LeRoy Ashby, Endangered Children: Dependency, Neglect, and Abuse in American History (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1997).

Alan M. Ball, And Now My Soul is Hardened: Abandoned Children in Soviet Russia, 1918-1930 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).

John Boswell, The Kindness of Strangers: The Abandonment of Children in Western Europe from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance (New York: Pantheon, 1988).

Sherri Broder, Tramps, Unfit Mothers, and Neglected Children: Negotiating the Family in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002).

Joan Jacobs Brumberg, The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls (New York: Vintage, 1997).

Joan Jacobs Brumberg, Fasting Girls: The Emergence of Anorexia Nervosa as a Modern Disease (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988).

Karin Clavert, Children in the House: The Material Culture of Early Childhood, 1600-1900 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1992).

E. Wayne Carp, Family Matters: Secrecy and Disclosure in the History of Adoption (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998).

Priscilla Ferguson Clement, Growing Pains: Children in the Industrial Age, 1850-1890 (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1997).

John Demos, A Little Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth Colony (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970).

Glen H. Jr. Elder, John Modell, and Ross D. Parke, eds., Children in Time and Place: Developmental and Historical Insights, Cambridge Studies in Social and Emotional Development (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

Paula S. Fass, Kidnapped: Child Abduction in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).

Paula S. Fass and Mary Ann Mason, eds., Childhood in America (New York: New York University Press, 1999).

Harvey J. Graff, Conflicting Paths: Growing Up in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995).

Michael Grossberg, A Judgment for Solomon: The D'Hauteveille Case and Legal Experience in Antebellum America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

Thomas Hine, The Rise and Fall of the American Teenager (New York: Perennial, 1999).

Wilma King, Stolen Childhood: Slave Youth in Nineteenth-Century America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995).

Kriste Lindenmeyer, "A Right to Childhood": The U.S. Children's Bureau and Child Welfare, 1912-46 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997).

K. Tsianina Lomawaima, They Called It Prairie Light: The Story of Chilocco Indian School (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994).

David I. Macleod, The Age of the Child: Children in America, 1890-1920 (New York: Twayne, 1998).

James Marten, The Children's Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998).

Steven Mintz. Huck's Raft: A History of American Childhood (Cambridge,: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004).

Mary Niall Mitchell. Raising Freedom's Child: Black Children and Visions of the Future after Slavery. New York: New York University Press, 2008.

Edmund S. Morgan, The Puritan Family: Religion and Domestic Relations in Seventeenth-Century New England (New York: Harper & Row, 1966).

Grace Palladino, Teenagers: An American History (New York: Basic Books, 1996).

Leslie Paris. Children's Nature: The Rise of the American Summer Camp(New York: New York University Press, 2008).

Jacqueline S. Reinier, From Virtue to Character: American Childhood, 1775-1850 (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1996).

Marie Jenkins Schwartz, Born in Bondage: Growing Up Enslaved in the Antebellum South (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000).

James W. Trent, Inventing the Feeble Mind: A History of Mental Retardation in the United States (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).

William M. Tuttle, Jr., 'Daddy's Gone to War': The Second World War in the Lives of America's Children (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).

Moral Value, Consumption, Popular Culture

Gary Cross, Kids’ Stuff: Toys and the Changing World of American Childhood (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997).

Lynn Hirschberg, “Desperate to Seem 16,” New York Times Magazine, September 5 1999, 42-49, 74, 77-79.

Henry Jenkins, ed., The Children's Culture Reader (New York: New York University Press, 1998).

Caroline F. Levander and Carol J. Singley, eds., The American Child: A Cultural Studies Reader (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003).

Thomas H. Murray, The Worth of a Child (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).

Margaret Jane Radin, Contested Commodities: The Trouble With Trade in Sex, Children, Body Parts, and Other Things (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996).

Steven Watts, The Magic Kingdom: Walt Disney and the American Way of Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997).

Viviana A. Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985).

Poverty, Social Policy, and Legal Regulation

William Ayers, A Kind and Just Parent: The Children of Juvenile Court (Boston: Beacon Press, 1997).

Elizabeth Bartholet, Nobody’s Children: Abuse and Neglect, Foster Drift, and the Adoption Alternative (Boston: Beacon Press, 1999).

Nina Bernstein, The Lost Children of Wilder (New York: Pantheon Books, 2001).

Elinor Burkett, The Baby Boon: How Family-Friendly America Cheats the Childless (New York: Free Press, 2000).

Hillary Rodham Clinton, It Takes a Village and Other Lessons Children Teach Us (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996).

Lisa Dodson, Don’t Call Us Out of Name: The Untold Lives of Women and Girls in Poor America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998).

William Finnegan, Cold New World: Growing Up in a Harder Country (New York: Random House, 1998).

Canada Geoffrey, Fist Stick Knife Gun: A Personal History of Violence in America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995)

Sylvia Ann Hewlett and Cornell West, The War Against Parents: What We Can Do for America's Beleaguered Moms and Dads (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1998).

Alex Kotlowitz, There Are No Children Here: The Story of Two Boys Growing Up in the Other America (New York: Doubleday, 1991).

Jonathan Kozol, Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation (New York: Harper Perennial, 1996).

Jonathan Kozol, Death at an Early Age: The Destruction of the Hearts and Minds of Negro Children in the Boston Public Schools (New York: Bantam, 1967).

