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.

Examines the place of Disney in the changing construction of childhood in mid-twentieth-century America

About the Author

Nicholas Sammond is Assistant Professor of Cinema Studies at the University of Toronto. He is the editor of Steel Chair to the Head: The Pleasure and Pain of Professional Wrestling, also published by Duke University Press.

Reviews
"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 America's Only TV Channel for Kids
"Babes in Tomorrowland provides an engaging, scholarly account of how watching Beaver Valley and going to Disneyland became central to the socialization of modern American children and the national future."

-- Erika Doss * Journal of American History *
"For those interested in a broad and soundly theoretical discussion of our changing social conceptions of childhood, and the economic and social sources of those conceptions, this book makes for valuable reading. . . . [A] vivid, extremely detailed history of child rearing in the early twentieth century, and a media company that blossomed alongside it." -- Chris McGee * The Lion and the Unicorn *
"Marvelously rich in source material and thoughtful in approach, Nicholas Sammond's Babes in Tomorrowland is a history of American child-rearing practices in the mid-twentieth century. . . . [It] will be engaging reading for all interested in American childhood studies." -- Martha Hixon * Children's Literature *
"With Babes in Tomorrowland, Nicholas Sammond offers a fine genealogy of Disney (the man and the industry), middle-class tastes and the intellectual and market regulation of 'the good child' from the Great Depression to the early 1960s. Sammond draws upon a staggering wealth of primary and secondary sources to make an impressive case about how the rise of Walt Disney was closely tied to the rise of child development theory, media standards and anxiety over childhood." -- Randal Doane * Journal of Consumer Culture *



Book Information
ISBN 9780822334637
Author Nicholas Sammond
Format Paperback
Page Count 488
Imprint Duke University Press
Publisher Duke University Press
Weight(grams) 712g