1. In 1976, the first public history programs in the United States were established at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh and at the University of California at Santa Barbara. In 1979, public history professionals organized the National Council on Public History, which was formally incorporated the following year. See Johnson, G. Wesley et al. , “Public History: A New Area of Teaching, Research, and Employment,” AHA Newsletter 18 (03 1980): 8–10Google Scholar; Public History: State of the Art, 1980, a special issue of Public Historian 2 (Fall 1979)Google Scholar; and Howe, Barbara J. and Kemp, Emory, eds., Public History: An Introduction (New York: Krieger, 1986).Google Scholar

2. By this Read meant that historians needed to underscore the demonstrable use of their subject. See Read, Conyers, “The Social Responsibilities of Historians,” American Historical Review 55 (01 1950): 279.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3. Read, , “Social Responsibilities,” p. 281.Google Scholar

4. Read, , “Social Responsibilities,” p. 283Google Scholar. Historians and the Cold War are discussed in Whitfield, Stephen J., The Culture of the Cold War (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), p. 58.Google Scholar

5. C. Vann Woodward, quoted in Leuchtenburg, William E., “The Historian and the Public Realm,” American Historical Review 97 (02 1992): 12.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6. Woodward, , “Historian,” p. 1.Google Scholar

7. See, for example, the discussion in Zilversmit, Arthur, “Academic Historians Need New Ways to Work With Schoolteachers,” Chronicle of Higher Education (01 27, 1993, sec. B, p. 3)Google Scholar, which outlines the activities of the History Academy for Ohio Teachers (sponsored by the National Council for History Education) in the context of “the series of reports on the failures of [American] schools” and the “urgent necessity” for school reform. On the latter, also see Zook, Jim, “10 Years Later, Many Educators See Little Progress for the ‘Nation at Risk’,” Chronicle of Higher Education, 04 21, 1993, sec. A, pp. 19, 24.Google Scholar

8. For a slightly revised version of this address, see Harlan, Louis R., “Social Studies Reform and the Historian,” Journal of American History 77 (12 1990): 801–11CrossRefGoogle Scholar; quote, p. 801.

9. Gary B. Nash posed this question at the OAH Focus on Teaching Day Luncheon in his address “Whose History Should We Teach Our Children?” Chicago, April 4, 1992.

10. See, for example, Coughlin, Ellen K., “Scholars Confront Fundamental Question: Which Vision of America Should Prevail?” Chronicle of Higher Education, 01 29, 1992, sec. A, pp. 8, 11Google Scholar; Scott, Joan W., “Liberal Historians: A Unitary Vision,” Chronicle of Higher Education, 09 11, 1991, sec. B, pp. 1–2Google Scholar; and Reinhold, Robert, “Class Struggle: Cowgirls and the Bantu Migration—In its Controversial New Textbooks, California Is Rewriting History,” New York Times Magazine, 09 29, 1991, pp. 26–29, 46–47, 52.Google Scholar

11. Manegold, Catherine S., “Top Guns at Buffalo Front in Abortion War,” New York Times, 04 25, 1992, p. 7Google Scholar. Reverend Schenck's language recalls the principle of “coverture” in Anglo-American colonial and early American common law in which a married woman (feme covert) had her legal identity “covered” by that of her husband in matters of property. For a brief discussion, see, for example, Kerber, Linda K., Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (1980; rept. New York: Norton, 1986), pp. 9–10, 119–21.Google Scholar

12. Rosenthal, Andrew, “What's Meant and What's Mean in the ‘Family Values’ Battle,” New York Times, 07 26, 1992, sec. 4, p. 6.Google Scholar

13. On feminism's analysis of the “personal nature of political action” and its connections to New Left thought, see Evans, Sara M., Personal Politics: The Roots of Women's Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left (New York: Knopf, 1979)Google Scholar; quote, p. 43; see also the epigraph by Charlotte Bunche, “‘A Broom of One's Own’: Notes on Women's Liberation Program Since the Motive Magazine Issue,” p. 212.

14. The Urban Interiors Project represents a collaboration between Wayne State University historian John J. Bukowczyk, project director, and photographer Bruce Harkness, now the city photographer of Dearborn, Michigan. The project combines oral history and documentary photography to portray the lives of residents of Detroit's east side and study how they have been affected by urban change in the post—World War II period. It comprises some four thousand black-and-white photographs and over a hundred hours of oral history interviews (about four thousand pages of transcript) with about fifty east side residents. When complete, the Urban Interiors Project will yield a collection of about fifty one- to two-hour taped oral history interviews, transcripts, and two hundred to four hundred archival 8 × 10-inch black-and-white photographs that will be deposited as a permanent research resource at the Wayne State University Folklore Archive or other suitable repository. For a fuller discussion of the project, see John J. Bukowczyk, “Linking Material Culture, Social Relations, Economic Change, and Urban Space: Interviews and Photographs in the Detroit Inner City,” a paper delivered at a joint meeting of the American Historical Association and Polish American Historical Association, New York City, December 28, 1990.

15. See Spring, Joel, Images of A merican Life: A History of Ideological Management in Schools, Movies, Radio, and Television (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), esp. ch. 10Google Scholar, “Subversion and Harmony,” pp. 159–84. Spring regards the public schools as “significant institutions for transmitting the values of the Cold War” (quote, p. 167).

16. Spring, , Images of American Life, p. 171Google Scholar. According to Spring the schools set about rooting out “criticisms of U.S. business, business people, free enterprise, economic individualism, and suggestions for government economic planning or collective action” from their curricula (quote, p. 171). The postwar relationship between American business and the schools built on an understanding forged during the war years, when, as part of the nation's mobilization effort, the National Education Association met jointly with the National Association of Manufacturers and chapters of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce worked closely with local schools (see Spring, pp. 148–51).

17. Counts, George S., “Dare the School Build a New Social Order?” in Controversies Over the Purposes of Schooling, ed. Benson, Norman and Lyons, Richard, rev. ed. (1932; rept. Lanham, N.Y.: University Press of America, 1950), pp. 46–55.Google Scholar

18. Counts, George S., Education and American Civilization (New York: Teachers College, Columbia University, 1952); p. ixGoogle Scholar. Counts published this book while serving as chairman of the powerful American Committee for Cultural Freedom, the U.S. subsidiary of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which, according to Christopher Lasch, was “a coalition of liberals and reactionaries who shared a conspiratorial view of communism and who agreed, moreover, that the Communist conspiracy had spread through practically every level of American society.” Like Counts, many others on the Council for Cultural Freedom were former critics of American capitalism. On the Congress for Cultural Freedom—its formation, leadership, ideology, and Central Intelligence Agency links—see Lasch, Christopher, “The Cultural Cold War: A Short History of the Congress for Cultural Freedom,” in Towards A New Past: Dissenting Essays in American History, ed. Bernstein, Barton (1967; rept. New York: Vintage, 1969), pp. 322–59Google Scholar; quote, p. 336. On Counts, see Lasch, , pp. 334, 337Google Scholar; and Spring, , Images of American Life, pp. 128–29.Google Scholar

19. Hollingshead, August B., Elmtown's Youth: The Impact of Social Classes on Adolescents (1949; rept. New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1964), p. 447.Google Scholar

20. Myrdal, Gunnar S., An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, 2 vols. (New York: Harper, 1944).Google Scholar

21. Hollingshead, , Elmtown's Youth, pp. 447–53Google Scholar. Significantly, Hollingshead did his field research in 1941–42; his military service during World War II delayed the writing of the book.

22. Spring, , Images of American Life, pp. 205–13Google Scholar; for a discussion of “Textbook Town,” see pp. 205–6.

23. DeMott, Benjamin, The Imperial Middle: Why Americans Can't Think Straight About Class (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), p. 143Google Scholar. DeMott assesses the denial of the existence and salience of class in American society, focusing especially on education. See also Graff, Gerald, Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education (New York: Norton, 1992), p. 5.Google Scholar

24. Scott, , “Liberal Historians,” sec. B, p. 2.Google Scholar

25. Bounded by the 1–94 expressway in the north, Mt. Elliott Street (west), Gratiot and Mack avenues (south), and St. Aubin Street (east), the area studied by the Urban Interiors Project lies just south of the site of the old Dodge main plant in the city of Hamtramck (and the city's new General Motors [GM] “Poletown” plant) and about two miles north of Detroit's Renaissance Center. Construction of the GM facility, probably the most controversial and certainly the largest reindustrialization project of the late 1970s and early 1980s, is treated extensively in both the popular press and the social science literature. See, for example, Wylie, Jeanie, Poletown: Community Betrayed (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989)Google Scholar; and Jones, Bryan D. and Bachelor, Lynn W., The Sustaining Hand: Community Leadership and Corporate Power (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1986).Google Scholar

26. U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, 1970 Census of Population and Housing, Census Tracts, Detroit, Mich., Table H-1; and 1980 Census of Population and Housing, Census Tracts, Detroit, Mich. Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area, Table H-1.

27. U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, 1970 Census of Population and Housing, Census Tracts, Detroit, Mich., Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area (and Adjacent Area) (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1972)Google Scholar, PHC(1)–58, Table P-1; and U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, 1980 Census of Population and Housing, Census Tracts, Detroit, Mich. Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1983)Google Scholar, PHC80-2–140, Tables P-1, P-3.

28. 1970 Census of Population and Housing, Census Tracts, Detroit, Mich., Table P-6; and 1980 Census of Population and Housing, Census Tracts, Detroit, Mich. Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area, Table P-14. On the general decline of the area and its social consequences, see Bukowczyk, John J., Poletown: Urban Change in Industrial Detroit, The Making of Detroit's East Side, 1850–1990, unpublished report to the Community and Economic Development Department, City of Detroit, 03 15, 1991, chs. 4–6.Google Scholar

29. The phrase, written by Thomas Jefferson in 1820, was later appropriated by Oscar Handlin. See Handlin, , Fire-Bell in the Night: The Crisis in Civil Rights (Boston: Little, Brown, 1964).Google Scholar

30. See Omi, Michael and Winant, Howard, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1980s (New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986)Google Scholar. Among recent books addressing a broad audience are Hacker, Andrew, Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal (New York: Scribner's, 1992)Google Scholar; and Terkel, Studs, Race: How Blacks and Whites Think and Feel About the American Obsession (New York: Free Press, 1992).Google Scholar

31. One Serbian immigrant, only three months in America and in the area, concluded, “Everybody, everybody knows—maybe that's taboo, maybe it's secret, maybe people don't like to talk about that—everyone knows that Black people make lot of troubles here.” Another white resident told interviewers, “The Black people. They don't wanna work. They sit there, they eat potato chips, drink pop, an' they don't do anything.” See interview with Andric, Zoran, 01 24, 1990, p. 25Google Scholar; and interview with Rose Przybylinski, July 7,1988, p. 54, Urban Interiors Project, Wayne State University.

