In this groundbreaking book, Ken Parille seeks to do for nineteenth-century boys what the past three decades of scholarship have done for girls: show how the complexities of the fiction and educational materials written about them reflect the lives they lived. While most studies of nineteenth-century boyhood have focused on post-Civil War male novelists, Parille explores a broader archive of writings by male and female authors, extending from 1830-1885. Boys at Home offers a series of arguments about five pedagogical modes: play-adventure, corporal punishment, sympathy, shame, and reading. The first chapter demonstrates that, rather than encouraging boys to escape the bonds of domesticity, scenes of play in boys’ novels reproduce values associated with the home. Chapter 2 argues that debates about corporal punishment are crucial sources for the culture’s ideas about gender difference and pedagogical practice. In chapter 3, “The Medicine of Sympathy,” Parille examines the affective nature of mother-daughter and mother-son bonds, emphasizing the special difficulties that “boy-nature” posed for women. The fourth chapter uses boys’ conduct literature and Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women – the preeminent chronicle of girlhood in the century – to investigate not only Alcott’s fictional representations of shame-centered discipline but also pervasive cultural narratives about what it means to “be a man.” Focusing on works by Lydia Sigourney and Francis Forrester, the final chapter considers arguments about the effects that fictional, historical, and biographical narratives had on a boy’s sense of himself and his masculinity. Boys at Home is an important contribution to the emerging field of masculinity studies. In addition, this provocative volume brings new insight to the study of childhood, women’s writing, and American culture. Ken Parille is assistant professor of English at East Carolina University. His articles have appeared in Children’s Literature, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, Papers on Language and Literature, and Children’s Literature Association Quarterly.

Contributions by Ann Mulloy Ashmore, Rudine Sims Bishop, Ruth B. Bottigheimer, Jennifer Brannock, Carolyn J. Brown, Ramona Caponegro, Lorinda Cohoon, Carol Edmonston, Paige Gray, Laura Hakala, Andrew Haley, Wm John Hare, Dee Jones, Allison G. Kaplan, Megan Norcia, Nathalie op de Beeck, Amy Pattee, Deborah Pope, Ellen Hunter Ruffin, Anita Silvey, Danielle Bishop Stoulig, Roger Sutton, Deborah D. Taylor, Eric L. Tribunella, Alexandra Valint, and Laura E. Wasowicz During the 1960s, a dedicated library science professor named Lena de Grummond initiated a letter-writing campaign to children’s authors and illustrators requesting original manuscripts and artwork to share with her students. Now named after de Grummond, this archive at the University of Southern Mississippi has grown into one of the largest collections of historical and contemporary youth literature in North America with original contributions from more than 1,400 authors and illustrators, as well as over 185,000 volumes. The first book-length project on the collection, A de Grummond Primer: Highlights of the Children's Literature Collection provides a history of de Grummond’s work and an introduction to major topics in the field of children’s literature. With more than ninety full-color images, it highlights particular strengths of the archive, including extensive holdings of fairy tales, series books, nineteenth-century periodicals, Golden Age illustrated books, Mississippi and southern children’s literature, nonfiction, African American children’s literature, contemporary children’s and young adult authors and illustrators, and more. The book includes contributions from literature and information science scholars, historians, librarians, and archivists—all noted experts on children’s literature—and points to the exciting research possibilities of the archive. De Grummond could not have realized when she wrote to luminaries like H. A. and Margret Rey, Berta and Elmer Hader, Madeleine L’Engle, J. R. R. Tolkien, Lois Lenski, Garth Williams, and others that their correspondence and contributions would form the foundation for this extraordinary trove now visited by scholars from around the world. Such major authors and illustrators as Ezra Jack Keats, Richard Peck, Rosemary Wells, Angela Johnson, and John Green continued to donate content. In addition, curators, past and present, have acquired both historical and contemporary volumes of literature and criticism.

