(DOWNLOAD) "Serialized Citizenships" by Lorinda B. Cohoon " eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Serialized Citizenships
- Author : Lorinda B. Cohoon
- Release Date : January 06, 2006
- Genre: Education,Books,Professional & Technical,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 9446 KB
Description
During the 1830s and 1840s, the fiction and the advertisements in American periodicals for boys participated in the construction of American boyhoods. Throughout their production, these boyhood constructions stabilized the ways that concepts of democracy and Union were shared with young citizens of the United States. The Youth’s Companion, a popular 1840s periodical for children, frequently responds to common boyhood experiences and connects them to future citizenship potential. The prevalent concern with boys reveals that boys were viewed as important in establishing and manipulating a nation that was relatively new but rapidly changing.
The Youth’s Companion provides examples of the kinds of boyhood constructed by adults writing for children in the 1840s, a decade defined by reform, rapid westward expansion due in part to railroads and gold rushes, boundary negotiations with Canada and Mexico, and booming industrialization. The Companion “advertises” a variety of responses to these changes and through thematic content has boy characters participate in them, defining the characters’ national identities and positioning the readers to define their own citizenships. The Youth’s Companion, which devotes much of its space to material that its editors deemed educational, can be read as coming firmly out of a middle-class northeastern publishing tradition. Designed for a northern middle-class Protestant audience, the Companion lasted for over a hundred years (1827–1929), and by the 1840s, it had been published steadily for over a decade.1 Histories of the Companion suggest that prior to 1857, when Daniel S. Ford took over for Nathaniel Willis, the content of the magazine was primarily religious, and because of this the early years of the Companion have not been examined as closely as the later ones.2 While it is dominant, religion is not the only topic addressed in the early years of the magazine. Citizen-shaping and educational concerns creep into the magazine before Ford begins editorship, and the Companion uses educational interventions to promote both the stabilization and exploration of boyhood citizenship within the United States.