32. This image of the family was extended through the war years. Historian Warren Susman has recalled “how Norman Rockwell turned the American ‘Four Freedoms’ into family-centered events.” See Susman, Warren, with Griffin, Edward, “Did Success Spoil the United States? Dual Representations in Postwar America,” in Recasting America: Culture and Politics in the Age of the Cold War, ed. May, Lary (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 22Google Scholar; and Levine, Lawrence W., “The Historian and the Icon: Photography and the History of the American People in the 1930s and 1940s,” in Documenting America, 1935–1943, ed. Fleischhauer, Carl and Brannan, Beverly W. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 33ff.Google Scholar

33. For an example of such analysis, see Michel, Sonya, “American Women and the Discourse on the Democratic Family in World War II,” in Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars, ed. Higonnet, Margaret Randolph, Jensen, Jane, Michel, Sonya, and Weitz, Margaret Collins (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), pp. 154–67Google Scholar. On the family's depiction in motion pictures during the same period, see Koppes, Clayton and Black, Gregory, Hollywood Goes to War: How Politics, Profits and Propaganda Shaped World War II Movies (New York: Free Press, 1987).Google Scholar

34. See May, , Recasting America, p. 163Google Scholar; and Boyer, Paul S., By the Bomb's Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (New York: Pantheon, 1985), p. 311.Google Scholar

35. Sandeen, Eric J., “ ‘The Family of Man’ at the Museum of Modern Art: The Power of the Image in 1950s America,” Prospects 11 (1987): 377Google Scholar. Steichen's exhibit, which displayed more than five hundred photographs from sixty-eight countries, drew record-breaking crowds to the museum, toured the globe to an audience of some nine million persons, and recorded over four million catalog sales. See Steichen, EdwardThe Family of Man (New York: Maco, for the Museum of Modern Art, 1955)Google Scholar, the catalog of the exhibit; Stange, Maren, Symbols of Ideal Life: Social Documentary Photography in America, 1890–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 134Google Scholar; and Tagg, John, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), p. 14.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

36. See Steichen's statement soliciting photographs for the exhibition in News Release, “Museum of Modern Art Plans International Photography Exhibition,” 01 31, 1954Google Scholar; as quoted in Sandeen, , “‘The Family of Man’ at the Museum,” p. 373.Google Scholar

37. Tagg, , Burden of Representation, p. 14.Google Scholar

38. For example, in a major installation that forms the centerpiece of the catalog, eighteen pictures feature unidentified cultural groups, each performing a circle game (Steichen, , Family of Man, p. 94–95).Google Scholar

39. May, Elaine Tyler, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic, 1988)Google Scholar; quote, p. 11. For a discussion of the “ideological conceptions” of both “family” and “home” in this exhibit, see Tagg, , Burden of Representation, pp. 160–62Google Scholar. Essentialist in nature, they are promulgated, of course, in contradistinction to analyses of the social construction of gender—both the feminine and the masculine.

40. The phrase is May, 's (Homeward Bound, p. 16)Google Scholar. On United States Information Agency sponsorship of the exhibit, see Sandeen, , “‘The Family of Man’ at the Museum,” p. 368Google Scholar. See also Stange, , Symbols of Ideal Life, pp. 138–41Google Scholar; Sekula, Allan, “The Traffic in Photographs,” in Photography Against the Grain: Essays and Photo Works, 1973–1983, ed. Sekula, (Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1984), pp. 76–101Google Scholar; and Tagg, , Burden of Representation, p. 14.Google Scholar

41. In order to counter what it regarded as a Soviet effort to paint the United States as a cultural wasteland, the American government promoted artworks abroad under its own auspices, but met with substantial Congressional and public opposition, centered especially on the exhibition of modernist paintings. American strategists then turned to private outlets to sponsor tours of the nation's artistic wares. In this effort MOMA, which hosted “The Family of Man” exhibit (and which, according to critic Eva Cockcroft, had served as a “minor war contractor” during the 1940s), proved an especially willing and valuable instrument of American cultural hegemony in the 1950s (see Cockcroft, Eva, “Abstract Expressionism: Weapon of the Cold War,” Artforum 12 [06 1974]: 39–40Google Scholar). The museum had direct links to the Central Intelligence Agency through its supervisor of cultural affairs, Thomas W. Braden, who had served as MOMA's executive secretary. Its three-time director, Nelson Rockefeller, headed the State Department's Office of Inter-American Affairs (an agency established in 1940 to “[mount] a thorough cultural offensive in Latin America”), while, of course, remaining a prominent representative of American economic interests abroad (see Rosenberg, Emily S., Spreading the American Dream: American Economic and Cultural Expansion, 1890–1945 [New York: Hill and Wang, 1982], p. 207)Google Scholar. In this capacity, Rockefeller continued his family's tradition of close association with the museum. During his term Edward Steichen became the museum's director of photography (see De Hart Mathews, Jane, “Art and Politics in Cold War America,” American Historical Review 81 [10 1976]: 762–87CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Collier, Peter and Horowitz, David, The Rockefellers: An American Dynasty [New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1976], p. 147Google Scholar; Tagg, , Burden of Representation, p. 14Google Scholar; and Stange, , Symbols of Ideal Life, 135–41)Google Scholar. On culture as an important Cold War arena, see Lasch, , “Cultural Cold War”Google Scholar; and on Rockefeller and the Office of Inter-American Affairs, see Rosenberg, , Spreading the American Dream, pp. 187, 206–9.Google Scholar

42. About California's Disneyland, historian Susman, Warren notes, “Disney tells us that throughout human history the family remains the same in every single historical period.”Google Scholar See Susman, , “Did Success Spoil the United States?” p. 33.Google Scholar

43. Steichen, , Family of Man, p. 184Google Scholar; and Sandeen, , “‘The Family of Man’ at the Museum,” p. 371.Google Scholar

44. The Disney empire has long ties to American cultural efforts. Nelson Rockefeller's Office of Inter-American Affairs cooperated with Walt Disney Studios in its production of a high-quality propaganda piece for Latin American consumption, Saludas Amigos. Emily Rosenberg describes it as “a feature-length cartoon with Disney characters dancing in Brazilian fiestas, riding with Argentine gauchos, and crossing the formidable Andes” (see Rosenberg, , Spreading the American Dream, p. 207)Google Scholar. For a recent assessment of Disney's ongoing legacy, see Willis, Susan, guest ed., The World According to Disney, a special issue of SAQ (The South Atlantic Quarterly) 92 (Winter 1993).Google Scholar

45. Graebner, William, Coming of Age in Buffalo: Youth and Authority in the Postwar Era (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), pp. 112–13Google Scholar. See also Graebner, , “Coming of Age in Buffalo: The Ideology of Maturity in Postwar America,” Radical History Review 34 (1986): 53–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The motif has continued. In 1985, the extraordinarily successful “We Are the World” album, featuring a host of star vocalists, evoked the vision of the pan-national family to campaign for African famine relief. Similarly, a 1992 “public service” advertisement by the Mobil Corporation announcing an exhibition of Philippine photographs by Eduardo Masferré at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of History carried the message, “The images seem ourselves: the warrior with his spear, the family gathered round the hearth, women and their babies at play.” See New York Times, 06 4, 1992, op-ed page.Google Scholar

46. When academic historians have become engaged in efforts to improve precollegiate education they have tended to concentrate on the secondary schools. For a rationale for including elementary teachers in programs to improve the teaching of history in the public schools, see Zilversmit, , “Academic Historians.”Google Scholar

47. Becker, Carl, “Everyman His Own Historian,” American Historical Review 37 (01 1932): 231CrossRefGoogle Scholar, quoted in Scott, Joan Wallach, “AHR Forum: History in Crisis? The Others' Side of the Story,” American Historical Review 94 (06 1989): 687.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

48. Read, , “Social Responsibilities,” p. 278.Google Scholar

49. Thelen, David, “An Afterthought on Scale and History,” part of “A Round Table: The Living and Reliving of World War II,” Journal of American History 77 (September 1990): 593.Google Scholar

50. Stuart J. Murphy, co-owner of Ligature, a textbook development concern, quoted in Reinhold, , “Class Struggle,” p. 28.Google Scholar

51. One teacher who participated in the Families of the City project expressed reservations about the use of this medium, believing that elementary-aged children in the 1990s would respond better to videotape or, minimally, color slides. Other teachers expressly remarked the appropriateness of using black-and-white still images for this project. Personal interviews by Nora Faires with anonymous teachers, Indian Hill Elementary School, Grand Blanc, Michigan, October 24 and 25, 1990.

52. See Faires, Nora, Teachers Guide for The Families of the City—A Project in the Schools based on URBAN INTERIORS: Photographs and Interviews on Detroit's East Side, ed. Bukowczyk, John J. (Detroit: Department of History, Wayne State University, 1989)Google Scholar; quote, p. 1. The Teachers Guide now has been revised so as to incorporate the experience of the workshop pilot tests.

53. Originally, the sections were grouped K-3,4–6, 7–8, but project assessment suggested the grouping noted in the text. The third section on “community” has yet to be fully developed and field-tested.

54. Depending on the age of the students, the workshops lasted from thirty to forty-five minutes and featured approximately sixteen Urban Interiors slides. The Teachers Guide outlines activities that teachers may undertake with their pupils before and after the workshop.

