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 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.
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.
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.
"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"--
Empire's daughters traces the interconnected histories of girlhood, whiteness, and British colonialism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through the study of the Girls’ Friendly Society. The society functioned as both a youth organisation and emigration society, making it especially valuable in examining girls’ multifaceted participation with the empire. The book charts the emergence of the organisation during the late Victorian era through its height in the first decade of the twentieth century to its decline in the interwar years. Employing a multi-sited approach and using a range of sources—including correspondences, newsletters, and scrapbooks—the book uncovers the ways in which girls participated in the empire as migrants, settlers, laborers, and creators of colonial knowledge and also how they resisted these prescribed roles and challenged systems of colonial power.
Covers the entire range of the history of U.S. foreign relations from the colonial period to the beginning of the 21st century. A Companion to U.S. Foreign Relations is an authoritative guide to past and present scholarship on the history of American diplomacy and foreign relations from its seventeenth century origins to the modern day. This two-volume reference work presents a collection of historiographical essays by prominent scholars. The essays explore three centuries of America’s global interactions and the ways U.S. foreign policies have been analyzed and interpreted over time. Scholars offer fresh perspectives on the history of U.S. foreign relations; analyze the causes, influences, and consequences of major foreign policy decisions; and address contemporary debates surrounding the practice of American power. The Companion covers a wide variety of methodologies, integrating political, military, economic, social and cultural history to explore the ideas and events that shaped U.S. diplomacy and foreign relations and continue to influence national identity. The essays discuss topics such as the links between U.S. foreign relations and the study of ideology, race, gender, and religion; Native American history, expansion, and imperialism; industrialization and modernization; domestic and international politics; and the United States’ role in decolonization, globalization, and the Cold War. A comprehensive approach to understanding the history, influences, and drivers of U.S. foreign relation, this indispensable resource: Examines significant foreign policy events and their subsequent interpretations Places key figures and policies in their historical, national, and international contexts Provides background on recent and current debates in U.S. foreign policy Explores the historiography and primary sources for each topic Covers the development of diverse themes and methodologies in histories of U.S. foreign policy Offering scholars, teachers, and students unmatched chronological breadth and analytical depth, A Companion to U.S. Foreign Relations: Colonial Era to the Present is an important contribution to scholarship on the history of America’s interactions with the world.
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.
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.
After World War II, studies examining youth culture on the silver screen start with James Dean. But the angst that Dean symbolized—anxieties over parents, the “Establishment,” and the expectations of future citizen-soldiers—long predated Rebels without a Cause. Historians have largely overlooked how the Great Depression and World War II impacted and shaped the Cold War, and youth contributed to the national ideologies of family and freedom. From Dead Ends to Cold Warriors explores this gap by connecting facets of boyhood as represented in American film from the 1930s to the postwar years. From the Andy Hardy series to pictures such as The Search, Intruder in the Dust, and The Gunfighter, boy characters addressed larger concerns over the dysfunctional family unit, militarism, the “race question,” and the international scene as the Korean War began. Navigating the political, social, and economic milieus inside and outside of Hollywood, Peter W.Y. Lee demonstrates that continuities from the 1930s influenced the unique postwar moment, coalescing into anticommunism and the Cold War.
