"Childhood in Americas"
October 11, 2024
9a - 2:30p
Rachel Devlin, Professor, Department of History, Rutgers University
This course explores two aspects of U.S. history that have long been ignored: first, the family has been the most basic form of social organization in the western world during the modern period; second, that children and child rearing have come to play an increasingly central role in American culture, society and politics over the last 150 years. Topics include transformations in ideologies of motherhood; coming of age under the system of racial slavery in the south; the relationship of men and masculinity to boyhood, fatherhood and family life; changing customs in youthful, heterosexual romance; the ?divorce revolution? of the twentieth century and its effect on children; the sentimentalization and eroticization of childhood; the emerging cultural power of teenagers and their place in American society; the rise of right wing family politics in the late twentieth century; international adoption; and the commercialization of childhood over the course of the twentieth century.
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