55. Participating schools included Ferry Elementary, Bunche Elementary, and Edmonson Elementary, in Detroit, and Indian Hill Elementary in suburban Grand Blanc, Michigan. The workshops were conducted following similar procedures, despite the contrasting profiles of the participating schools. At each, project staff was granted permission by the principal and other administrators (and, in the case of Indian Hill, by a school advisory board). At Indian Hill, project staff also met with interested parents at an open meeting. Project staff recruited teachers to participate, meeting with them to explain the project and distribute copies of the Teachers Guide. Teachers were asked to review the Guide, discuss the pertinent concept—“family” or “diversity”—with their students before the workshop presentation, participate in the workshop with the children, reinforce the exercise through “follow-up activities” described in the Guide, and evaluate the entire endeavor. Project photographer Bruce Harkness conducted the field test at Ferry Elementary in May, 1989; Nora Faires did so at Indian Hill Elementary in October, 1990; and research assistant David R. Smith conducted the workshops at Bunche Elementary in December, 1990, and at Edmonson Elementary in January, 1991. Our discussion here derives from all four field sites, but focuses on Ferry and Indian Hill. As outlined below, the former fits the profile of the Detroit inner city; the latter, the pattern of the Michigan suburb. Since the field tests, a presentation on the project has been made to an audience of Michigan teachers at a ROADS (Renaissance Outreach Alliance for Detroit-Area Schools) workshop sponsored by the Michigan Humanities Council.

56. Both Edmonson Elementary School and Bunche Elementary School, also located in inner-city Detroit neighborhoods, have student populations comparable to Ferry Elementary's. Bunche Elementary, for example, serves an area two miles southeast of the Urban Interiors project site. Of Bundle's roughly 280 students, 99 percent are African-American—the four white students attending do so as part of a school district-wide special education program. Like Ferry Elementary, in addition to local tax receipts Bunche receives significant state and federal funding. Although enrollment at Bunche is declining, class sizes average thirty-five students per classroom. On average, Bunche students' scores on the standardized state examination ranged between those of the Ferry and Indian Hill pupils. The 1988–89 Michigan Educational Assessment Program scores for Bunche were 88.4 percent in mathematics, 76.7 percent in reading, and 23.3 percent in science. Data on Bunche are courtesy of Violet Crawford, Principal, Bunche Elementary School, Detroit, Michigan; personal interview by David R. Smith, December 12,1990.

57. Data on Ferry school are courtesy of Paul Kulhanjian, principal of Ferry Elementary School, Detroit, Michigan; personal interview by project research assistant Smith, David R., 11 29, 1990Google Scholar. At the time of the field test, nearby St. Hyacinth Roman Catholic Church operated an elementary school, most of whose students were white. The school since has closed.

58. As a group, Ferry students fall below average on standardized achievement tests. Scores on the state's annual test for 1988–89 indicated that in both math and reading fewer than six out often Ferry fourth graders achieved at least 75 percent of the minimum standard deemed appropriate for their grade level. The results for science were much lower: slightly over one in five scored at this level. The Michigan Educational Assessment Program scores for Ferry in 1988–89 were 59.6 percent in math, 59.1 percent in reading, and 21.0 percent in science.

59. Three of four Ferry students qualify for the federal free lunch program, which is only available to students from low-income families. To augment its funding from local revenues, the school receives substantial state aid, while federal funds support Ferry's preschool and all-day kindergarten.

60. Demographic information on Indian Hill provided by Diane Wilbur, Principal, Indian Hill Elementary School, Grand Blanc, Michigan; personal interview by Faires, Nora, 11 14, 1990Google Scholar. Additional information supplied by Zoe Starkweather, grants officer, Genesee Intermediate School District, Flint, Michigan; personal interview by Faires, Nora, 11 16, 1990.Google Scholar

61. The percentages are 91.4 percent white, 1.4 percent African-American, 4.3 percent Asian, 1.3 percent Hispanic, and 0.7 percent “American Indian” or Alaskan.

62. Indian Hill students likewise have tended to score higher on the state's standardized test than do most Michigan children: in 1988–89 more than nine of ten Indian Hill students ranked in the highest category of math and reading achievement; slightly more than half did so in science. The Michigan Educational Assessment Program scores for Indian Hill in 1988–89 were 93.4 percent in math, 90.3 percent in reading, and 52.1 percent in science.

63. Local sources support approximately 92 percent of the school's general fund.

64. Two influential recent reports have provided guidelines for reforming history and social studies instruction at all grade levels. See the report prepared by the Bradley Commission on History in Schools (Kenneth T. Jackson, Chair), Building A History Curriculum: Guidelines for Teaching History in Schools (Washington, D.C.: Educational Excellence Network, 1988)Google Scholar, commonly (and hereafter) referred to as the Report of the Bradley Commission, and the report of the Curriculum Task Force of the National Commission on Social Studies in the Schools, Charting a Course: Social Studies for the 21st Century—A Report of the Curriculum Task Force of the National Commission on Social Studies in the Schools (Washington, D.C.: National Commission on Social Studies in the Schools, 1989)Google Scholar. The Report of the Curriculum Task Force, as it hereafter will be called, was a joint project of the AHA, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, the National Council for the Social Studies, and the OAH.

65. Report of the Bradley Commission, p. 16.

66. See the Report of the Bradley Commission, pp. 7, 10, 12; quote, p. 6; and the Report of the Curriculum Task Force, pp. 8, 12, 49.

67. It has since been adopted in Oregon, Arkansas, Indiana, West Virginia, Newark, New Jersey, and Dubuque, Iowa. See Reinhold, , “Class Struggle,” p. 27.Google Scholar

68. The teaching of values in the schools is once again a topic of widespread popular, as well as pedagogical, discussion. See, for example, Daley, Suzanne, “Pendulum Is Swinging Back to the Teaching of Values in U.S. Schools,” New York Times, Midwest edition, 12 12, 1990, sec. B, p. 8Google Scholar. For an example of a methodology for teaching values, see James A. Banks, with Clegg, Ambrose A. Jr., Teaching Strategies for the Social Studies: Inquiry, Valuing, and Decision-Making, 3d ed. (New York: Longman, 1985).Google Scholar

69. The literature on the changing patterns of American family life is growing rapidly. See especially Coontz, Stephanie, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap (New York: Basic, 1992)Google Scholar; Ruggles, Steven, “The Transformation of American Family Structure,” American Historical Review 99 (02 1994): 103–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Mintz, Steven and Kellogg, Susan, Domestic Revolutions: A Social History of American Family Life (New York: Free Press, 1988), pp. 177–201Google Scholar. Coontz outlines the public policy implications of demythologizing the American family in “Let Scholars Bring Realism to the Debate on Family Values,” Chronicle of Higher Education, 10 21, 1992, sec. B, pp. 1–2Google Scholar. See also “Change in the American Family: Now Only 1 in 4 Is ‘Traditional’,” New York Times, Midwest edition, 01 30, 1991, sec. A, p. 1Google Scholar, and sec. C, p. 20, which reports on a March, 1990, survey of 57,400 housing units; these data also are discussed in Barringer, Felicity, “Changes in U.S. Households: Single Parents and Solitude,” New York Times, 06 7, 1991, sec. A, pp. 1, 12Google Scholar. In addition, see Gutis, Philip A., “What Makes a Family? Traditional Limits Are Challenged,” New York Times, 08 31, 1989, Midwest edition, pp. 15, 19Google Scholar; Skolnick, Arlene, Embattled Paradise: The American Family in an Age of Uncertainty (New York: Basic, 1991)Google Scholar; Seward, Rudy Ray, The American Family: A Demographic History (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1978)Google Scholar; and Goldschieder, Frances K. and Waite, Linda J., New Families, No Families? The Transformation of the American Home (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991)Google Scholar. Mintz and Kellogg discuss the portrayal of the family in 1950s television. In 1992, the influence of politics and popular culture is illustrated in a decision by the Judith Corporation, the distributor of an expectant “mommy doll” named “Judy” whose “round stomach … can be removed to reveal a baby doll.” The corporation introduced father-to-be “Charlie,” Judy's husband, and modified both dolls so that each would “come with a wedding ring.” A public relations representative for Judith remarked that the change was “to show the whole family-unity thing and to show that she is married and that she does have a husband.” Neither doll, it might be noted, is anatomically correct. See Shapiro, Eben, New York Times, 06 20, 1992.Google Scholar

70. “Change in the American Family,” sec. C, p. 20; and Barringer, , “Changes in U.S. Households,” sec. A, pp. 1, 12.Google Scholar

71. See Ahlburg, Dennis A. and DeVita, Carol J., “New Realities of the American Family,” Population Bulletin 47 (08 1992): 5–7Google ScholarPubMed; quote, p. 5. See also Crispell, Diane, “How to Avoid Big Mistakes,” American Demographics 13 (03 1991): 48Google Scholar; and Waldrop, Judith and Exeter, Thomas, “The Legacy of the 1980s,” American Demographics 13 (03 1991): 35.Google Scholar

72. In 1991, 16.6 million children in the United States lived with only one parent. More than two-thirds of these children lived with either a divorced parent or a parent who had never married. See Ahlburg, and DeVita, , “New Realities,” p. 8Google Scholar; and Barringer, , “Changes in U.S. Households,” sec. A, p. 12.Google Scholar

73. Ahlburg, and DeVita, , “New Realities,” pp. 7–8Google Scholar; and Barringer, , “Changes in U.S. Households,” sec. A, p. 12Google Scholar. Most signs point to a continuation of these patterns into the next century. See Ahlburg, and DeVita, , “New Realities,” pp. 5, 7, 38–39Google Scholar; and also, for example, Weitzman, Lenore J., The Divorce Revolution: The Unexpected Social and Economic Consequences for Women and Children in America (New York: Free Press, 1985)Google Scholar; and Cherlin, Andrew J., Marriage, Divorce, Remarriage, rev., enl. ed. (1981; rept. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992)Google Scholar. For a useful literature review, see Krantz, Susan, “The Impact of Divorce on Children,” in Feminism, Children and The New Families, ed. Dornbusch, Sanford M. and Strober, Myra H. (New York: Guilford, 1988).Google Scholar

