| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Caroline F. Levander and Carol J. Singley, editors. The American Child: A Cultural Studies Reader. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. 2003. Pp. viii, 318. Cloth $62.00, paper $24.00.
Introducing this collection, editors Caroline F. Levander and Carol J. Singley note that "American childhood is a dynamic rather than static analytical site" and, as such, "offers a unique lens through which to glimpse assumed, neglected, or hidden processes of cultural signification" (p. 11). Their book not only delivers on this promise but also is the rare academic volume that is fun to read. The fourteen essays study a range of "texts"—literature, animated films, photographs, correspondence, case histories, magazines—to consider the how the meanings of American childhood have changed, and what those changes tell us about American identity.	1
In the first of three essays on nineteenth-century childhood identities, Gillian Brown shows that the roots of present-day anxieties about children can be traced to "nineteenth-century American discourse about childhood" (p. 20). Echoing a point Brown makes, Melanie Dawson—in her insightful examination of advice books, books on toys, and novels by Louisa May Alcott, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Susan Warner—finds boyhood "effectively severed from adult concerns" (p. 69), while girlhood serves as preparation for womanhood. Gender differences also emerge in Karen Sánchez-Eppler's study of the childhood construction of class identity. Comparing the literary uses of street children with reports by former street children, she notes a tendency to pity street girls but to both pity and idealize street boys, who come to represent the "free" childhood sought by middle-class children—paradoxically, because of course the street child lacks such freedoms.	. . .

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