In this groundbreaking book, Ken Parille seeks to do for nineteenth-century boys what the past three decades of scholarship have done for girls: show how the complexities of the fiction and educational materials written about them reflect the lives they lived. While most studies of nineteenth-century boyhood have focused on post-Civil War male novelists, Parille explores a broader archive of writings by male and female authors, extending from 1830-1885.

Boys at Home offers a series of arguments about five pedagogical modes: play-adventure, corporal punishment, sympathy, shame, and reading. The first chapter demonstrates that, rather than encouraging boys to escape the bonds of domesticity, scenes of play in boys’ novels reproduce values associated with the home. Chapter 2 argues that debates about corporal punishment are crucial sources for the culture’s ideas about gender difference and pedagogical practice. In chapter 3, “The Medicine of Sympathy,” Parille examines the affective nature of mother-daughter and mother-son bonds, emphasizing the special difficulties that “boy-nature” posed for women. The fourth chapter uses boys’ conduct literature and Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women – the preeminent chronicle of girlhood in the century – to investigate not only Alcott’s fictional representations of shame-centered discipline but also pervasive cultural narratives about what it means to “be a man.” Focusing on works by Lydia Sigourney and Francis Forrester, the final chapter considers arguments about the effects that fictional, historical, and biographical narratives had on a boy’s sense of himself and his masculinity.

Boys at Home is an important contribution to the emerging field of masculinity studies. In addition, this provocative volume brings new insight to the study of childhood, women’s writing, and American culture.

Ken Parille is assistant professor of English at East Carolina University. His articles have appeared in Children’s Literature, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, Papers on Language and Literature, and Children’s Literature Association Quarterly.


 

Chicano Studies is a comparatively new academic discipline. Unlike well-established fields of study that long ago codified their canons and curricula, the departments of Chicano Studies that exist today on U.S. college and university campuses are less than four decades old. In this edifying and frequently eye-opening book, a career member of the discipline examines its foundations and early years. Based on an extraordinary range of sources and cognizant of infighting and the importance of personalities, Chicano Studies is the first history of the discipline.

What are the assumptions, models, theories, and practices of the academic discipline now known as Chicano Studies? Like most scholars working in the field, Michael Soldatenko didn't know the answers to these questions even though he had been teaching for many years. Intensely curious, he set out to find the answers, and this book is the result of his labors. Here readers will discover how the discipline came into existence in the late 1960s and how it matured during the next fifteen years-from an often confrontational protest of dissatisfied Chicana/o college students into a univocal scholarly voice (or so it appears to outsiders).

Part intellectual history, part social criticism, and part personal meditation, Chicano Studies attempts to make sense of the collision (and occasional wreckage) of politics, culture, scholarship, ideology, and philosophy that created a new academic discipline. Along the way, it identifies a remarkable cast of scholars and administrators who added considerable zest to the drama.

James Farr and Raymond Seidelman bring new historical reflection to the "state of the discipline" debate in political science. This anthology offers a panorama of views about the state of the discipline that have been sketched by leading political scientists and disciplinary historians from the late nineteenth century to the past.

The essays in this volume explore four distinct periods in the development of the discipline, with special emphasis on the subfields of American politics and political theory, revealing that the identity of the discipline is constituted not so much by agreements over fundamental principles as by the history of debates about the meaning of politics, the methods of science, the theories of behavioralism and the state, and the responsibilities of public professionals and civic educators.

Contributors are Terence Ball, Charles A. Beard, John W. Burgess, Robert A. Dahl, David Easton, John G. Gunnell, Norman Jacobson, Harold D. Lasswell, Francis Lieber, Charles E. Merriam, David M. Ricci, William H. Riker, Dorothy Ross, Helene Silverberg, Leonard D. White, Woodrow Wilson, and W.W. Willoughby.

Its unprecedented treatment of the history of political science makes Discipline and History essential reading for political scientists and their students. Historians of the social sciences will also find much to consider.

In the vast literature on architectural theory and practice, the ways in which architectural knowledge is actually taught, debated, and understood are too often ignored. The essays collected in this groundbreaking volume address the current state of architecture as an academic and professional discipline. The issues considered range from the form and content of architectural education to the architect’s social and environmental obligations and the emergence of a new generation of architects. Often critical of the current paradigm, these essays offer a provocative challenge to accepted assumptions about the production, dissemination, and reception of architectural knowledge. 

Contributors: Sherry Ahrentzen, U of Wisconsin-Milwaukee; Stanford Anderson, MIT; Carol Burns, Harvard U; Russell Ellis, UC Berkeley; Thomas Fisher, U of Minnesota; Linda Groat, U of Michigan; Kay Bea Jones, Ohio State U; David Leatherbarrow, U of Pennsylvania; A. G. Krishna Menon, TVB School of Habitat Studies, India; Garth Rockcastle, U of Minnesota; Michael Stanton, American U, Beirut; Sharon E. Sutton, U of Washington; David J. T. Vanderburgh, Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium; and Donald Watson, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

As zero-tolerance discipline policies have been instituted at high schools across the country, police officers are employed with increasing frequency to enforce behavior codes and maintain order, primarily at poorly performing, racially segregated urban schools. Actions that may once have sent students to the detention hall or resulted in their suspension may now introduce them to the criminal justice system. In Police in the Hallways, Kathleen Nolan explores the impact of policing and punitive disciplinary policies on the students and their educational experience.

Through in-depth interviews with and observations of students, teachers, administrators, and police officers, Nolan offers a rich and nuanced account of daily life at a Bronx high school where police patrol the hallways and security and discipline fall under the jurisdiction of the NYPD. She documents how, as law enforcement officials initiate confrontations with students, small infractions often escalate into “police matters” that can lead to summonses to criminal court, arrest, and confinement in juvenile detention centers.

Nolan follows students from the classroom and the cafeteria to the detention hall, the dean’s office, and the criminal court system, clarifying the increasingly intimate relations between the school and the criminal justice system. Placing this trend within the context of recent social and economic changes, as well as developments within criminal justice and urban school reform, she shows how this police presence has created a culture of control in which penal management overshadows educational innovation.

Police in the Hallways also examines the prevalent forms of oppositional behavior through which students express their frustrations and their deep sense of exclusion. With compassion and clear-eyed analysis, Nolan sounds a warning about this alarming convergence of prison and school cultures and the negative impact that it has on the real lives of low-income students of color—and, in turn, on us all.