74. Personal interview by Nora Faires with anonymous teacher, Indian Hill Elementary School, Grand Blanc, Michigan, November 20, 1990. Preparing “family trees” remained a popular elementary school assignment through the 1950s; changes in contemporary family structure probably also have rendered it a problematical pedagogical exercise. See Waters, Mary G., Ethnic Options: Choosing Identities in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), p. 59.Google Scholar

75. It is likely also potentially damaging to children living in households that fall outside its strict confines. For a thoughtful, brief discussion of the “emergence of the family in the West as a moral unit” and the “cult and culture of the modern family” with “traces running deep into ancient and medieval history,” see Herlihy, David, “Family,” American Historical Review 96 (02 1991): 1–16; quotes, pp. 1, 16CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For an antirevisionist reassertion of the timelessness of the nuclear family, see Mount, Ferdinand, The Subversive Family: An Alternative History of Love and Marriage (1982; rept. New York: Free Press, 1992).Google Scholar

76. Faires, , Teachers Guide, p. 2.Google Scholar

77. The relativist definition of the family this project and others embrace seeks to expand the concept of family beyond its supposedly “traditional limits” of persons related by “blood, marriage, or adoption” to include persons bound to each other by ties of assistance, support, nurture, commitment, and love. The relativist view lately has gained some institutional recognition. Recent court decisions, for example, have upheld “domestic partnership” laws; a U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare directive stated that “any combination of individuals who combine in willingness to meet each other's needs and provide mutual support, emotionally and/or financially, may meet the test of the family”; and even the federal census, in 1970, recognized several new descriptions of relationships among persons in the household (for example, “roommate,” “partner,” and “spouse”). See Marks, James D., “A Victory for the New American Family,” New York Times, 02 1, 1992Google Scholar, op-ed page; “Unmarried-Partners' Rights Test Those of Washington,” New York Times, 03 10, 1992, sec. A, p. 13Google Scholar; and Ryan, Mary P., “The Explosion of Family History,” Reviews in American History 10 (12 1982): 180CrossRefGoogle Scholar, quoting Allen, Catherine M., “Defining the Family for Post-Industrial Public Policy,” in The Family in Post-Industrial America, ed. Snyder, David Pearch (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1979)Google Scholar. Nonetheless, as contemporary political debates have made clear, the so-called “traditional” family's defenders remain legion. See Popenoe, David, “The Controversial Truth: Two-Parent Families Are Better,” New York Times, 12 26, 1992Google Scholar, op-ed page; and Gutis, , “What Makes a Family?” pp. 15, 19Google Scholar. For a brief account of the debate over this definition, see “What Is a Family?” Christian Science Monitor, 05 2, 1991, p. 11.Google Scholar

78. For an early presentation of a multicultural approach, see Teaching Ethnic Studies, National Council for the Social Studies 43rd Yearbook, ed. Banks, James A. (Washington, D.C.: National Council for the Social Studies, 1973)Google Scholar. See also Banks, , Teaching Strategies for Ethnic Studies, 5th ed. (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1991)Google Scholar; and Banks, James A. and Banks, Cherry A. McGee, eds., Multicultural Education: Issues and Perspectives (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1989)Google Scholar. The last two decades have witnessed the emergence of a huge literature on multicultural education in the United States, most directed toward practical classroom applications. See, for example, Tiedt, Pamela L. and Tiedt, Iris M., Multicultural Teaching: A Handbook of Activities, Information, and Resources, 3d. ed. (1979; Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1990)Google Scholar; Gollnick, Donna M. and Chinn, Philip C., Multicultural Education in a Pluralistic Society, 2d. ed. (Columbus, Ohio: Merrill, 1986)Google Scholar; Kendall, Frances E., Diversity in the Classroom: A Multicultural Approach to the Education of Young Children (New York: Teachers College, Columbia University, 1983)Google Scholar; and Bennett, Christine I., Comprehensive Multicultural Education: Theory and Practice, 2d ed. (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1990)Google Scholar. For a comparable work on the British educational system, see Nixon, Jon, A Teacher's Guide to Multicultural Education (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985).Google Scholar

79. For each photograph, workshop leaders asked students to identify objects that displayed a family's or group's culture and discussed the respective cultural practices. For example, two slides showed holiday festivities in a Polish-American home; project staff described the Easter and Christmas customs illustrated and examined the role of holidays, other ritual gatherings, festive foods, and so on, in preserving culture, renewing family and friendship ties, and creating new customs. Interestingly, Figures 3 and 4—photographs of a Polish-American and an African-American home, respectively—both feature a Christmas tree, a noteworthy common element. The workshops, of course, also treated secular celebrations and holidays in various non-Christian cultural traditions, for example, Chanukah, Ramadan, and Kwanzaa. See Faires, , Teachers Guide, pp. 13, 17.Google Scholar

80. Faires, , Teacher Guide, pp. 13, 17.Google Scholar

81. On ethnicity, see, for example, Waters, , Ethnic OptionsGoogle Scholar; and Alba, Richard D., Ethnic Identity: The Transformation of White America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990)Google Scholar; and, on race, Omi, and Winant, , Racial FormationGoogle Scholar. See also Fuchs, Lawrence H., The American Kaleidoscope: Race, Ethnicity, and the Civic Culture (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England for Wesleyan University Press, 1990).Google Scholar

82. For some African Americans interviewed in the Urban Interiors Project, race held salience but not ethnicity. When asked whether one of her white friends in grade school was Polish, one interviewee responded emphatically, “White! We didn't have no Polish people. We just had white and black. If there were any other color, we didn't care no way, I mean, any other. I can't tell them the difference no way, to tell you the truth. I mean, you know, people is just people to me, honest.” See interview with Beverly Young, December 2, 1988, p. 16, Urban Interiors Project, Wayne State University.

83. The history of their homelands does not easily collapse into Western European history surveys. See Gromada, Thaddeus V., Report of the New Jersey Governor's Commission on Eastern European and Captive Nation History to Governor Thomas H. Kean and Dr. Saul Cooperman, Commissioner ofEducation (07 1989).Google Scholar

84. The subject is treated in Bukowczyk, John J., And My Children Did Not Know Me: A History of the Polish-Americans (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), pp. 110–16.Google Scholar

85. The response recalls the formula offered by Rev. Patrick Peyton in the 1950s: “The family who prays together stays together.” See Susman, , “Did Success Spoil the United States?” p. 22.Google Scholar

86. That children in the workshops mentioned Jesus is in itself not very surprising. All four test sites lie in areas that are denominationally but not religiously particularly diverse. Residents with a religious identification nearly all stem from the Christian tradition, Protestant or Catholic. In the Urban Interiors Project area itself, only a few Muslims reside (most recently arrived ethnic Albanians from the Kosovo province of Yugoslavia) and likewise few if any Jews. (The east side's Jewish population lived farther to the west along Hastings Avenue and is now entirely supplanted by Black in-migration that went to form the Black Bottom and Paradise Valley districts. The former has now been entirely—and the latter now largely—razed for urban renewal or freeway construction or owing to general obsolescence or deterioration.)

87. This conclusion finds support in the widely divergent responses given by Urban Interiors Project interviewees to a question about how far their neighborhood extends and in their reported patterns of association. In general, programs on diversity or multiculturalism lodged in public schools probably handle race, gender, and, to some extent ethnicity, more comfortably than they do religion.

88. Both were equally unfamiliar to most pupils.

89. The project teaches that not only fighting America's wars but also its domestic social ills (through, for example, “community service,” “conservation efforts,” “working in hospitals, community centers, and neighborhood shelters,” and “helping to eliminate poverty, racism, and war”) demonstrates loyalty and good citizenship. In both cases, project staff specifically asked students to name organizations for girls, women, and persons of different ages. See Faires, , Teachers Guide, p. 23.Google Scholar

90. The “community” segment has not yet been fully field-tested.

91. In order to develop students' numeric skills and engage each class with the photographs, the “What is a Family?” workshop leader asked the children to count—out loud—how many persons made up the family depicted in each slide. Children under seven years seem to favor the inclusion of pets as part of a family.

Including pets in “the family” has been a mainstay of American popular culture. In an episode of the 1960s television cartoon, The Jetsons, for example, this fictionalized “space family” together with their robot-maid and their dog, Astro, competed on a quiz show called “Family Fall-Out” (a take-off on the television game show, Family Feud). When the show's host disqualified an answer tendered by the robot-maid because “computers are not allowed on ‘Family Fall-Out’,” one of the Jetson offspring rejoined that the robot-maid “is not a computer,” but “part of our family.” The program, it might also be noted, also distorted class relations among householders and their hired help.

The question of a dog's membership in a household, if not of a family, more recently seems to have been decided affirmatively by at least one reputable source. See “Clue to Bushes' Disease Sought in Water” (New York Times, 05 29, 1991, sec. A, p. 10)Google Scholar, which describes the effort to “uncover a clue to the extraordinary coincidence that three members of a household had developed autoimmune disorders over a 16-month period.” The three household members referred to are George Bush, Barbara Bush, and “their dog, Millie.”

92. Personal interviews by Nora Faires with Marie Pfeifer, kindergarten teacher, and Chris Lott, third-grade teacher, Indian Hill Elementary School, Grand Blanc, Michigan, October 25, 1990. Overall, the teachers approved of the children's generally close attention to the content of the photographs, with several expressing considerable surprise and pleasure at the pupils' ability to discern and identify the contents of the pictures.

