Dear CHILDREN-MEDIA-UK subscribers,
I hope the following book will be of interest to you:
Babes in Tomorrowland
Walt Disney and the Making of the American Child, 1930-1960
Nicholas Sammond
“Babes in Tomorrowland is a phenomenally accomplished work. The coverage is encyclopedic, the argument masterful, and the prose consistently accessible and engaging. The amount of research is nothing short of monumental. There is no question that the book will make a significant impact on anyone working on contemporary children’s culture.”—Henry Jenkins, editor of The Children’s Culture Reader
“Babes in
Tomorrowland is an impressive work that meticulously documents historically
shifting conceptions of the American child. This finely researched book will
make a valuable contribution to our understanding of how children serve grown-up
needs as adults strive to craft a better child to ensure a better
tomorrow.”—Heather Hendershot, editor of Nickelodeon Nation: The History, Politics,
and Economics of
Linking Margaret Mead to the Mickey Mouse Club and
behaviorism to Bambi, Nicholas Sammond traces a path back to the
early-twentieth-century sources of “the normal American child.” He locates the
origins of this hypothetical child in the interplay between developmental
science and popular media. In the process, he shows that the relationship
between the media and the child has long been much more symbiotic than arguments
that the child is irrevocably shaped by the media it consumes would lead one to
believe. Focusing on the products of the Walt Disney company, Sammond
demonstrates that without a vision of a normal American child and the belief
that movies and television either helped or hindered its development, Disney
might never have found its market niche as the paragon of family entertainment.
At the same time, without media producers such as Disney, representations of the
ideal child would not have circulated as freely in American popular
culture.
In vivid detail, Sammond describes how the latest
thinking about human development was translated into the practice of
child-rearing and how magazines and parenting manuals characterized the child as
the crucible of an ideal American culture. He chronicles how Walt Disney
Productions’ greatest creation—the image of Walt Disney himself—was made to
embody evolving ideas of what was best for the child and for society. Bringing
popular child-rearing manuals, periodicals, advertisements, and mainstream
sociological texts together with the films, tv programs, ancillary products, and
public relations materials of Walt Disney Productions, Babes in Tomorrowland reveals a child
that was as much the necessary precursor of popular media as the victim of its
excesses.
Nicholas Sammond is Assistant Professor of Media and Society at
Duke University Press
September 2005 472 pages 36 b&w illustrations
£16.95 PB ISBN 0-8223-3463-1
SPECIAL DISCOUNTED PRICE OF £11.95
to CHILDREN-MEDIA-UK Subscribers
Postage and
Packing £2.75
To order a copy please contact Marston on 44(0)1235 465500 or email [log in to unmask] or visit our website www.combinedacademic.demon.co.uk
(Please quote reference CMUK0106BT).
If you would like further information please contact me below