Interviews Conducted by Paula Fass and Christina Maslach; Introduction by Fass and Mashlach [505 pages]

Interviewees: Clair Brown, Beth Burnside, Carol Christ, Carol Clover, Galen Cranz, Natalie Zemon Davis, Fiona Doyle, Paula Fass, Catherine Gallagher, Jewell Gibbs, Susan Graham, Leanne Hinton, Judith Klinman, Robin Lakeoff, Christina Maslach, Mary Ann Mason, Susan Matisoff, Karlene Roberts, Marjorie Shultz, Eleanor Swift, Ruth Tringham, Bonnie Wade, Marvalee Wake, Rhona Weinstein

This dissertation argues that prom is a distinctive ritual, whose history offers a singular perspective on changing understandings of the passage from youth to adulthood and the role of the high school in that transition. Initially the outgrowth of a vibrant student culture at elite all-male universities such as Yale, where juniors organized their first prom in the mid- nineteenth century, the prom spread around the country among coed college students who gradually adopted this social institution over the next fifty years. By the 1910s, the prom was established not only in colleges, but in high schools as well, as younger students sought to emulate "sophisticated" collegiate life. Adult administrators had an interest in encouraging this more grown-up behavior as long as they could maintain control. At the high school level, the prom reveals how students conflated adulthood with social mobility and autonomy.

In my research I draw heavily on student publications from high schools in San Francisco, Milwaukee, and Baltimore, as well as a variety of local newspapers and popular magazines, such as Seventeen and Senior Scholastic. These sources offer a diverse mix of youth voices and adult perspectives. My work deepens our historical understanding of how educational institutions served as incubators of youth culture, and argues further that high school students actively constructed their youth culture as a training ground for adulthood. For much of the twentieth century, as secondary education expanded, high school graduation symbolized a transition to adulthood and the promise of social mobility. As one avenue for students to rehearse the identities they wanted to assume as adults and to assert themselves in negotiations with administrators and other authority figures, the prom illuminates the social construction of age and adulthood. Prom's longevity as a high school tradition speaks to its ability to shift alongside students' ideas of their own youth and maturity. It also underscores the evolution of youth culture from customs transmitted more by peers to one that has become ever more mediated by adults.

My dissertation begins by foregrounding the high school prom with an examination of the origins of the prom in college life and how its transmission between campuses reflected college students' desire to imitate more elite campuses. In the second chapter, I contextualize the prom within the environment of high school dances. Students embraced dancing as an activity that expressed their youth but part of dancing's appeal was how it also allowed students to emulate adult behavior and the privileged classes. The next chapter explores the endurance of prom king elections in the Milwaukee area where the boisterousness of prom king elections led school administrators to seek greater control over students' campaigning activities, but students' dedication to their tradition pushed the administration to negotiate, rather than dictate, new campaign practices. I then examine students' debates over what extravagance and formality contributed to prom's significance as a ritual and students' challenges to the cost of prom, which proved prohibitive for some. I close my dissertation by looking at how adults from media, education, community organizations, and business, sought to take a more active role in proms during the postwar period.

This dissertation examines the career of Horace Newton Allen, an American physician who became the first Protestant missionary to reside in Choson Korea. It focuses specifically on the initial decade of his tenure on the peninsula (1884-1894), the period when he transitioned from a participant of the Protestant foreign mission movement to a member of the American diplomatic service. These years also comprised the formative era of relations between the United States and Korea. Through a close look at Allen's work and activities, this study uses his story as window into the broader dynamics of the early American-Korean encounter. In particular, it challenges previous characterizations of Horace Allen as an exemplar of US expansionism, and argues instead that his career was shaped in large part by the divergence in American interests vis-à-vis Korea during the late nineteenth century.

“A Century of Denying Child Labor in America” analyzes the influence of agrarian ideology on agricultural child labor policy in the United States over the course of the twentieth century. The project places agrarianism at the heart of the child labor question by arguing that agrarian sensibility uncompromisingly viewed children’s farm labor as a beneficial and healthful activity, and a natural and integral part of the rural family economy—even among children who did not live on family farms. Throughout the twentieth century, rural parents and agricultural interests invoked reason that was rooted in agrarianism to limit or thwart legislation that aimed at regulating agricultural child labor. As a result, children’s agricultural labor has never been regulated on a par with that of other sectors.