93. Families of the City workshop presentation; Indian Hill Elementary School, Grand Blanc, Michigan, October 24, 1990. For each slide, project staff carefully named the persons depicted, pointing out generational and other relations. Elementary school curricula nonetheless still have tended to view “families” consisting of gay persons/parents with constraint. The dispute between New York City's Schools Chancellor Joseph Fernandez and a school board in Queens over the inclusion of “families of gay men and lesbians,” which raged throughout 1992, exemplifies this trend. See, for example, “Curriculum Urging Respect for Gay People Is Rejected,” New York Times, 04 24, 1992Google Scholar; Meyers, Steven Lee, “School Board Out in New York Fight: Local Panel Suspended After It Bars Gay-Life Lessons,” New York Times, 12 2, 1992, sec. A, pp. 1, 13 (quote p. 13)Google Scholar; Vigilante, Richard, “Heather's Mommies vs Heather's Parents,” New York Times, 12 12, 1992Google Scholar, op-ed page; and Barnabel, Josh, “School Chancellor Modifies Curriculum on Gay Families,” New York Times, 01 27, 1993, sec. B, p. 12.Google Scholar

94. One Indian Hill third-grader volunteered—albeit perhaps influenced by the proximity of Halloween—that “Detroit's where they have ‘Devil's Night’ [on Halloween]—when they scare people and burn down buildings and then [the people] don't have any homes left anymore,” a perception his classmates' nodding heads confirmed. This annual fall ritual was made nationally infamous in 1990 via a widely reviewed book on Detroit by that title and by a popular network television news show that broadcast a segment highlighting the year's burning spree. By contrast, Detroit's east side held immediate salience for the Ferry school's pupils whose own neighborhood and even some persons whom they knew were depicted in project photographs. Families of the City workshop presentation; Indian Hill Elementary School, Grand Blanc, Michigan, October 25, 1990. See Chavets, Ze'ev, Devil's Night and Other True Tales of Detroit (New York: Random House, 1990)Google Scholar; the review of Chavets's book by Green, Laura, “Trouble in Murder City,” New York Times Book Review, 11 11, 1990, p. 9Google Scholar; and ABC's Prime Time Live episode, 11 1, 1990Google Scholar. The “officially measured” toll for 1990 was “281 fires over three days, plus 26 rekindlings and 104 petty blazes in leaf piles and trash bins,” according to Rubin, Neal, “Ashes of Devil's Night,” Detroit Free Press, 12 2, 1990, sec. G, pp. 1, 6Google Scholar; figures cited in sec. G, p. 6.

95. This is not so likely considering how race—and racism—have been implicated in a term analogous to the students' Detroit stereotypes, “crime and danger”: “law-and-order.” According to Andrew Hacker, “What most Americans regard as ‘black crime’ has become a preoccupation of public and private life,” and most Americans regard “black crime” as “involving violence.” See Hacker, , Two NationsGoogle Scholar, ch. 11, “Crime: The Role Race Plays,” pp. 179–98Google Scholar; quotes, pp. 180, 181.

96. In discussing the slides, Ferry students routinely remarked on the race of those depicted, referring to some slides as ones with “whites” in them. Similarly matter-of-factly, students at Indian Hill mentioned specific photographs as being of “whites” or “Blacks.” These children's behavior confirms scholarship in the field of multicultural education. See interview with noted scholar Banks, James A. by Bullard, Sara, “It's Up to Us: James A. Banks Talks about Multicultural Education and Easing Racial Tensions,” Teaching Tolerance 1 (Fall 1992): 22–23.Google Scholar

97. Most whites portrayed in project slides are Polish-American, an ethnic group about whom Indian Hill children knew little and with which they felt little connection. The school's third-grade teacher, a Polish American, indicated that she stressed cultural heritage in her classes throughout the year, but few of her white students knew much about their roots. As if fulfilling a destiny suggested by its name, from the suburban soil of Grand Blanc (in a school whose name ironically commodifies Native Americans), most traces of white ethnic identification appear to have leached away (personal interview by Faires, Nora with Lott, Chris, 10 25, 1990)Google Scholar. For a lucid discussion of “suburban ethnicity” and ethnic identity choices among persons of multiethnic backgrounds, see Waters, , Ethnic Options.Google Scholar

98. It is, of course, possible that the differential reactions to the photographs also involved, for example, the influence of class on learning styles and interactions.

99. Families of the City workshop presentations; Indian Hill Elementary School, Grand Blanc, Michigan, October 24 and 25,1990. At these field tests, time limitations did not allow project staff to ascertain what clues in the pictures guided the students' perceptions.

100. See, for example, Banks, , Teaching StrategiesGoogle Scholar; Gollnick, and Chinn, , Multicultural EducationGoogle Scholar; Kendall, , Diversity in the ClassroomGoogle Scholar; and Bennett, , Comprehensive Multicultural EducationGoogle Scholar; and also Chira, , “Rescuing Cultures,” sec. 3, pp. 1, 13Google Scholar. In a recent interview Banks defined multicultural education inclusively as “a reform movement designed to bring about educational equity for all students, including those from different races, ethnic groups, social classes, exceptionality, and sexual orientation” (Banks, , “It's Up to Us,” p. 21)Google Scholar. On American education's denial of class, see DeMott, , Imperial Middle, ch. 8, pp. 129–48Google Scholar. Carby, Hazel V., scholar of American Studies and African-American literature, has charged that multiculturalism has become “one of the current code words for race”Google Scholar (Carby, , “The Multicultural Wars,” Radical History Review 54 [Fall 1992]: 9)Google Scholar. Also see Higham, John, “Multiculturalism and Universalism: A History and Critique,” American Quarterly 45 (06 1993): 195–219.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

The Report of the Curriculum Task Force prescribes a curriculum that to some degree does incorporate class. But while suggesting that, along with the stories of “heroes and heroines,” “common people should also be studied,” it places greater emphasis on the need to include “black and white, male and female, Native Americans, Asians and Hispanics” in its model curriculum. By contrast, the Report of the Bradley Commission, although urging a history curriculum more deeply imbedded in the Western tradition, specifically embraces the examination of class as a dimension of social difference. One of its nine recommendations regarding curriculum reform states flatly that “the history of women, racial and ethnic minorities, and men and women of all classes and conditions should be integrated into historical instruction.” In philosophy, the Families of the City project in large measure shares the perspective on class expounded by the latter and that embraced by the executive board of the OAH, which, in early 1991, affirmed “the importance of studying race, class, sex, and ethnicity in history curricula in the public schools,” while observing that “because history is tied up with a people's identity, it is legitimate that minority groups, women, and working people seek to derive self-esteem from aspects of their history.” See the Report of the Curriculum Task Force, pp. 8,12 (regarding recommendations for grades 7 and 8), and 30 (the Report's special section on “American History” by Thomas C. Holt, in which he asserts that because of their growing racial/ethnic diversity American schoolrooms are becoming places that are “themselves a kind of social studies text”); Report of the Bradley Commission, pp. 8, 11; and “Organization of American Historians Backs Teaching of Non-Western Culture and Diversity in Schools,” Chronicle of Higher Education, 02 6, 1991, sec. A, pp. 5–7Google Scholar; quotes, p. A5. For a review and evaluation of this report, see the six articles in A Special Issue: The Bradley Commission on History in Schools, History Teacher 23 (11 1989).Google Scholar

101. According to Michael Katz, schools have been “assigned key roles in the diffusion of democratic culture” and “also [have] had to mediate the contradictions between democratic ideals and the continuance of class and inequality.” See Katz, Michael B., Reconstructing American Education (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), p. 16Google Scholar; and Ira Katznelson and Weir, Margaret, Schooling for All: Class, Race, and the Decline of the Democratic Ideal (New York: Basic, 1985).Google Scholar

102. See, for example, Hughes, Raymond H. and Lancelot, William H., Education: America's Magic (Ames: Iowa State College Press, 1946), esp. pp. 6–7Google Scholar. See also the discussion in Graebner, William, “Outlawing Teenage Populism: The Campaign Against Secret Societies in the American High School, 1900–1960,” Journal of American History 74 (09 1987): 411–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Mosteller, Frederick and Moynihan, Daniel P., eds. On Equality of Educational Opportunity: Papers Deriving from the Harvard University Faculty Seminar on the Coleman Report (New York: Random House, 1972), esp. ch. 10Google Scholar, Gordon, Edmund W., “Toward Denning Equality of Educational Opportunity,” pp. 423–34Google Scholar. The report entitled Equality of Educational Opportunity (and dubbed the “Coleman Report” for its principal investigator, James S. Coleman) has its roots in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which mandated that the U.S. Office of Education undertake a survey of American education; it was submitted in 1966. Notably, this document took the quality of educational achievement as its measure of educational opportunity. The investigation for this influential document constituted, at the time, “the second largest social science research project in history” (quote, p. 4). For an example of the abundant literature that relates occupational mobility to expanded educational opportunities (in this case at the postsecondary level), see the well-known study by Lipset, Seymour Martin and Bendix, Reinhard, Social Mobility in Industrial Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963), esp. pp. 91–101Google Scholar. For a critique of the school as effective social escalator, see Katz, Michael B., Class, Bureaucracy, & Schools: The Illusion of Educational Change in America, expanded ed. (1971; rept. New York: Praeger, 1975), esp. pp. 149–52.Google Scholar

103. Personal interviews by Nora Faires with Diane Wilbur, November 9 and 14, 1990. See also Hollingshead, , Elmtown's Youth, Table 8, p. 461.Google Scholar

104. Personal interview by Nora Faires with Wilbur, Diane, 11 14, 1990Google Scholar. The Indian Hill principal recognizes this reality and despairs that this flawed standard will record the “success” of the school's teachers (as well as of her own).

105. DeMott discusses the “iconographic status” of the public school as a “fairness zone” in Imperial Middle (ch. 8, pp. 129–48).

106. Despite a range of state and federal programs that seek to equalize funding (and a growing movement to further this end), public schools—like the ones in which project staff conducted field tests for this project—generally reflect the economic condition of the neighborhoods they serve. This constraint finds reinforcement in the fact that the funding of American public schools typically is tied to local property tax assessments. See Kozol, Jonathan, Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools (New York: Crown, 1991)Google Scholar; and Brown, Stephen I., “Educational Finance Equity: Recent Developments in State Courts,” National Association of Secondary School Principals 75 (01 1991): 80–85Google Scholar, for an overview. On funding equity efforts in the states of New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Illinois, see the “School Finance” section of Education USA 11 26, 1990, p. 87Google Scholar; also see Celis, William 3d, “A Texas-Size Battle to Teach Rich and Poor Alike,” New York Times, 02 12, 1992, sec. B, p. 6Google Scholar; “Fairer Schooling for Michigan,” New York Times, 03 18, 1994, sec. A, p. 10Google Scholar. On recommended federal legislation, see “Fiscal Inequity,” National School Boards Association, School Board News 11 (01 1, 1991).Google Scholar

107. In response, the schools have designed and implemented programs that seek to rectify such inequities, raise achievement levels, and build students' self-esteem.

