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Playing with History: American Identities and Children's Consumer Culture

2022; Oxford University Press; Volume: 109; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/jahist/jaac406

1945-2314

Gary Cross,

Themes in Literature Analysis

American children have long learned their history and social values through consumer culture as much as through the classroom. Toys, dolls, amusement parks, and even leisure-reading books have passed on hegemonic ideas about race and gender as well as value-laden historical narratives, while also reflecting the prevailing culture and fostering consumerist values. Through a brief account of the origins of American toy industry and four case studies of commercial artifacts from the late 1930s, Molly Rosner offers an engaging and varied account of this phenomenon. The American toy industry, Rosner notes, rising with other consumer-goods producers in the decades around 1900, promoted racist and sexist themes in dolls and toys (mechanical toy savings banks and gendered toy lines, for example). While her focus on the Doll Show of 1938 sits oddly in a book about the impact of consumer goods on children, Rosner uses the New York gathering of adult collectors of (commercial) dolls to show how nostalgia for childhood playthings became a defense of white upper-class culture and a critique of the consumer culture that emerged in the 1920s. The children's American historical books series published by conservative Bobbs-Merrill and liberal Random House both offered heroic stories to a Cold War–era generation of predominately white middle-class children, while ignoring issues of racial injustice and the historical roles of women. In doing so, these books conformed to the prevailing quest for “consensus” among historians of the 1950s. This vision of the past no longer worked in the 1960s in the Freedomland theme park in the Bronx, which folded in four years. Freedomland's attempt to replicate these conventional narratives in rides and shows fared poorly when compared with the more realistic history offered at heritage sites such as Williamsburg, while its efforts to provide thrills could not compete with increasingly “exciting” amusement parks.