Jonathan Kozol, Ordinary Resurrections: Children in the Years of Hope (New York: Crown, 2000).

Susan Levine. School Lunch Politics: The Surprising History of America's Favorite Welfare Program (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008.)

Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner, Children, Race, and Power: Kenneth and Mamie Clark's Northside Center (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996).

Mary Ann Mason, Arlene Skolnick, and Stephen D. Sugarman, eds., All Our Families: New Policies for a New Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).

Sonia Michel, Children's Interests, Mothers' Rights: The Shaping of America's Child Care Policy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999).

Martha Minow, ed., Family Matters: Readings on Family Lives and the Law (New York: New Press, 1993).

Blake Morrison, As If: A Crime, A Trial, A Question of Childhood (New York: Picador, 1997).

Ellen Ryerson, The Best-Laid Plans: America's Juvenile Court Experiment (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978).

Judith S. Wallerstein, Julia M. Lewis, and Sandra Blakeslee, The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce (New York: Hyperion, 2000).

Child Science and The Logic of Human Development

Adriana S. Benzaquén, Encounters with Wild Children: Temptation and Disappointment in the Study of Human Nature (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2006).

John Colapinto, As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl (New York: HarperCollins, 2000).

Hamilton Cravens, Before Head Start: The Iowa Station and America's Children (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993).

Rachel Devlin. Relative Intimacy: Fathers, Adolescent Daughters, and Postwar American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005).

Christa DeLuzio. Female Adolescence in American Scientific Thought, 1830-1930 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007).

Erik H. Erikson, Childhood and Society, 2nd, revised and enlarged ed. (New York: W.W. Norton, 1950).

Diane Eyer, Mother-Infant Bonding: A Scientific Fiction (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992).

Janet Lynne Golden. Message in a Bottle: The Making of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005).

Judith Rich Harris, The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do (New York: Touchstone, 1998).

Ann Hulbert, Raising America: Experts, Parents, and a Century of Advice About Children (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003).

Kathleen W. Jones, Taming the Troublesome Child: American Families, Child Guidance, and the Limits of Psychiatric Authority (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999).

Jerome Kagan, The Nature of the Child (New York: Basic Books, 1984).

Daniel J. Kindlon and Michael Thompson, Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys (New York: Ballantine, 2000).

Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, The Assault on Truth: Freud's Suppression of the Seduction Theory (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984).

Ross D. Parke et al., eds., A Century of Developmental Psychology (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 1994).

Mary Bray Pipher, Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Lives of Adolescent Girls (New York: Ballantine, 1995).

Nancy L. Segal, Entwined Lives: Twins and What They Tell Us About Human Behavior (New York: Plume, 1999).

Christina Hoff Sommers, The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000).

Peter N. Stearns, Anxious Parents: A History of Modern Childrearing in America (New York: New York University Press, 2003).

Fernando Vidal, Piaget Before Piaget (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994).

Childhood Cross-Culturally

Anne Fadiman, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures (New York: Hill and Wang, 1997).

Evelynn Maxine Hammonds, Childhood's Deadly Scourge: The Campaign to Control Diphtheria in New York City, 1880-1930 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).

Stephanie Coontz, ed., American Families: A Multicultural Reader (New York: Routledge, 1999).

Chanrithy Him, When Broken Glass Floats: Growing Up Under the Khmer Rouge (New York: W.W. Norton, 2000).

Annick Prieur, Mema's House, Mexico City: On Transvestites, Queens, and Machos (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).

Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Death Without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).

Carol B. Stack, All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community (New York: Harper Colophon, 1974).

Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Carolyn Sargent, eds., Small Wars: The Cultural Politics of Childhood (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).

Sharon Stephens, ed., Children and the Politics of Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).

Narratives and Fiction

Dorothy Allison, Bastard Out of Carolina (New York: Dutton, 1992).

Chelsea Cain, ed., Wild Child: Girlhoods in the Counterculture (Seattle: Seal Press, 1999).

Lorene Cary, Black Ice (New York: Knopf, 1991).

Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl (New York: Bantam, 1995).

Susanna Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted (New York: Turtle Bay Books, 1993).

Barbara Kingsolver, Pigs in Heaven (New York: Harper Perennial, 1993).

Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible (New York: HarperFlamingo, 1998).

Frank McCourt, Angela's Ashes (New York: Scribner, 1996).

Lisa Michaels, Split: A Counterculture Childhood (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999).

Anna J. Michener, Becoming Anna: The Autobiography of a Sixteen-Year-Old (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).

Anne Moody, Coming of Age in Mississippi (New York: Dell, 1968).

Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (New York: Knopf, 1993).

Sonia Nazario. Enrique's Journey: The Story of a Boy's Dangerous Odyssey to Reunite with His Mother (New York: Random House, 2006).

Clara Claiborne Park, Exiting Nirvana: A Daughter's Life with Autism (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 2001).

Richard Rodriguez, Hunger of Memory (New York: Bantam, 1983).

Daphne Scholinski and Jane Meredith Adams, The Last Time I Wore a Dress (New York: Riverhead Books, 1997).

Brady Udall. The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint (New York: Norton, 2001).

Rebecca Walker, Black, White, and Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self (New York: Riverhead Books, 2001).

Suzanne Mehler Whiteley, Appel Is Forever: A Child's Memoir (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1999).

Barbara Wilson, Blue Windows: A Christian Science Childhood (New York: Picador, 1997).

Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America (New York: Riverhead Books, 1994).