108. This perhaps is not the case in, for example, La Crosse, Wisconsin, where school officials have begun to plan school assignments for elementary school students on the basis of family income, with the aim of distributing the poorer students throughout the system. See Celis, William 3d, “In Effort to Improve Schools, Pupils to Be Assigned on Basis of Income,” New York Times, 01 22, 1992, sec. A, p. 13Google Scholar; see also Judson, George, “Poverty, Not Race, Is Linked to Hartford School Failures,” New York Times, 02 20, 1993, p. 31.Google Scholar

109. See, for example, Mursell, James L., Education for American Democracy (New York: Norton, 1943), esp. pp. 10–21Google Scholar; see also Dewey, John, “The Democratic Conception in Education,” in Controversies over the Purposes of Schooling and the Meaning of Work: Selected Readings in the History of Education, ed. Benson, Norman and Lyons, Richard, rev. ed. (1916; rept. Lanham, N.Y.: University Press of America, 1990), pp. 25–43.Google Scholar According to Dewey, , “school facilities must be secured of such amplitude and efficiency as will in fact and not simply in name discount the effects of economic inequalities, and secure to all the wards of the nation equality of equipment for their future careers.… [T]he democratic ideal of education is a farcical yet tragic delusion except as [this] ideal more and more dominates our public system of education” (quote, p. 41).Google Scholar

110. On American education and egalitarianism, see also, for example, George S. Counts's Cold War-era volume, Education and American Civilization, in which he argues for the elimination, through education, of “every economic barrier to the full development of the talents of the young,” referring to the “talents and aptitudes resident in the young” as the “basic resource” of American society (p. 371).Google Scholar

111. For a synthetic discussion of the view that “school is an institution critical to the survival of an opportunity society,” see DeMott, , Imperial Middle (pp. 133–38; quote, pp. 133–34)Google Scholar; and for an example of a critical rejoinder, see Bowles, Samuel and Gintis, Herbert, Schooling in Capitalist America (New York: Basic, 1976).Google Scholar On American society and abundance, see John, J. Hector St. (Michel-Guillaume-Jean) de Crèvecoeur, , Letters from an American Farmer; and Sketches of Eighteenth-Century America (1782; rept. New York: Penguin, 1986)Google Scholar; Susman, Warren I., Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (1984; rept. New York: Pantheon, 1973)Google Scholar, esp. “Introduction: Toward a History of the Culture of Abundance,” pp. xix–xxxGoogle Scholar; and Potter, David M., People of Plenty: Economic Abundance and the American Character (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954).CrossRefGoogle Scholar On American character in the 1940s through the 1980s (and American exceptionalism), see Wilkinson, Rupert, The Pursuit of American Character (New York: Harper and Row, 1988), esp. chs. 1 and 2.Google Scholar Also see Kammen, Michael, “The Problem of American Exceptionalism: A Reconsideration,” American Quarterly 45 (03 1993): 1–43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

112. A pastiche of homeroom photographs hanging in the hall of one of the Families of the City project field-test sites bears the normative and revealing caption: “we are family … bunche bobcats.”

113. Faires, , Teachers Guide, p. 13.Google Scholar

114. Faires, , Teachers Guide, p. 2.Google Scholar

115. Families of the City workshop presentation, Ferry Elementary School, Detroit, Michigan, May, 1989.

116. Families of the City workshop presentation, Bunche Elementary School, Detroit, Michigan, December 3, 1990. Several Bunche students identified grandmothers as important members of their families. Their experiences reflect national trends. In 1991 some 3.3 million American children resided in their grandparents' homes; among African-American children nearly one in eight lived with a grandparent, triple the rate for white children. See Ahlburg, and DeVita, , “New Realities,” p. 8.Google Scholar

117. Potter, , People of Plenty, p. 117.Google Scholar

118. See Harrington, Michael, The Other America: Poverty in the United States (New York: Macmillan, 1962).Google Scholar

119. According to Katz, Michael B., between 1965Google Scholar and 1980 government income transfer programs helped the official rate of poverty in the U.S. to drop substantially as more poor and not-so-poor Americans received cash payments or other in-kind transfers of income; see Katz, , “The War on Poverty and the Transformation of American Social Science,” Reviews in American History 16 (03 1988): 139CrossRefGoogle Scholar, in which he reviews the influential and exhaustive study by Haveman, Robert H., Poverty Policy and Poverty Research: The Great Society and the Social Sciences (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987).Google Scholar

120. See Block, Fred, Cloward, Richard A., Ehrenreich, Barbara, and Piven, Frances Fox, The Mean Season: The Attack on the Welfare State (New York: Random House, 1987)Google Scholar; Katz, Michael B., The Undeserving Poor: From the War on Poverty to the War on Welfare (New York: Pantheon, 1989)Google Scholar; and Phillips, Kevin, The Politics of Rich and Poor: Wealth and the American Electorate in the Reagan Aftermath (New York: Random House, 1990).Google Scholar

121. This figure translated into 14.2 percent, still the highest rate since the early 1980s. See Pear, Robert, “Ranks of U.S. Poor Reach 35.7 Million, the Most Since '64,” New York Times, 09 4, 1992Google Scholar, sec. A, pp. 1, 12; Harrington, Michael, The New American Poverty (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1984)Google Scholar; Wilson, William Julius, The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987)Google Scholar; and Ellwood, David T., Poor Support: Poverty in the American Family (New York, Basic, 1988).Google Scholar

122. Greenhouse, Steven, “Income Data Show Years of Erosion for U.S. Workers,” New York Times, 09 7, 1992, pp. 1, 20.Google Scholar

123. The seemingly “stable” suburban family itself is in the process of dissolution, a fact attested to by the growing statistics describing the battles and defeats of suburban America's domestic “civil wars.” For a synthetic discussion of the “profound and far-reaching changes” that have transformed family life across America, affecting affluent suburbanites as well as the urban poor, see Mintz, and Kellogg, , Domestic Revolutions, pp. 203–37; quote, p. 204.Google Scholar

124. Ryan, , “Explosion of Family History,” p. 186.Google Scholar In 1990, 9.7 percent of American children lived in housesholds not headed by a parent. See Gross, Jane, “Collapse of Inner-City Families Creates America's New Orphans,” New York Times, 03 29, 1992, p. 1Google Scholar; also see Hareven, Tamara K., “The History of the Family and the Complexity of Social Change,” American Historical Review 96 (02 1991): 95–124CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Copeland, Anne B. and White, Kathleen M., Studying Families, Applied Social Science Methods 27 (Summer 1991)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and, on the utility of widening the definition of family and family feeling, Gross, Jane, “A Festival, a Smorgasbord of Families,” New York Times, 10 3, 1992, p. 6Google Scholar; and Alexander, Adele Logan, Ambiguous Lives: Free Women of Color in Rural Georgia, 1789–1879 (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1992).Google Scholar

125. In the process, the workshops tried to encourage a more comfortable interface between students in unorthodox or complex family situations, their teachers, and the school. The Indian Hill teacher who had declared herself “afraid to use the word ‘family’ because it would hurt somebody's feelings” reported that, since the workshop,

Now I just have them think of their family as the people who love them and live with them, like in the slides.… [This presentation]'s allowed them to feel better about themselves. [Now when] I have them write letters home, I put “Dear” on the board, followed by a blank and tell them to fill in the blank with the names of all the important people in their home.

The “divorce” of a youth from his mother granted in a recent court case underscores the functional definition of who and what constitute a family. See personal interview by Nora Faires with anonymous teacher, Indian Hill Elementary School, Grand Blanc, Michigan, November 20, 1990.

On the historical pattern of incorporating relatives, especially female kin, and others into African-American families, see Pleck, Elizabeth Hafkin, Black Migration and Poverty: Boston, 1865–1900 (New York: Academic, 1979).Google Scholar The literature on African-American female-headed families is vast, much of it responding to the thesis of family disorganization promulgated in the 1960s. Herbert G. Gutman discusses this literature and places 20th-century African-American family patterns in historical context in Gutman, , The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750–1925 (New York: Pantheon, 1976), esp. pp. 461–69.Google Scholar See also, for example, Farley, Reynolds and Allen, Walter, The Color Line and the Quality of Life in America (New York: Russell Sage, 1987)Google Scholar; Darity, William and Myers, Samuel L. Jr., “Does Welfare Dependency Cause Female Headship? The Case of the Black Family,” Journal of Marriage and the Family 46 (11 1984): 765–79CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Coontz, , The Way We Never Were, pp. 237–53.Google Scholar

126. Such personal sacrifice might even enhance a family's economic position. Conservative Charles Murray, for example, has argued that, under current welfare policy, female-headed households presently have little to gain economically from the presence of an unemployed adult male member. One can think of many ways in which a dysfunctional parent or spouse—male or female—might drain off economic resources that might otherwise go toward, say, children's education or health care. See Murray, Charles, Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950–1980 (New York: Basic, 1984).Google Scholar Scholars are increasingly examining the stresses that divorce brings to bear on children in light of the alternative—dysfunctional families. For a brief review of this literature, see Coontz, , The Way We Never Were, pp. 221–25.Google Scholar

127. On this topic, see Stack, Carol B., All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community (New York: Harper and Row, 1974)Google Scholar; and Gutman, , Black Family, esp. ch. 5.Google Scholar

128. The frontal style of presentation is rooted firmly in the documentary tradition, begun during the Progressive years and deepened by the massive projects undertaken during the 1930s by the Farm Security Administration. See Fleischhauer, and Brannan, , Documenting AmericaGoogle Scholar; and Trachtenberg, Alan, Reading American Photographs: Images as History, Mathew Brady to Walker Evans (New York: Hill and Wang, 1989).Google Scholar

129. On media representations of African Americans, see Hooks, Bell, Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End, 1992), pp. 1–8.Google Scholar The African-American students in the field tests on balance seemed to express demonstrably less interest in the photographs of whites in similar circumstances.

