REVIEWS 413

late nineteenth century even native middle-class groups turned away from older
work habits to leisure pursuits as Daniel Rodgers showed us some years ago, or
how their sons and daughters respectably helped each other to participate in
formerly proscribed behaviors at school. 3 Like the good progressive, Burnham
would rather see the evil figures who manipulate and exploit behind the scenes.
And he is far more intent to show who gained from our nasty (and often self,
destructive) indulgences and to save us from ourselves, especially those of us
who have weak minds because we are "vulnerable non,middle class people" (p.
276), than to develop the genuinely important historical analysis offered by the
story he tells.

University of California, Berkeley Paula S. Fass

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ENDNOTES
1. Michael Schudson, Advertising, The Uneasy Persuasion: Its Dubious Impact on Amer-
ican Society (New York, 1984).
2. Lizabeth Cohen, Making A New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939
(Cambridge and New York, 1990), especially pp. 251-89.

3. Daniel T. Rodgers, TheWork Ethic in Industrial America, 1850-1920(Chicago, 1978);

Paula S. Fass, TheDamned and the Beautiful: American Youth in the 1920s (New York, 1977).

Small Worlds: Children and Adolescents in America, 1850-1950. Edited by

Elliott West and Paula Petrick (Lawrence, Kansas: University of Kansas
Press, 1992. xii plus 403pp. $29.95jcloth, $ 17.95jpaper).
Historians have never quite known what to do with children. Are children simply
adults-in-waiting so that historical generalizations about adults will suffice for
understanding children? Or do we have reasons to believe that developmental
and historical forces converge uniquely such that children of an historical period
are no more like their parents than they are like children of our times? These
questions vex us not least because children leave so little evidence of their lives
from their own perspectives. Most of the work on American "family history"
in the past two decades more truthfully must be called "the history of married
couples and of the views of adults about children." We must find some way to
recapture children's lives from their own perspectives.
The editors of this volume have gathered essays aimed at writing the new
history of American children. Their "Introduction" sets the stage intelligently,
urging the reader to see children as important actors in history, as (for example)
important producers and consumers in the American economy. The editors make
the crucial point that both historical and developmental forces are at work in the
child, but they also recognize the problem of evidence. Adults create most of the
evidence of children's lives, from institutional records to private correspondence,
and even the memoir or reminiscence of childhood suffers from all the problems
of selective memory. The greatest challenge facing the authors in this collection
414 journal of social history winter 1994

lies in finding new sorts of evidence and new ways of interpreting the evidence
of children's lives.
The authors meet this challenge with mixed success. The more successful
essays draw upon three or more sorts of evidence, looking for continuities and
discontinuities in what the evidence tells us about children's lives. Bernard Mer-
gen's essay, "Made, Bought, and Stolen: Toys and the Culture of Childhood,"
draws upon autobiographies, adult writing on toys, and the surviving artifacts
themselves to show how children used toys to create identity, to try out adult
roles, and to resist adult socialization. Mergen's mastery of the interdisciplinary
scholarship on play makes his the most daring and, I think, the most interesting
essay in the collection. Miriam Formanek- Brunell's essay on the "politics of doll
play" in the nineteenth nicely complements Mergen's essay, as she uses autobi-
ographies, biographies, oral histories, adults writing about dolls (including "doll

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fiction"), and to some extent the surviving dolls themselves to show how doll
play gradually changed to take on increasingly symbolic functions. Doll play in
Victorian America may have mimicked adult tastes in conspicuous consump-
tion, but boys and girls alike also engaged in play (such as doll funerals) meant
"to subvert convention and to undermine restrictions" (p.l23).
Vicki L. Ruiz's study of the acculturation of adolescent Mexican American
women from 1920 to 1950 takes advantage of a range of evidence to argue
that these teenagers managed somehow to adopt the trappings of American
popular culture without necessarily losing their Mexican identity. Ruiz makes
good, creative use of oral history interviews, movie and romance magazines,
popular film, and organizational records to examine the "Americanization" of
these teens, from dating practices to community beauty pageants. Editor Paula
Petrick draws together evidence of a different sort, as she has available for her
study of novelty toy printing presses a unique set of publications created by and
for adolescents, 1870-1886. Along with the records of the National Amateur
Press Association and other organizations, the juvenile papers from this period
permit Petrik to explore the ways these young middle-class men and women
were grappling with changing ideas regarding race and gender.
Some contributors, like Elliott West, have to settle for a small range of sorts
of evidence of children's lives. West uses conventional evidence-the letters,
diaries, and reminiscences of families on the Plains frontier in the second half
of the nineteenth century-in order to make an unconventional argument. So
many generalizations about life on the frontier, such as those about hardship
and about the pioneer's nostalgia for the East left behind, simply do not apply to
children, under West's careful readings of the evidence. Children were essential
to the economy of the frontier family, and these children built a different set
of meanings of the Plains. This" 'inner' history of the frontier," as West puts
it (p, 32), helps us understand the real cognitive differences between frontier
children and their parents. These children, especially the girls, felt acutely the
contradictions between social expectations and the real conditions of their lives.
West also challenges the historians' orthodoxy that American childhood was
"reconstructed" in these decades toward a separation of the safe, female domestic
sphere and the more masculine public world. For frontier families, these goals
collided with the realities of lives as actually lived.
Despite the good intentions of the editors, some of the contributors never
REVIEWS 415

really rise above relying upon evidence reflecting only the adult versions of
children's lives. These essays, by and large, still make interesting reading, but
the "Introduction" promises more of a breakthrough in writing the history of
children's lives than some of the authors deliver. William M. Tuttle, Jr.'s essay
on children's popular culture during World War II offers an intelligent survey
of the radio, film, cartoon, advertising, music, popular fiction, and other texts
consumed by American children and adolescents on the homefront, but it is
hard to judge what sense the consumers might have made of the texts.
Ethnographicallv-based audience-response criticism now so common in cul-
tural studies has the luxury of dealing only in the present and only with living
audiences, so it would be interesting to see Tuttle grapple with how the historian
might take on an historical audience, in this case, children. Similarly, David Na-
saw's essay on children and the moving picture industry in the early twentieth

