Description: These mutually reinforcing and complicating strands, traced through a wide range of cultural modes, from social and scientific theorizing to mass entertainment, lead to a new understanding of how changing American ideas about boyhood and the western frontier have worked together to produce compelling stories about the nation's past and its imagined future.
Brief description:
Martin Woodside is a Philadelphia-based writer, poet, and scholar and a founding member of the book publisher Calypso Editions. He has written five children's books, a collection of poetry, and numerous scholarly articles. Woodside holds a doctorate in childhood studies from Rutgers University-Camden.
Review Quotes: "Martin Woodside deftly interprets constructions of region, gender, race, and class, and draws on thinkers from Herbert Spencer to Frederick Jackson Turner, and from G. Stanley Hall to Kenneth and Mamie Clark, to show how the West, real and imagined, shaped juvenile literature, performance, and play, and how youth shaped notions about the West's meaning."--James Marten, author of Children and Youth during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era