130. Frisch, Michael, “The Presentation of Urban History in Big-City Museums,” in History Museums in the United States: A Critical Assessment, ed. Leon, Warren and Rosenzweig, Roy (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), p. 41.Google Scholar

131. Primary school children have not constituted the only public for the Urban Interiors Project. To date fifteen exhibits of Urban Interiors materials have opened in Detroit and elsewhere in Michigan.

132. The project plans a supplemental volume of oral history interviews that would narrate and analyze the evolution of eastsiders' lives. This raises more complicated questions concerning the general relationship between presentation and representation that cannot be taken up here. See Tagg, , Burden of RepresentationGoogle Scholar; and Stange, , Symbols of Ideal Life.Google Scholar

133. The second-listed author of this article recalls a vignette from his eighthgrade public school class in which an English teacher responsible for preparing the class yearbook asked students to state their intended occupations. One older Puerto Rican boy said he wanted to become “a carpenter,” to which the teacher rejoined, by way of “correction,” “You want to be a laborer.” This episode in some ways is reminiscent, though far harsher in tone, of the bearing of the “teacher” toward the Polish immigrant boy, Jan, in Silver, Joan Micklin's early film, The Immigrant Experience—The Long, Long Journey.Google Scholar Interestingly, during a project workshop held for a group of Michigan teachers, several teachers of African-American background criticized the project's focus on poor and working-class persons, which they believed would reinforce a stereotype. Clearly, project staff and this portion of their audience were talking past each other.

134. Personal interview by Nora Faires with Lori Eller, fifth-grade teacher, Indian Hill Elementary School, Grand Blanc, Michigan, November 19, 1990.

135. The report of the National Commission on Social Studies recommends that schools address sensitive topics so as to bring children's social attitudes into the open and allow them to test their opinions against reality and broaden their world views. “Especially in the early grades,” the report counsels, “social studies instruction needs to take place very much ‘in public’” See Report of the Curriculum Task Force, pp. 24–25; quote, p. 25.

136. See, for example, Taylor, Ella, Prime-Time Families: Television Culture in Postwar America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989)Google Scholar; Spiegel, Lynn and Mann, Denise, eds., Private Screenings: Television and the Female Consumer (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992)Google Scholar; and Spiegel, Lynn, Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

137. See Ella Taylor's discussion of the context of “cheery politics of social adjustment” that surround television treatments of family change. On an episode of Who's the Boss? a single mother tells her son that “a family means people who share each other's lives and care about each other,” but, “with the sting of divorce, family poverty, and other problems removed, single parenthood and stepparenthood turn into a romp, a permanent pajama party” (Taylor, , Prime-Time Families, p. 158).Google Scholar

138. Interview with Mae Cole, July 6, 1988, Urban Interiors Project, Wayne State University, quoted in Faires, , Teachers Guide, p. 23.Google Scholar

139. Interview with Mary Ann White, November 20, 1988, Urban Interiors Project, Wayne State University.

140. The project did not aim to assess the validity of this speculation nor, if accurate, to establish whether and under what circumstances this matrix of attitudes might conduce toward political mobilization, transcendence, or whatever.

141. In endorsing the importance of community alongside that of family, we reject what one analyst of modern America has dubbed “family chauvinism”: “the new consensus that the family is now our last refuge, our only defense against universal predatory selfishness, loneliness, and rootlessness.…” See Willis, Ellen, “The Family: Love It or Leave It,” in Beginning to See the Light, ed. Willis, (New York: Wideview, 1982), p. 150.Google Scholar

142. Recall the worker's maxim: “Life begins when the whistle blows.”

143. The still useful term, of course, derives from the early writings of Marx. See Karl Marx: Early Writings, trans, and ed. Bottomore, T. B. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), p. 13Google Scholar, n. 2. Obviously, this line of argument takes a different tack from that developed in Sennett, Richard and Cobb, Jonathan, The Hidden Injuries of Class (New York: Knopf, 1972).Google Scholar

144. See, for example, Faue, Elizabeth, Community of Suffering and Struggle: Women, Men, and the Labor Movement in Minneapolis, 1915–1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991)Google Scholar; Parr, Joy, The Gender of Breadwinners: Women, Men, and Change in Two Industrial Towns, 1880–1950 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990)Google Scholar; and Frank, Dana, “Gender, Consumer Organizing, and the Seattle Labor Movement, 1919–1929,” in Work Engendered: Toward a New History of American Labor, ed. Baron, Ava (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), pp. 273–95.Google Scholar The analysis here, and in the works just cited, stands outside the dichotomous view of a “job model,” which “focuse[s] on work as the primary factor explaining workers' behavior on and off the job” and a “gender model,” which “focuse[s] primarily on family circumstances to explain workers' relationship to employment”; see the discussion in Baron, Ava, “Gender and Labor History: Learning from the Past, Looking to the Future,” in Work Engendered, pp. 12–13Google Scholar; quote, p. 12. See also Feldberg, Roslyn and Glenn, Evelyn, “Male and Female: Job versus Gender Models in the Sociology of Work,” Social Problems 26 (06 1979): 524–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

Recent “communitarian” thought addresses the related issues of “the moral ties of family, neighborhood, workplace, and citizenship” from a different perspective. See Steinfels, Peter, “A Political Movement Blends Its Ideas from Left and Right,” New York Times, 05 24, 1992, sec. E, p. 6.Google Scholar The quote is from William Galston, A., “Clinton and the Promise of Communitarianism,” Chronicle of Higher Education, 12 2, 1992, sec. A, p. 52.Google Scholar

145. See Bukowczyk, John J., “Decline and Fall of a Detroit Neighborhood: Poletown vs. G.M. and the City of Detroit,” Washington and Lee Law Review 41 (Winter 1984): 49–76Google Scholar; and Lynd, Staughton, “The Genesis of the Idea of a Community Right to Industrial Property in Youngstown and Pittsburgh, 1977–1987,” Journal of American History, The Constitution and American Life: A Special Issue, 74 (12 1987): 926–58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar In the same special issue of the Journal of American History, see also Minow, Martha, “We, the Family: Constitutional Rights and American Families,” pp. 959–83.Google Scholar Notably, Minow takes as her “working definition the idea of families as social units created by biological or affective ties among people who commonly contribute to one another's economic, moral, and psychological well-being” (pp. 959–60).

146. “Unlike many other peoples,” the Bradley Commission observed, “Americans are not bound by a common religion or a common ethnicity. Our binding heritage is a democratic vision of liberty, equality, and justice.” See Report of the Bradley Commission, p. 2.

147. Bukowczyk, , And My Children, p. 70.Google Scholar For related sentiments injected into the multicultural debate, see, for example, Fletcher, George P., “Update the Pledge,” New York Times, 12 6, 1992Google Scholar, op-ed page, in which Fletcher suggests a rewording of the Pledge of Allegiance to include the phrases “united in our diversity, committed to liberty and justice for all”; and the statement on behalf of the American Jewish Committee by Sen. Lieberman, Joseph I. of Connecticut on “What Being Jewish Means to Me,” New York Times, 12 6, 1992.Google Scholar

148. This point has been developed lucidly in Thompson, E. P., Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act (New York: Pantheon, 1975).Google Scholar On Thompson's public role, see Bess, Michael D., “E. P. Thompson: The Historian as Activist,” American Historical Review 98 (02 1993): 18–38.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

149. As Senator Lieberman expressed it, “My parents raised me to believe that I did not have to mute my religious faith or ethnic identity to be a good American, that, on the contrary, America invites all its people to be what they are and believe what they wish.” See Lieberman, , “What Being Jewish Means to Me.”Google Scholar Our thinking here has parallels to Joan Scott's suggestion that “diversity … not [be] conceived in individualistic terms and [ that ] … our notions of community [be] redefined.” Scott, Joan Wallach, “The Campaign Against Political Correctness: What's Really at Stake,” Radical History Review 54 (Fall 1992): 75.Google Scholar

150. Lipsitz, George, “The Meaning of Memory: Family, Class, and Ethnicity in Early Network Television,” in Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture, ed. Lipsitz, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), pp. 40–41.Google Scholar Industry representatives, supported by a ruling of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), counter that commercial television in fact has educational content. See, for example, Andrews, Edmund L., “Broadcasters, to Satisfy Law, Define Cartoons as Education,” New York Times, 09 30, 1992, sec. A, pp. 1, 3Google Scholar; and, on the recent reversal of the FCC ruling, Andrews, , “‘Flintstones’ and Programs Like It Aren't ‘Educational,’ F.C.C. Says,” New York Times, 03 4, 1993, sec. A, pp. 1, 9.Google Scholar The experimentation with “Channel One,” a television news program with commercials available without charge for classroom use on cable, is one of the latest battlefields in this culture war. For a television insider's view that “there is value in [commercial] children's television” and a prescription for the role that parents, producers, and advertisers can play in making the medium both “good sense” and “good business,” see Schneiderman, Cy, Children's Television: The Art, the Business, and How It Works (Lincolnwood, lll.: NTC, 1987)Google Scholar; quotes, p. 206. Notably, Schneiderman worked for more than twenty years developing advertising directed at children and helped to develop “Nickelodeon,” the first cable network designed for a young audience (see pp. 227–28).

151. While some children's television programs invite children to identify with the exploits of adult heroes, many cast children themselves in heroic roles, from the adventure-dramas Captain Gallant, Lassie, Fury, Rin-Tin-Tin, and My Friend Flicka in the 1950s to the cartoons Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Captain Planet, Little Mermaid, and Chipmunks in the late 1980s and 1990s. In this sense, they replicate a theme in many children's stories, including, for example, those published by the syndicate of Edward Stratemeyer, who marketed hundreds of titles featuring such characters as the Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, the Bobbsey Twins, and Tom Swift. See Tuttle, William M. Jr., “The Homefront Children's Popular Culture: Radio, Movies, Comics—Adventure, Patriotism, and Sex-Typing,” in Small Worlds: Children and Adolescents in America, 1850–1950, ed. West, Eliot and Petrik, Paula (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1992), pp. 150–51, 157.Google Scholar On the campaign against violence in children's television programs, see Slaby, Ronald G., “Combating Television Violence,” Chronicle of Higher Education, 01 5, 1994Google Scholar, sec. B, p. 1–2; and Kolbert, Elizabeth, “Canadians Act to Restrict Violence on TV,” New York Times, 01 11, 1994, sec. B, pp. 1–2.Google Scholar We thank Roy S. Hanashiro and son, Willy Hanashiro, for their consultation on contemporary children's television programs.

