History 3394
Kids & Teens in American History
Steven Mintz
548 Agnes Arnold Hall
SMintz@uh.edu
713-743-3109
About the Course:
The experiences of children, and the relations between children
and their elders, differ radically from one time period to another.
They also differ across class, ethnic group, gender, and geographical
region. Childhood, far from being a constant of human nature,
is, to use the language of our time, a social and cultural construct.
This class' objective is to help you understand how childhood
was understood, lived, and treated in distinct historical eras
and specific social settings.
Topics that we will examine
include:
The "discovery" of
child abuse;
The invention of adolescence;
The abolition of child labor;
Youth culture;
Contemporary controversies, such as teen pregnancy and youth
gangs.
The study of childhood and youth will also challenge you to think
creatively and critically about what we can learn from such sources
such as autobiographies, clothing, movies, photographs, and toys
and games.
Course Themes:
Changing ideas about childhood: How has childhood been conceived
in different historical eras?
The changing experience of
children: How has the lived experience of childhood changed over
time? How have children learned about gender and other social
values?
The politics of childhood:
How have adults-including parents, experts, advertisers, and
politicians - shaped children's desires, behavior and experiences?
Skills:
Analytical Skills: You will
critically examine a wide variety of primary documents -- documents
produced by people from the historical moments we are studying
such as photographs, autobiographies, advice literature, comics,
toys, clothing, movies and surveys.
o You will learn to consider what sources tell us about the past
and what they do not tell us, focusing on the strengths and weaknesses,
biases and distortions of particular types of evidence.
o You will also consider how sources convey meaning - the language,
forms, assumptions, images, symbols they use.
Oral and Written Communication
Skills: The written assignments will teach you how to formulate
your ideas in appropriate language, how to organize them in a
logical and persuasive order, and supporting them with appropriate
evidence.
Course Requirements
Your grade will be based on three factors:
1. Class attendance and participation;
2. In-class projects;
3. Three paper assignments:
1. Documenting the Experience
of Childhood. DUE: February 18
After reading one of the following
autobiographies, you will write a five-page, double-spaced printed
essay, in which you will thoroughly analyze the author's experience
of childhood.
Dorothy Allison, Bastard Out
of Carolina;
Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings;
Russell Baker, Growing Up;
Kim Chernin, In My Mother's House;
Annie Dillard, American Childhood;
The Autobiography of Frederick Douglass;
Lucy Grealy, The Autobiography of a Face;
Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl;
Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior;
Susan Minot, Monkeys;
Anne Moody, Coming of Age in Mississippi
Charlotte Nekola, Dream House;
Richard Rodriguez, The Hunger of Memory;
Kate Simon, Bronx Primitive;
Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club;
Richard Wright, Black Boy;
2. Locating and Using Primary
Sources DUE: March 18
You will write a five-page
essay on one of the following topics. You MUST identify primary
sources that provide information on this topic (e.g. online New
York Times (1853 - to the present), and write a historical analysis
of the topic using the primary sources
Abduction of Charley Ross (1874)
Mary Ellen (1874)
Leopold and Loeb (1924)
Lindbergh Kidnapping (1932)
Abductions of Robert Marcus and Stepanie Bryan (1955-57)
Elizabeth Eckford (1957)
Ruby Bridges (1960)
Gerald Gault (1967)
Mary Anne and John Tinker (1969)
3. Oral History DUE: April
15
You must conduct an interview
with someone over the age of forty and write a five-page double-spaced
essay examining how their childhood and adolescence differs from
childhood and adolescence today.
Course Calendar
Part I. The Pre-Modern World
of Childhood
Week 1. Tuesday, January 14.
Giving Childhood a History
Conceptions of Childhood
The Discovery of Childhood in Early Modern Europe
In-Class Project: Childhood
in the Middle Ages
Week 2. Tuesday, January 21.
Childhood in Colonial America
In-Class Projects: Puritan
Childhood
Indian Childhood
Part II. The Invention of
Modern Childhood
Week 3. Tuesday, January 28.
Inventing the Modern Child
New Attitudes Toward Children
Schooling
In-Class Projects: The Changing
Image of Children
Childrearing Advice
Week 4. Tuesday, February 4
Divergent Paths: Varieties
of Childhood in 19th-Century America
Frontier Children
Working-Class Children
Growing Up in Bondage and Jim Crow
Native American Children
In-Class Projects: History
through Primary Sources
Week 5. Tuesday, February 11
Child-Saving
Problem Children
In-Class Project: Abolishing
Child Labor and Reforming Juvenile Justice
Part III. The Century of
the Child
Week 6. Tuesday, February 18
Becoming American: Immigrant
Children, Then and Now
In-Class Project: Schooling
and Americanization
Week 7. Tuesday, February 25
Making Childhood Modern
In-Class Project: Children
in the Movies: The Payne Fund Studies
Week 8. Tuesday, March 4
NO CLASS: SPRING BREAK
Week 9. Tuesday, March 11
Childhood in Depression America
In-Class Project: Children
in Depression-Era Movies
Week 10. Tuesday, March 18
Childhood on the Homefront
In-Class Project: Kleen Teens
and JDs
Week 11. Tuesday, March 25
Growing Up in Cold War America
In-Class Project: The Baby
Boomers: Toys and Television
Week 12. Tuesday, April 1
Classic Teen Culture
The Soundtrack of Their Lives
In-Class Project: Teens in
the Movies
Teen Lingo
Week 13. Tuesday, April 8
The Youth Revolt of the 1960s
In-Class Project: The Youth
Revolt and the Movies
Part IV. Childhood in Our
Time
Week 14. Tuesday, April 15
Moral Panics
In-Class Project: Mapping Children's
Well-Being
Week 15. Tuesday, April 22
Post-Modern Childhood
The Disappearance of Childhood
