Ladies Home Journal And Practical Housekeeper

This book centers on the role of media in shaping public perceptions of breastfeeding. Drawing from magazines, doctors’ office materials, parenting books, television, websites, and other media outlets, Katherine A. Foss explores how historical and contemporary media often undermine breastfeeding efforts with formula marketing and narrow portrayals of nursing women and their experiences. Foss argues that the media’s messages play an integral role in setting the standard of public knowledge and attitudes toward breastfeeding, as she traces shifting public perceptions of breastfeeding and their corresponding media constructions from the development of commercial formula through contemporary times. This analysis demonstrates how attributions of blame have negatively impacted public health approaches to breastfeeding, thus confronting the misperception that breastfeeding, and the failure to breastfeed, rests solely on the responsibility of an individual mother.

Containing 2,729 entries, Kevin L. Seligman’s bibliography concentrates on books, manuals, journals, and catalogs covering a wide range of sartorial approaches over nearly five hundred years. After a historical overview, Seligman approaches his subject chronologically, listing items by century through 1799, then by decade. In this section, he deals with works on flat patterning, draping, grading, and tailoring techniques as well as on such related topics as accessories, armor, civil costumes, clerical costumes, dressmakers’ systems, fur, gloves, leather, military uniforms, and undergarments. Seligman then devotes a section to those American and English journals published for the professional tailor and dressmaker. Here, too, he includes the related areas of fur and undergarments. A section devoted to journal articles features selected articles from costume- and noncostumerelated professional journals and periodicals. The author breaks these articles down into three categories: American, English, and other. Seligman then devotes separate sections to other related areas, providing alphabetical listings of books and professional journals for costume and dance, dolls, folk and national dress, footwear, millinery, and wigmaking and hair. A section devoted to commercial pattern companies, periodicals, and catalogs is followed by an appendix covering pattern companies, publishers, and publications. In addition to full bibliographic notation, Seligman provides a library call number and library location if that information is available. The majority of the listings are annotated. Each listing is coded for identification and cross-referencing. An author index, a title index, a subject index, and a chronological index will guide readers to the material they want. Seligman’s historical review of the development of publications on the sartorial arts, professional journals, and the commercial paper pattern industry puts the bibliographical material into context. An appendix provides a cross-reference guide for research on American and English pattern companies, publishers, and publications. Given the size and scope of the bibliography, there is no other reference work even remotely like it.

How are we to comprehend, diagnose, and counter a system of racist subjugation so ordinary it has become utterly asymptomatic? Challenging the prevailing literary critical inclination toward what makes texts exceptional or distinctive, Genre and White Supremacy in the Postemancipation United States underscores the urgent importance of genre for tracking conventionality as it enters into, constitutes, and reproduces ordinary life. In the wake of emancipation's failed promise, two developments unfolded: white supremacy amassed new mechanisms and procedures for reproducing racial hierarchy; and black freedom developed new practices for collective expression and experimentation. This new racial ordinary came into being through new literary and cultural genres—including campus novels, the Ladies' Home Journal, Civil War elegies, and gospel sermons. Through the postemancipation interplay between aesthetic conventions and social norms, genre became a major influence in how Americans understood their social and political affiliations, their citizenship, and their race. Travis M. Foster traces this thick history through four decades following the Civil War, equipping us to understand ordinary practices of resistance more fully and to resist ordinary procedures of subjugation more effectively. In the process, he provides a model for how the study of popular genre can reinvigorate our methods for historicizing the everyday.

This collection of essays explores a wealth of topics in children’s and young adult (YA) literature and culture. The contributions include an examination of the Watchbird cartoons by Munro Leaf and their attempts to teach morals and manners; an ethnographic study about the role of public youth librarians; and an exploration of the role popular video games can play in the secondary classroom. Other topics investigated here encompass the presentation of environmentalism in Hayao Miyazaki’s films, psychological analyses, and the role of race, gender, and culture in children’s and YA literature.

America’s Changing Icons is a discursive examination of the female patriotic icon in the United States. This creative and entertaining work examines her use and decline, particularly in the 20th century, with a particular focus on popular culture icons like Lady Columbia, Rosie the Riveter, and Wonder Woman. These fictional creations, used with advertisements; letters; and literature of the eras work together to craft a multi-layered and dynamic portrait of cultural politics, tides, and perceptions about American women, life, and place.