152. Joel Spring discusses the development of public children's programming, focusing on the connection between the Carnegie Commission on Educational Television and the establishment of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, an important link between foundations and the federal government during the Johnson years. See Spring, , Images of American LifeGoogle Scholar, ch. 13, “Public Broadcasting and Big Bird: Foundations and Government Managing Knowledge,” pp. 231–50.Google Scholar The phrase television as “third educator” appears throughout the chapter, occurring first on p. 231.

153. The Urban Interiors project photographs testify to the ubiquity of television sets in eastsiders' homes in the 1980s and early 1990s. See, for example, Figures 6 and 7.

154. Spring, , Images of American Life, pp. 242–43.Google Scholar On the development of Sesame Street and other products of the Children's Television Workshop (CTW), including The Electric Company and 3-2-1 Contact, see Palmer, Edward L., Television and America's Children: A Crisis of Neglect (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 91–119.Google Scholar Palmer argues that these CTW programs demonstrate “television's capacity to become children's third institution of learning surpassed in importance only by the family and school” (quote, p. 120).

155. The complicated relationships of audiences to media have, of course, become an important area of inquiry in cultural studies. For a recent example of the debate, see AHR Forum, Levine, Lawrence, “The Folklore of Industrial Society: Popular Culture and Its Audiences,” American Historical Review 97 (12 1992): 1369–99CrossRefGoogle Scholar; with comments on Levine's article by Kelley, Robin D. G., “Notes on Deconstructing ‘The Folk,’” 1400–1408; Natalie Zemon Davis, “Toward Mixtures and Margins,” 1409–16Google Scholar; and Lears, T. J. Jackson, “Making Fun of Popular Culture,” 1417–26Google Scholar; and concluding comments by Levine, , “Levine Responds,” 1427–30.Google Scholar Kelley's notes provide a brisk historiographical review of the last fifteen years of scholarship that has depicted “popular culture as contested terrain” and explored the “dialogic relationship between readers (consumers) and texts (mass-mediated culture)”; quotes, pp. 1400, 1401.Google Scholar In general, this scholarship has not focused on children or the young; but see, for example, Willis, Paul E., Learning to Labour: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs (1977; rept. New York: Columbia University Press, 1981)Google Scholar; and, specifically on television and its audiences, Spiegel, , Make Room for TV.Google Scholar Spiegel charts the Cold War-era view that children had become the chief “victims of the new pied piper” and that the medium had become the master of America's youth (see pp. 55–60; quote, p. 55).

Among the many other studies examining television's effects on children and their relationships to this medium, see, for example, Gunter, Barrie and McAleer, Jill L., Children and Television: The One-Eyed Monster? (London: Routledge, 1990)Google Scholar; Noble, Grant, Children in Front of the Small Sceen (London: Constable, 1975)Google Scholar; Tichi, Cecilia, Electronic Hearth: Creating an American Television Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991)Google Scholar, esp. ch. 9, “The Child—A Television Allegory,” pp. 191–207Google Scholar; and Palmer, Edward L. and Dorr, Aimee, Children and the Faces of Television: Teaching, Violence, Selling (New York: Academic, 1981).Google Scholar For a useful and intriguing account of “the development of ideas about TV, the child as TV viewer, and the relations between them, as these were constructed in scholarly discourses from 1948 to the mid-1980s,” see Luke, Carmen, Constructing the Child Viewer: A History of the American Discourse on Television and Children, 1950–1980 (New York: Praeger, 1990).Google Scholar

156. David Nasaw concludes his study of “Children and Commercial Culture: Moving Pictures in the Early Twentieth Century” by suggesting that “when the full history of the subject is written, it may reveal that the children's effect on the [motion picture] industry was much greater than the moving pictures' effect on children”; see Nasaw, , “Children in Commercial Culture,” in Small WorldsGoogle Scholar, ed. West, and Petrik, , pp. 1–25Google Scholar; quote, p. 24. Two other essays in this volume similarly stress the agency of children and young people with regard to mechanisms of popular culture; see Ruiz, Vicki L., “‘Star Struck’: Acculturation, Adolescence, and Mexican American Women, 1920–1950,” pp. 61–80Google Scholar; and Tuttle, , “Homefront Children's Popular Culture.”Google Scholar

157. On historians' lack of attention to “children and adolescents as influential actors in past societies,” see “Introduction” to Small WorldsGoogle Scholar, ed. West, and Petrik, , pp. 1–7Google Scholar; quote, p. 1. Recently historian Adam Walaszek has begun to examine the lives of Polish immigrant children; also see Baumel, Judith Tydor, Unfulfilled Promise: Rescue and Resettlement of Jewish Refugee Children in the United States, 1934–1945 (Juneau, Alaska: Nenali, 1990)Google Scholar; and Hiner, N. Ray and Hawes, Joseph M., eds., Growing Up in America: Children in Historical Perspective (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985).Google Scholar In addition to this recent research, some of the earlier noteworthy works in this broad area include Ari´s, Philippe, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, trans. Baldick, Robert (1960; rept. New York: Vintage, 1962)Google Scholar; Coles, Robert, Children of Crisis, 3 vols. (Boston: Little-Brown, 1968–1971)Google Scholar; and Kett, Joseph, The Rites of Passage: Adolescence in America, 1790 to the Present (New York: Basic, 1977).Google Scholar For historiographical reviews, see Neil Sutherland and Hale, Linda I., comps., History of Canadian Childhood and Youth: A Bibliography (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1992)Google Scholar; Hawes, Joseph M. and Hiner, N. Ray, eds. American Childhood: A Research Guide and Historical Handbook (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1985)Google Scholar; and, by the same editors, Children in Comparative and Historical Perspective: An International Handbook and Research Guide (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1991).Google Scholar

158. N. Ray Hiner discusses the value of photographs for scholars seeking to make children visible as historical actors. See Hiner, , “Seen but Not Heard: Children in American Photographs,” in Small WorldsGoogle Scholar, ed. West, and Petrik, , pp. 167–202.Google Scholar The photographic essay that comprises most of this contribution reveals the problems as well as the possibilities of using this form of evidence: at best captions list the names of those depicted and the site and date of the photograph, providing the reader/interpreter with insufficient historical context to understand and evaluate these fragments of life.

159. Note that these eastside boys have used elements of their environment to fashion their weapons. Contrast this with West's and Petrik's analysis of 19th-century mass-produced toys as “part of the paraphernalia of the new middle-class childhood and a means for introducing young men and women to values useful for achieving white-collar success or domestic gentility.…” See Petrik, and West, , “Eenie Meanie, Minie Moe: Children, Play, and Society,” in Small Worlds, p. 83Google Scholar; Seiter, Ellen, Sold Separately: Children and Parents in Consumer Culture (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1993).Google Scholar

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162. See Coles, Robert, The Moral Life of Children (Boston: Atlantic Monthly, 1986)Google Scholar; Coles, , The Spiritual Life of Children (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990)Google Scholar; and Kagan, Jerome and Lamb, Sharon, eds., The Emergence of Morality in Young Children (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 1989.Google Scholar The work by Carol Gilligan on the moral development of adolescent girls has proved especially provocative; see, for example, Gilligan, Carol, Lyons, Nona P., and Hammer, Trudy J., Making Connections: The Relational Worlds of Adolescent Girls at Emma Willard School (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990).Google Scholar

163. On high school life, see Graebner, , Coming of Age in BuffaloGoogle Scholar; and Graebner, , “Outlawing Teenage Populism: The Campaign Against Secret Societies in the American High School, 1900–1960,” Journal of American History 74 (09 1987): 411–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

164. Given their legal disenfranchisement, this area will be particularly difficult to investigate—but also may prove especially worthwhile. How, when, and why, for example, have political parties mobilized youth in their campaigns? Does the shifting political climate in the 20th Century, with its shrinking electorate and falling voter turnout, relate to a progressive failure—or disinclination—of parties to galvanize support of those not yet of voting age?

165. See, for example, Parr, Joy, Labouring Children: British Immigrant Apprentices to Canada, 1869–1924 (London: Croom Helm, 1980)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Parr, Joy, ed., Childhood and Family in Canadian History (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1982)Google Scholar; and West, Elliott, “Children on the Plains Frontier,” in Small WorldsGoogle Scholar, ed. West, and Petrik, , pp. 26–41.Google Scholar

166. For an examination of socialization by gender and class, see Thorne, Barrie, Gender Play: Girls and Boys in Schools (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1993)Google Scholar; Nightingale, Carl Husemoller, On the Edge: A History of Poor Black Children and Their American Dreams (New York: Basic, 1994)Google Scholar; Brown, Victoria Bissell, “Golden Girls: Female Socialization Among the Middle Class of Los Angeles, 1880–1910,” in Small WorldsGoogle Scholar, ed. West, and Petrik, , pp. 232–54Google Scholar; and, in the same volume, Alexander, Ruth M., “‘The Only Thing I Wanted Was Freedom’: Wayward Girls in New York, 1900–1930,” pp. 275–95.Google Scholar

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167. See, for example, Johnston, Charles M., “The Children's War: The Mobilization of Ontario Youth During the Second World War,” in Patterns of the Past: Interpreting Ontario's History, ed. Hall, Roger, Westfall, William, and MacDowell, Laurel Sefton (Toronto: Dundurn, 1988)Google Scholar; and Tuttle, William M. Jr., “Daddy's Gone to War”: The Second World War in the Lives of American Children (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).Google Scholar

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169. See Bender, Thomas, “Wholes and Parts: The Need for Synthesis in American History,” Journal of American History 73 (06 1986): 126CrossRefGoogle Scholar; see also DeMott, , Imperial Middle, pp. 142–45.Google Scholar

170. Hollingshead, , Elmtown's Youth, p. 453.Google Scholar

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