American Girls and Global Responsibility

American Girls and Global Responsibility
Author: Jennifer Helgren
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Total Pages: 235
Release: 2017-04-17
Genre: Family & Relationships
ISBN: 0813575826

American Girls and Global Responsibility brings together insights from Cold War culture studies, girls’ studies, and the history of gender and militarization to shed new light on how age and gender work together to form categories of citizenship. Jennifer Helgren argues that a new internationalist girl citizenship took root in the country in the years following World War II in youth organizations such as Camp Fire Girls, Girl Scouts, YWCA Y-Teens, schools, and even magazines like Seventeen. She shows the particular ways that girls’ identities and roles were configured, and reveals the links between internationalist youth culture, mainstream U.S. educational goals, and the U.S. government in creating and marketing that internationalist girl, thus shaping the girls’ sense of responsibilities as citizens.

American Girls and Global Responsibility

American Girls and Global Responsibility
Author: Jennifer Helgren
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2017
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780813575797

American Girls and Global Responsibility brings together Cold War culture studies, girls' studies, and the history of gender and militarization to shed new light on how age and gender work together to form categories of citizenship. Jennifer Helgren shows the particular ways that girls' identities and roles were configured, thus shaping their sense of responsibilities as citizens.

The Camp Fire Girls

The Camp Fire Girls
Author: Jennifer Helgren
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 373
Release: 2022-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 1496233670

As the twentieth century dawned, progressive educators established a national organization for adolescent girls to combat what they believed to be a crisis of girls’ education. A corollary to the Boy Scouts of America, founded just a few years earlier, the Camp Fire Girls became America’s first and, for two decades, most popular girls’ organization. Based on Protestant middle-class ideals—a regulatory model that reinforced hygiene, habit formation, hard work, and the idea that women related to the nation through service—the Camp Fire Girls invented new concepts of American girlhood by inviting disabled girls, Black girls, immigrants, and Native Americans to join. Though this often meant a false sense of cultural universality, in the girls’ own hands membership was often profoundly empowering and provided marginalized girls spaces to explore the meaning of their own cultures in relation to changes taking place in twentieth-century America. Through the lens of the Camp Fire Girls, Jennifer Helgren traces the changing meanings of girls’ citizenship in the cultural context of the twentieth century. Drawing on girls’ scrapbooks, photographs, letters, and oral history interviews, in addition to adult voices in organization publications and speeches, The Camp Fire Girls explores critical intersections of gender, race, class, nation, and disability.

Growing Up America

Growing Up America
Author: Susan Eckelmann Berghel
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2019-12-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 082035662X

Growing Up America brings together new scholarship that considers the role of children and teenagers in shaping American political life during the decades following the Second World War. Growing Up America places young people—and their representations—at the center of key political trends, illuminating the dynamic and complex roles played by youth in the midcentury rights revolutions, in constructing and challenging cultural norms, and in navigating the vicissitudes of American foreign policy and diplomatic relations. The authors featured here reveal how young people have served as both political actors and subjects from the early Cold War through the late twentieth-century Age of Fracture. At the same time, Growing Up America contends that the politics of childhood and youth extends far beyond organized activism and the ballot box. By unveiling how science fairs, breakfast nooks, Boy Scout meetings, home economics classrooms, and correspondence functioned as political spaces, this anthology encourages a reassessment of the scope and nature of modern politics itself.

Adopting for God

Adopting for God
Author: Soojin Chung
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 225
Release: 2021-12-14
Genre: Family & Relationships
ISBN: 1479808857

"Adopting for God is the first historical study to focus on the role of adoption evangelists in the transnational adoption movement between the United States and East Asia. It shows how both evangelical and ecumenical Christians challenged Americans to redefine traditional familial values and rethink race matters"--

In Fashion: Culture, Commerce, Craft, and Identity

In Fashion: Culture, Commerce, Craft, and Identity
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 391
Release: 2022-01-10
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9004446591

For the international cast of contributors to this volume being “in fashion” is about self-presentation; defining how fashion is presented in the visual, written, and performing arts; and about design, craft manufacturing, packaging, marketing, and archives.

Children’s Voices from the Past

Children’s Voices from the Past
Author: Kristine Moruzi
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 349
Release: 2019-04-23
Genre: History
ISBN: 3030118967

This book explores a central methodological issue at the heart of studies of the histories of children and childhood. It questions how we understand the perspectives of children in the past, and not just those of the adults who often defined and constrained the parameters of youthful lives. Drawing on a range of different sources, including institutional records, interviews, artwork, diaries, letters, memoirs, and objects, this interdisciplinary volume uncovers the voices of historical children, and discusses the challenges of situating these voices, and interpreting juvenile agency and desire. Divided into four sections, the book considers children's voices in different types of historical records, examining children's letters and correspondence, as well as multimedia texts such as film, advertising and art, along with oral histories, and institutional archives.

Our Frontier Is the World

Our Frontier Is the World
Author: Mischa Honeck
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 244
Release: 2018-05-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 1501716190

Mischa Honeck’s Our Frontier Is the World is a provocative account of how the Boy Scouts echoed and enabled American global expansion in the twentieth century. The Boy Scouts of America (BSA) has long been a standard bearer for national identity. The core values of the organization have, since its founding in 1910, shaped what it means to be an American boy and man. As Honeck shows, those masculine values had implications that extended far beyond the borders of the United States. Writing the global back into the history of one of the country’s largest youth organizations, Our Frontier Is the World details how the BSA operated as a vehicle of empire from the Progressive Era up to the countercultural moment of the 1960s. American boys and men wearing the Scout uniform never simply hiked local trails to citizenship; they forged ties with their international peers, camped in foreign lands, and started troops on overseas military bases. Scouts traveled to Africa and even sailed to icy Antarctica, hoisting the American flag and standing as models of loyalty, obedience, and bravery. Through scouting America’s complex engagements with the world were presented as honorable and playful masculine adventures abroad. Innocent fun and earnest commitment to doing a good turn, of course, were not the whole story. Honeck argues that the good-natured Boy Scout was a ready means for soft power abroad and gentle influence where American values, and democratic capitalism, were at stake. In other instances the BSA provided a pleasant cover for imperial interventions that required coercion and violence. At Scouting’s global frontiers the stern expression of empire often lurked behind the smile of a boy.

Dialogues on the Delta

Dialogues on the Delta
Author: Martín Camps
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 249
Release: 2018-07-27
Genre: History
ISBN: 1527514706

This collection of essays examines the city of Stockton, California from an interdisciplinary perspective. Stockton is in the heart of the Central Valley, an agricultural region that comprises a diverse population and rich history. This book covers the economic downturn of the city that was ground zero for the housing market crisis during the Great Recession, which resulted in it becoming the first major American city to declare bankruptcy. Nevertheless, the city cannot be framed only on its economic misfortunes; Stockton has a vibrant community with important historical figures such as Martín Ramírez, an outsider painter who was a patient in the Stockton State Hospital. This book also covers topics such as food studies, religious communities, historical resources at the library at the University of the Pacific, business community programs such as “Puentes”, an overview of the city’s racial diversity, auto-ethnographies, the family connection to Mexican author Elena Poniatowska, and a program at the Stockton High School during WWII to send jeeps as part of the war effort. This book is informed by the perspectives of historians, sociologists, political scientists, economists, business scholars, and literary and cultural studies theorists to provide a wide range of approaches to a vital community in the Central Valley of California.