Browsing by Subject "Toys"
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Item Science and the culture of American childhood, 1900-1980(2012-12) Onion, Rebecca Stiles; Davis, Janet M.; Mickenberg, Julia L.; Meikle, Jeffrey; Hunt, Bruce; Hartigan, JohnIn American culture of the twentieth century, there has evolved a persistent popular association between the personal qualities of children and of scientists. Efforts to encourage children to get “hooked on science” have consistently noted this affinity, as Americans have ascribed curiosity, wonder, and delight in discovery to their children. Responding to debates within cultural history, childhood studies, and the history of science, this dissertation argues that tracking the ways that this cultural commonplace has been created, and showing how it has depended upon inequalities of gender, race, and class, can help us understand intermingled attitudes of awe and distrust toward science in public culture. In five chapters, the dissertation traces efforts to bring science into children’s popular culture across the twentieth century, showing how these efforts constitute a very visible form of public science. In Chapter One, located in the Progressive Era, the American Museum of Natural History and the Brooklyn Children’s Museum offer comparative case studies that show how “science” was perceived as a civilizing or empowering force in children’s lives, depending on their social class. In the interwar period, children’s culture taught that posing questions about the natural and technological worlds was a practice that cemented a white male child’s position as the vanguard of evolution. Chapter Two examines the proliferation of children’s non-fiction and encyclopedias, and Chapter Three shows how chemistry sets created images of modern boyhood. In the postwar era, young scientists began to appear as an endangered species, as science promoters saw popular culture as a threat to the kind of individuality and focus necessary for serious inquiry. Chapters Four and Five show how promoters of the Westinghouse Science Talent Search and Robert Heinlein, author of a series of young-adult science fiction novels, sought to create alternative youth cultures hospitable to science. By examining the images of young inquirers that result from these popularization efforts, I argue that these images helped adults come to terms with their own relationships to innovation, while naturalizing the perception of science as an intellectual project of privilege.Item The power of play : East German toy design, consumption, and the socialist personality 1949-1979(2015-05) Nagy, Shannon Romayne; Crew, David F., 1946-; Hake, Sabine; Bsumek, Erika; Rubin, Eli; Neuburger, MaryThis dissertation explores how East Germany used children’s toys to educate its citizens on how to act and consume like socialists and establish a specific socialist society that differentiated itself from the West. Toys, like other objects, are meant to be manipulated, rendering them ephemeral and part of everyday life. Yet, they are also a representational medium for the prevailing mores of a culture and society—their ability to influence individual sensory experience and cognition has made toys enduring features of education, socialization, consumer culture, politics and ideology. By approaching the history of East Germany from the perspective of material culture, this dissertation reveals the extent to which socialist ideology pervaded the design, production, and consumption of East German toys and demonstrates how the state's efforts—literally and figuratively—shaped the material lives, national identity, and quotidian practices of its citizens. A major tenet of socialist ideology in East Germany (GDR) was the commonly held belief that citizens of the state could be molded into "better" socialists through education, paternal supervision, and manipulation of the physical environment. Therefore, government officials and pedagogues hoped that through the process of childhood political indoctrination, the responsibilities and mores of a socialist society would come as second nature to GDR citizens. Using toys as a lens, this project reveals how the East German government attempted to establish a socialist product landscape and way of life much different from the ones in the West by dictating and controlling the material culture of everyday life and creating new relationships between people and things. Ideology drove the shape, style, and appearance of the material world while the GDR marketed its aesthetic as "national in form, socialist in content" and changed the everyday surroundings and physical world of its citizens. Finally, while traditional historiography of the Cold War relationship between East and West Germany focuses on East-West competition and the political relationships between the two states, this study examines East Germany's cultural and ideological strategy for negotiating the creation of a distinctive aesthetic and specific socialist personality among the most impressionable and youngest members of the state, its children.Item While supplies last : playing with toys, Jewish masculinity, and toxic American inheritances through devised theatre(2020-05-04) Rosenthal, Mason Gregory; Rossen, RebeccaThis Performance as Research thesis centers the 2019 work-in-progress performance of While Supplies Last. While Supplies Last’s central narrative follows the family life of Geoffrey “Junior” Giraffe, in his struggle to lead Toys “R” Us, after the recent death of his father. In While Supplies Last, I play with what I term “toxic American inheritances,” entrenched systems of oppression that shape the United States including: hegemonic masculinity, white supremacy, rampant consumerism, and plastic pollution. I argue that toys, while molded by these forces, are simultaneously objects of play, and therefore potent sources for transgression and transformation. I contend that the free-wheeling spirit of play makes it a particularly effective tool to address toxic American inheritances, which rely on restriction and regulation. In Chapter One I describe the historical and theoretical frameworks of the project, including my research into the Jewish inventors and entrepreneurs that shaped the post-World War II American toy industry. In Chapter Two I analyze the three performance lecture interludes that interrupt While Supplies Last ’s central narrative: a Borscht Belt comedy set by Mr. Potato Head, a physical fitness seminar with G.I. Joe, and a TED Talk by Pac-Man. In Chapter Three I evaluate the successes and failures of While Supplies Last with an eye towards its future development