An accessible academic analysis of the progression of American children’s lives since 1800.
A comprehensive investigation of how Americans have raised their children in the past two centuries.
In today’s global society, many Americans question whether there’s still an advantage to raising children in the United States, as opposed to other countries, whether immigrants still find significant advantages here, and whether parents have enough or too much control over their children. Using extensive sociological research, Fass (History, Emerita/Univ. of California; Children of a New World: Society, Culture, and Globalization, 2006, etc.) delves deeply into the evolution of the American childhood from the post–Revolutionary War era to the present day. “Children’s lives are always enmeshed in the changing cultural and political landscape of their time,” she writes, “and each generation will have a somewhat (and sometimes drastically) different set of social conditions influencing its life.” In the 1800s, children were expected to work alongside their parents in traditional roles while enjoying a sense of freedom that would be considered dangerous nowadays. They grew up rapidly, forming independent, reliable characters at an early age. After the Civil War, many children were left fatherless, forcing them to live on the streets, which birthed foundling associations and “orphan trains” that sent homeless children to the ever expanding West. Meanwhile, former slave children sought education of their own, which brought about educational reform. As America settled into the next century, scientists explored health benefits and concerns, and the emphasis shifted toward lowering the staggering numbers of infant and early childhood mortalities. Researchers applauded breast-feeding and stressed the importance of education and play. As American lives stabilized after the world wars, more attention was directed toward child abuse, extended educational opportunities, the issues of race and immigration, and the role of working mothers in the family dynamic. In each scenario, Fass provides ample historical and scientific evidence to support her findings, giving readers a methodical, meticulous accounting of childhood in America over the past 200 years.
An accessible academic analysis of the progression of American children’s lives since 1800.Pub Date: June 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-691-16257-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: March 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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