This dissertation demonstrates the strength of agrarian reason and reveals the ramifications for working children by tracing the evolution of the agricultural exemption to the child labor provision of the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act. This project challenges conventional narratives that mark the New Deal as the end point for the history of child labor in America. It moves the discussion beyond the 1930s and pushes it outside the bounds of eastern industrial America. In doing so, it draws out the experiences of racially and ethnically diverse groups of children while shedding light on the power of cultural myths to influence public policy. In challenging conventional narratives, this project contributes significantly to our understanding of the history of American politics, labor, and childhood in the twentieth century. It is the first project to argue that child labor was a critical component in FDR’s 1937 battle with the Supreme Court; to analyze the nation’s increased dependence on child farm labor during World War II; and to highlight the ways that children were activists in the United Farm Worker labor movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Moreover, this project calls attention to the fact that the child labor problem is not yet solved.

Ultimately, this dissertation demonstrates the ways that agrarian reason veiled exploitation, denied children legal protection, and perpetuated multi-generational cycles of poverty and structural inequality that were in contradistinction to the tenets of agrarianism.

This dissertation examines interracial relations between white men and non-white women in the antebellum period. Focusing on black, Indian, and Spanish American women, this dissertation argues that such liaisons were far more prevalent, institutionalized, and tolerated than historians have previously argued. Although such phenomena as black concubines, tribally organized Indian marriages, and land-rich Mexican wives have been separately examined, no single study has put them together and questioned their particular prevalence at a specific time in American history. This dissertation argues that the relationships white men formed with non-white women follow certain patterns that evidence a sexual "crisis" in antebellum America. This is specifically identified as a "crisis of white femininity," wherein cultural stereotypes of virile white men, passionless white women, and hyper-sexual non-white women created a significant threat to stable white marriages. Moreover, this dissertation argues that the romanticization of such relations extended far beyond the men who contracted them: some of the period's most popular fiction involved fantasies of interracial love, pointing to a far more deep-seated fascination and desire within the American public than has hitherto been acknowledged.

Between 1900 and 1930, a wide variety of authors, journalists, parenting experts, boyworkers, and social scientists expressed interest in fostering closer father-child relationships in the United States. As the interest in fatherhood grew through the late-1910s and 1920s, authors promoting greater paternal involvement also reinterpreted what it meant to be a good father, focusing more on play and camaraderie and less on discipline and education. This dissertation argues that the changing ideal of fatherhood was the result of conscious efforts to convince men to take a more active role in parenting, to revitalize fatherhood by distinguishing the fun, youthful, modern father from the stodgy, Victorian patriarchs of the previous generation. The modern father even had a new name: "Dad."

Interest in fostering greater paternal participation in child-rearing grew in part out of a fear of the "feminization" of boys and particularly emphasized the benefits of fathers' involvement with sons, but efforts to engage fathers more fully with their children were even more focused on the imagined benefits for men. Authors fretted over the skyrocketing divorce rate and the erosion of the shared economic function of the family and sought to tie the father more tightly to the middle-class home. The changing ideals of fatherhood reflect a more child-centered, democratic middle-class family and a new valuation of youthfulness.

This dissertation explores a variety of efforts to connect fathers more fully with their children and to make fatherhood seem modern and fun. Such concerns can be seen in efforts to design homes to appeal more to masculine sensibilities, in efforts to increase father participation in child-focused organizations, in more inclusive advice literature, and in the growth of popular humor about fatherhood. In addition to these developments, fathers began seeking parenting groups and books of their own, and the 1910s and 1920s saw the growth of fathers' clubs, fathering classes, father-child organizations and events, and books on childrearing written specifically for and by fathers. Rather than joining their wives in parenting groups, these men reached out to other fathers in an acknowledgement of what some called a "fraternity of fatherhood."

"Youthful Transgressions" examines teenage sexual culture in the United States after World War II, with a particular focus on the ways that changing notions of childhood and adulthood influenced the place of sexually precocious adolescents in American society. This dissertation argues that between the 1940s and the 1980s, teenage sexuality transformed from a private problem that was seen as leading children into premature adulthood, to a public problem that kept adolescents in a pathologized version of childhood.

This dissertation addresses the question of how Americans decided who was an adult and who was a child, as well as the consequences of those decisions. In the immediate postwar years, sexually active teenagers were reclassified as adults and hidden from public view through hasty marriages and mandatory expulsions from schools. In the 1960s and 1970s, married and pregnant youth took advantage of a newly expansive concept of childhood to fight their way back into schools and reclaim many of the legal and social rights of children. By the late 1970s and 1980s, lawmakers became convinced that teenage childbearing was an epidemic and responded with federal programs that intervened into the personal and sexual lives of youth and redefined teenage mothers as dependent children.

"Youthful Transgressions" draws from a range of institutional, legal, popular and personal sources, including school records, court documents, congressional testimony, newspaper and magazine articles, advice literature, popular music, and diaries. These sources reveal that ideas about age categories and sexuality evolved in tandem. Teenagers created their own definitions of childhood, adulthood, and age-appropriate sexuality that coexisted with adult views, challenged conventional norms, and evolved to meet their needs over the course of the twentieth century.