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century tells an interesting story about reform groups and their influences on the
content and accessibility of films, but by Nasaw's frank admission this is a story
about adult discourse on the effects of movies on children. Ruth M. Alexander
uses twenty'two inmate case files from two New York State reformatories in
the first decades of this century to write about "wayward girls" and the ways in
which working class adolescent females created a lifestyle later appropriated by
middle, class girls, and her conclusions offer helpful modifications to historians'
wisdom about the history of working class women. But we are still working with
evidence created by and for the adult caretakers of these children, and gener-
alizations about the "subjective experience and emerging social identities" (p.
278) of these women need this careful warning.
The remaining essays seem to me the least successful, given the goals an,
nounced in the volume's introduction. Thus, Selma Berrol'sessayon "Immigrant
Children at School, 1880-1940," relies entirely upon memoirs and, despite its
subtitle of "A Child's Eye View," renders a conventional view of schools as re'
membered by adults. Lester Alston's essay on slave children attempts to apply
psychohistorical methods and content analysis to the body of slave narratives
in order to reconstruct (speculatively, Alston admits) the themes, tensions, and
contradictions in slave children's lives, but there seems to be little new to say
about slave children's lives. Victoria Bissell Brown's essay on "Golden Girls: Fe'
male Socialization among the Middle Class of Los Angeles, 1880-1910," uses
reminiscences and contemporary studies to survey that generations' coming of
age, but again the evidence and approach are rather conventional. The same
must be said of Robert L. Griswold's essay on children's attitudes toward their
fathers in the first three decades of this century. It is interesting to have Gris-
wold survey public attitudes toward fatherhood during this period, but he offers
little evidence that seems to come from the children themselves. Finally, Liahna
Babener's concluding essay, "Bitter Nostalgia: Recollections of Childhood on
the Midwestern Frontier," uses conventional evidence (memoirs) to explore the
dark side of frontier life. Babener sees in the narrative strategies of these mem'
oirists the "bitter nostalgia" arising from the stresses of frontier life, a personal
and public "myths" collide with realities. The editors placed this essay at the
end of the volume to alert the reader, as they say, to the "contradiction between
explicit memories and implicit emotions" (p. 300), as if to issue a final warning
to historians who rely too glibly upon memoirs and reminiscences.
416 journal of social history winter 1994

The editors and N. Ray Hiner alert the reader to the possible uses of pho-
tographs as evidence in writing the history of children's lives. Hiner provides
a very brief essay accompanying a number of photographs reproduced in the
center of the volume, and other photographs illustrate the essays throughout.
Hines's essay is speculative and provocative, meant to raise more questions than
he is prepared to answer, and clearly we are only in the early stages of figuring
out how to "read" photographs for clues about children's lives.
Overall, this volume may be more important for what it attempts than for
what it accomplishes. It announces clearly that we need truly to begin writing
the history of American children's lives from their point of view, and that this
history will be very difficult to reconstruct. At their best, the essays show how
new sorts of evidence and new approaches might begin writing this history; at
their least successful, the essaystell us some interesting things about what adults

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think about children. Were it not for the grand ambitions announced by the
editors, the reader might take the less successful essays as solid social history,
which they are in most cases. Once we realize that we are not yet writing the
history of children's lives, though, we get impatient to get on with the work.
This volume whets that appetite.

University of California, Davis Jay Mechling

Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro,Creole Culture

in the Eighteenth Century. By Gwendolyn Midlo Hall (Baton Rouge,
Louisiana: Louisiana State University Press, 1992. xx plus 434pp.
$29.95).
Professor Hall's Africans in Colonial Louisiana is destined to become an influential
work not only on colonial slave societies but on the social and economic history
of Louisiana's Europeans. Given how little we know about early Louisiana, it is
a welcome addition to the literature. Based upon extensive archival research in
French, Spanish, and English sources, the book analyzes the history of Louisiana
slavery, beginning when the first French settlers arrived in the late seventeenth
century and ending with the 1795 slave conspiracy at Pointe Coupee. Although
the book is organized chronologically, strong themes-the brevity of the African
slave trade to French Louisiana, the development of language-based Afro-Creole
communities, planters' struggles to find a viable staple, the ubiquity of both
inter,racial comity and conflict-emerge. This approach highlights such changes
as the transition from French to Spanish rule and the impact of the French
Revolution on slaves. A brief overview of the themes of the book cannot do it
justice.
Professor Hall stresses the differences between Louisiana and the English
slave societies of the Chesapeake and South Carolina. If the relatively rapid
development of slave families resembled those of the mid-eighteenth-century
Chesapeake colonies, the legal protection the French afforded slave families
(mothers, children, and fathers) did not; if the predominance of Africans in
the adult population and the concentration of slaves from one African region