Children at Play: An American History |
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Children at Play: An American History
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by Howard Chudacoff
Sales Rank: 65420
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Discount: 34 %
List Price: $27.95
$18.45
At Amazon
on 4-18-2008.
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Features
Cover Type: Hard Cover with 288 pages
Published by: NYU Press August 1, 2007
Written in: English
ISBN 10 Number: 0814716644
ISBN 13 Number: 978-0814716649
Book Dimensions:
9 x 6 x 1 inches
Weighs: 1.2 pounds
From Publishers Weekly
Throughout American history, argues Brown University historian Chudacoff (The Age of the Bachelor), parents have sought to control their children's games and toys, but kids have been determined to set the terms of their play. In the colonial era, children typically played with improvised toys, and parents tried to prevent play from degenerating into idleness, insisting that games must serve God or family. In the 19th century, consumer culture intersected with a new conception of childhood as a distinct, adorable life stage to be cherished, while children increasingly played with toys that brought them into contact with the market. By the 20th century, adults, influenced in part by the new field of child psychology, focused on educational toys and directed kids off the streets and into playgrounds, where they could be carefully supervised. The tension between parental prerogatives and children's autonomy manifests itself still, says Chudacoff: parents try to keep children indoors for fear of dangers lurking outside, but children take new kinds of risks playing in cyberspace. While a bit dry and broad, Chudacoff's work gives historical depth to debates that continue to rage over what constitutes appropriate child's play. 22 illus. (Aug.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
The New York Times Book Review
"A fascinating and provocative survey."
Reader Reviews
Howard Chudacoff's Children at Play: An American History explores the changing nature of childhood in American since the 1600s. The whole notion of childhood as an historical and cultural phenomenon is, in itself, revelatory. Reading Children at Play is to see American children as something like a separate country, with its own government, its own history, its own customs, its own borders. In a large part, the history of American childhood proves to be a story of borders being constantly redrawn, redefined, reinterpreted. Chudacoff's well-documented and compassionate study shows how children, poor and wealthy, slave and privileged, native and immigrant, surrounded on all sides by adult America, endowed with childlike resilience and endless capacity for passion, have managed to resist hundreds of years of concerted adult efforts to subvert childhood into something other, something safe, predictable and under control. Children at Play is in many ways a romance. As the book nears its conclusion, and we read about the evermore massive attempts to co-opt children's play, we find our very adult selves hoping against hope that children will once again reclaim their inalienable rights, breaking the shackles of rampant commercialism and overprotective parents so they can once again take up their "quest for independence." Here, from the end of the chapter "1950 to the Present," Chudacoff gifts us with a ray of hope: "...while media critics and child advocates have fretted about the hypnotic, sedentary quality that television has inflicted on children, there is always the possibility that kids can convert an object as mundane as a TV box into ther own plaything." He goes on to quote a story told by Isabel Alverez. "See, those old television sets used to have the cardboard [backs] with holes in them. The television was on and we could see all of the lights in the back...So we took the cardboard off and put our dolls in there and played that it was the city of Manhattan." Chudacoff concludes: "Kids still find ways to be kids." Bernie DeKoven, author, Junkyard Sports, The Well-Played Game
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Children at Play: An American History
Available from Amazon
Price: $18.45
Updated on 4-18-2008.
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