Students are given a comprehensive overview of U.S. history from Columbus to the present. Review questions are included throughout, as well as helpful maps. The text contains numerous pictures and large print. Grade 4.
An engaging picture book for children that celebrates what it means to be American--regardless of politics What does it mean to be American? Does it mean you like apple pie or fireworks? Not exactly. While politics seem to divide our country into the two opposing teams of red and blue, one truth remains: we are all Americans. But what does that mean? This continuation of the popular What Does It Mean to Be...? series provides a nonpartisan point of view perfect for any and all Americans who are proud of who they are--and where they come from, regardless of their political views. Other Titles in the What Does It Mean to Be...? Series: What Does It Mean to Be Present? What Does It Mean to Be Global? What Does It Mean to Be Kind?
This in-depth look at the psychological effects of being a former child star includes an examination of the life of Dana Plato, and includes interviews with former child actors who appeared on various television shows. Color and bandw photos.
Why the United States has failed to establish a comprehensive high-quality child care program is the question at the center of this book. Edward Zigler has been intimately involved in this issue since the 1970s, and here he presents a firsthand history of the policy making and politics surrounding this important debate. Good-quality child care supports cognitive, social, and emotional development, school readiness, and academic achievement. This book examines the history of child care policy since 1969, including the inside story of America's one great attempt to create a comprehensive system of child care, its failure, and the lack of subsequent progress. Identifying specific issues that persist today, Zigler and his coauthors conclude with an agenda designed to lead us successfully toward quality care for America's children.
In DeShaney v. Winnebago County Department of Social Services, a bitterly divided Supreme Court rejected a claim brought on behalf of five-year old Joshua DeShaney, left permanently disabled after sustained abuse, despite regular home visits by social workers charged with monitoring his welfare. In its decision the court asserted that the state has no duty to shield citizens from private violence, even those involved in their lives and knowing of their distress. Poor Joshua tracks the story from its origins in small town Wisconsin to the Supreme Court and chronicles the tragic consequences of the majority decision. John R. Howard shows how that decision became the rock on which later child abuse cases foundered, and how it echoes today in every newspaper story about society's failure to protect children. The continuing vitality of DeShaney, he argues, derives from a persistent sense that the decision is legally incorrect and profoundly at odds with the underlying values of the Constitution. The case is also about different visions of our social order and the relationship between "law" and "justice." Howard summarizes the substantial law review literature critical of the DeShaney decision and erects the scaffolding for a counterargument bringing law into a closer alignment with justice.
Nothing tugs on American heartstrings more than an image of a suffering child. Anna Mae Duane goes back to the nation's violent beginnings to examine how the ideal of childhood in early America was fundamental to forging concepts of ethnicity, race, and gender. Duane argues that children had long been used to symbolize subservience, but in the New World those old associations took on more meaning. Drawing on a wide range of early American writing, she explores how the figure of a suffering child accrued political weight as the work of infantilization connected the child to Native Americans, slaves, and women. In the making of the young nation, the figure of the child emerged as a vital conceptual tool for coming to terms with the effects of cultural and colonial violence, and with time childhood became freighted with associations of vulnerability, suffering, and victimhood. As Duane looks at how ideas about the child and childhood were manipulated by the colonizers and the colonized alike, she reveals a powerful line of colonizing logic in which dependence and vulnerability are assigned great emotional weight. When early Americans sought to make sense of intercultural contact—and the conflict that often resulted—they used the figure of the child to help displace their own fear of lost control and shifting power.