"The five volumes of A History of American Magazines constitute a unique cultural history of America, viewed through the pages and pictures of her periodicals from the publication of the first monthly magazine in 1741 through the golden age of magazines in the twentieth century"--Page 4 of cover.

While information regarding children and their outlook on the war is not abun-dant, James Marten, through extensive research, has uncovered essays, editorials, articles, poems, games, short stories and letters that tell the story of the Civil War through the eyes of children. Lessons of War: The Civil War in Children's Magazines is a collection of such items, gathered from popular children's magazines that were published during this era. The selections in Lessons of War demonstrate the depth of children's involve-ment in the war, from raising funds for soldiers to incorporating the war into their play activities and eagerly accepting northern political attitudes. The era's leading children's magazines, such as The Little Pilgrim, The Little Corporal, and Student and Schoolmate, used first-person accounts to let the children of the Civil War tell their own stories. Marten's commentary illuminates the vision of the Union war effort presented to children as the nation waged war against itself. Sure to enlighten both scholars and students, Lessons of War is a valuable addition to courses on the Civil War and American social and cultural history.

This volume offers profiles of 423 titles published during the past two hundred years. The sketches are full and detailed, those for the longer-lived periodicals running to several pages. . . . The guide's real strength lies in the wealth of information it provides. For its full descriptions of magazines, its bibliographies, publication histories, and location sources, Children's Periodicals of the United States is a much needed work. Wilson Library Bulletin

Schooling Readers takes up a largely unexplored genre of fiction, the common school narrative, popular between 1830 and 1890. These stories both propagate and challenge the myth of the idyllic one-room school, and reveal Americans' perceptions of and anxieties about public education, many of which still resonate today.

Daniel Webster captured the hearts and imagination of the American people of the first half of the nineteenth century. This bibliography on Webster brings together for the first time a comprehensive guide to the vast amount of literature written by and about this extraordinary man who dwarfed most of his contemporaries. This bibliography also provides references to materials on slavery, the tariff, banking, Indian affairs, legal and constitutional development, international affairs, western expansion, and economic and political developments in general. This bibliography is divided into fifteen sections and covers every aspect of Webster's distinguished career. Sections I and II deal primarily with Webster's writings and with those of his contemporaries. Sections III through X cover the literature dealing with his family background; childhood and education, his long service in the United States House of Representatives and in the Senate, his two stints as secretary of state, and his career in law. Section X provides guidance in locating materials relating to his associates. Finally, Sections XI through XV provide coverage of his personal life, his death, historiographical materials, and iconography.

Focusing on representations of women's literary celebrity in nineteenth-century biographies, autobiographical accounts, periodicals, and fiction, Brenda R. Weber examines the transatlantic cultural politics of visibility in relation to gender, sex, and the body. Looking both at discursive patterns and specific Anglo-American texts that foreground the figure of the successful woman writer, Weber argues that authors such as Elizabeth Gaskell, Fanny Fern, Mary Cholmondeley, Margaret Oliphant, Elizabeth Robins, Eliza Potter, and Elizabeth Keckley helped create an intelligible category of the famous writer that used celebrity as a leveraging tool for altering perceptions about femininity and female identity. Doing so, Weber demonstrates, involved an intricate gender/sex negotiation that had ramifications for what it meant to be public, professional, intelligent, and extraordinary. Weber's persuasive account elucidates how Gaskell's biography of Charlotte Brontë served simultaneously to support claims for Brontë's genius and to diminish Brontë's body in compensation for the magnitude of those claims, thus serving as a touchstone for later representations of women's literary genius and celebrity. Fanny Fern, for example, adapts Gaskell's maneuvers on behalf of Charlotte Brontë to portray the weak woman's body becoming strong as it is made visible through and celebrated within the literary marketplace. Throughout her study, Weber analyzes the complex codes connected to transatlantic formations of gender/sex, the body, and literary celebrity as women authors proactively resisted an intense backlash against their own success.