Biography

Research

Sites

Teaching

Writing

Ellen Herman

Department of History, University of Oregon


 

HIST 365
The Social, Historical, and Scientific Worlds of 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).

Anne Higonnet, Pictures of Innocence: The History and Crisis of Ideal Childhood (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1998).

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).

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).

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).

Lisa Belkin, “Your Kids Are Their Problem,” New York Times Magazine, July 23 2000, 30-35, 42, 56, 60-63.

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).

Children's Defense Fund, “The State of America's Children Yearbook, 2000,” (Washington, DC: Children's Defense Fund, 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).

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).

Martha Minow, “What Ever Happened to Children's Rights?,” Minnesota Law Review 8 (December 1995): 267-298.

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

Hillary Rodham, “Children Under the Law,” in Rethinking Childhood: Perspectives on Development and Society, ed. Arlene Skolnick (Boston: Little, Brown, 1976), 391-413.

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

Margaret Talbot, “The Maximum Security Adolescent,” New York Times Magazine, September 10 2000, 40-47, 58, 60, 88, 96.

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

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).

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).

Sigmund Freud, “The Sexual Life of Human Beings,” in Introductory Lectures in Psycho-Analysis (London: The Hogarth Press, 1963).

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).

Margaret Mead, Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilisation (New York: American Museum of Natural History, 1928).

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).

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).

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).