News from SHCY Members
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News from the Field

Compiled by Nancy Zey and David Pomfret

News from SHCY Members

Congratulations to Harvey Graff who joined Ohio State University this past fall as Ohio Eminent Scholar and Professor of English and History. This endowed, interdisciplinary position offers an unusually broadly conceived and well-supported opportunity to promote interdisciplinary research and teaching, including literacy studies, across departments and colleges.

Jessica Clark has started the doctoral program in History at North Dakota State University. She was awarded the Teresa Mack Assistantship with the Germans from Russia Library at NDSU. With this position, she will travel throughout North Dakota conducting oral history interviews for her dissertation on the childhood experiences of Germans from Russia on the plains.

At the Southern Historical Association annual meeting in Memphis last November four SHCY members participated in a panel on "The Contested Image of the Black Child" organized by Gail Murray (Rhodes College, another SHCY member). James Marten (Marquette) chaired the session, Mary Nial Mitchell (University of New Orleans) presented a paper entitled "Miss W. Murray, Elsie and Puss: The Black Child and Visions of a Reconstructed South," Stacey Patton (graduate student at Rutgers) presented "White America's Perverted Relationship with the Bodies of Black Children: Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Images" and Rebecca de Schweinitz (independent scholar) presented "’What Kind of Boy Was Emmett Till?': The Brown Ruling, Southern Constructions of Black Childhood, and the Struggle for Racial Equality." Panel commentator Kenneth W. Goings (Ohio State University) complimented participants, saying it was the best session he had ever attended at the Southern.

Dan Cook (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)has a new book out: The Commodification of Childhood: The Children's Clothing Industry and the Rise of the Child Consumer (Duke University Press, 2004). This social history explores the roots of children's consumer culture—and the commodification of childhood itself—by looking at the rise, growth, and segmentation of the children's clothing industry in the twentieth century. He illustrates how a fundamental shift in perspective from the mother to the child in the consumer realm continues to inform broader conceptualizations of children as legitimate, autonomous actors. The Commodification of Childhood argues that any consideration of "the child" must necessarily take into account how childhood came to be understood through and structured by a market idiom.

Chana R. Kotzin has published a new essay: "Germany's Loss is Baltimore's Gain": Jewish Youth from the Third Reich Remake Their Lives in Baltimore" The essay is included in the exhibition catalog to Lives Lost, Lives Found: Baltimore's German Jewish Refugees, 1933-1945; eds. Anita Kassof, Avi Y. Dector and Deborah R. Weiner (Jewish Museum of Maryland, 2004). She adds that she is very interested in hearing from other researchers working in the area of unaccompanied and accompanied child refugees, particularly relating to the period of the Nazi era.

Janet Golden (Rutgers University) recently published Message in a Bottle: The Making of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (Harvard University Press, 2005). She also has co-written a new article with Howard Markel on the history of child public health in a special issue of Health Affairs devoted to the subject of child health.

Jim Block (DePaul University) and Rebecca de Schweinitz (University of Virginia) have published articles in an international, interdisciplinary volume entitled The Politics of Childhood: International Perspectives, Contemporary Developments, edited by Jim Goddard, Sally McNamee, Adrian James, and Allison James (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). Block's article is “The Politics of Modern Childhood: American Socialisation and the Crisis of Individualism,” and de Schweinitz' is "The 'Shame of America': African-American Civil Rights and the Politics of Childhood.