Toy Stories: The Production, Marketing, Consumption and Psychology of German Children’s Literature and Toys from the Enlightenment to the Present

It has been a very busy few weeks for us in Chicago Hall (and beyond)! Our collaboration has focused on the history of German children’s culture, particularly toys and children’s books, one of Prof. Elliott Schreiber’s key research interests. Throughout the summer, Kristen Caccavale has assisted Prof. Schreiber with research into the psychology of children’s play as depicted especially in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s famous children’s story, “Nutcracker and the King of Mice.” This research will culminate in an article to be submitted to a peer-reviewed journal in Fall 2014.

Children’s culture also features heavily in Vassar’s year-long Beginning German sequence. We started our summer with Kristen compiling a list of over 50 contemporary, award-winning German children’s books, which we have ordered for Vassar’s Thompson Memorial Library. We will be using these books in Beginning German to help students improve not only their understanding of the German language, but also of the German culture. Students in this class write and illustrate their own children’s books and read them to elementary school children at Deutsche Schule New York, located about an hour south of Vassar in White Plains. We have been working with several staff members at Academic Computing Services in order to incorporate iBooks into this project, and we will now be piloting some of the iBooks software in class next year. We also had a very productive trip to the Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, New York during our fifth week. There, we had access to the museum’s extensive archives, where we were able to look at original editions of German pop-up books written by Lothar Meggendorfer, some of which were over 100 years old. We have ordered reproductions of these books to use in Beginning German, and they will make another excellent addition to the curriculum.

This scene is from the first page of the Lothar Meggendorfer pop-up book; it shows the mother and father being driven in a car on the right, and a maid on the left.

This scene takes place on the fourth page of the book and shows a little girl with her cat and a maid in the kitchen.

While at the Strong also discovered some extensively detailed books regarding German dolls and dollhouses, which Kristen will be using in her culminating Ford Scholar poster and presentation, as well as in a presentation she will be giving to students in Beginning German in the Fall. Kristen has decided to center her presentation on German girlhood in Imperial Germany, and has been reading several girls’ memoirs from that period, as well as researching German girls’ dolls, toys, dollhouses, and societal roles during this time.

The whole book laid out at the Strong National Museum of Play Archives.

In our last few weeks, we will be preparing for our October Ford Scholar poster presentation, as well as looking through the archives in Special Collections for any rare German children’s books or illustrations of the Brothers Grimm fairy tales, which we will also be using to educate students in Beginning German about German art, literature, history, and culture. We can’t believe that our fellowship is almost over, but we have certainly made the most of it!

The Corporatization of American Education

Kyle DeAngelis (Class of 2015) and Professor Chris Bjork

Educational historians generally identify the publication of A Nation at Risk as the start of the corporate school reform movement.

In 1983, the National Commission for Excellence in Education published a report titled A Nation at Risk, which insisted that American schools were chronically failing, posing an imminent threat to America’s economic and military supremacy at home and abroad. Since the publication of the report, a bipartisan consensus has emerged around the imperative for structural school reform. The series of reforms that have resulted from this consensus are heavily influenced by business and neoliberal economic theories, earning this movement the nickname “corporate school reform”.

President Bush signs the No Child Left Behind Act into law.

The agenda of corporate school reform emphasizes test-based school accountability, high standards, and school choice as the main levers to improve educational outcomes. The reformers contend that students should be tested annually, and their scores on these standardized tests should be used to punish or reward teachers, principals, and schools accordingly. Rigorous academic standards should be set for all students and no excuses should be accepted for failure to meet these standards. Reformers promote vouchers, charter schools, and other policies that increase choice in education, arguing that competition among schools will drive improvement. Critics of corporate reform have pointed out that these reforms are not as effective in practice as they appear to be in theory, and have had several unforeseen negative effects on American education.

In 2002, President George W. Bush signed the No Child Left Behind Act into law. Passed by Congress with overwhelming bipartisan support, NCLB took the test and punish accountability measures touted by corporate reformers to scale and promoted school choice. In 2009, President Barack Obama revealed his major education initiative, Race to the Top, which continued to embrace the same education reforms as NCLB.

Like their predecessors, President Barack Obama and his Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, both embrace corporate school reform.

My project with Professor Chris Bjork involved the creation of a new senior seminar in education to be offered in the spring of 2015 on the subject of corporate education reform. I spent several weeks reading books, essays, government reports, research articles, and news pieces on the subject of corporate school reform. I used this research to create a schedule of reading for Professor Bjork’s seminar. Next spring, students in “The Corporatization of American Education” seminar will read from both proponents and critics of corporate school reform and analyze the arguments put forth by all sides of the debate. Students will investigate the neoliberal theories underpinning corporate school reform, the research regarding accountability and school choice, the political history of school reform since 1983, and the influence of teachers unions and billionaire philanthropists on educational policy. At the end of the course, students will research the potential for alternatives to corporate school reform. Ultimately, students will gain a comprehensive and critical knowledge of U.S. school reform over the last three decades.

The World of Shojo Manga: Mirror of Girls’ Desires

This upcoming fall there will be a shojo manga art exhibition in Vassar’s Palmer Gallery and Dutchess Community College’s Washington Gallery from October 29^th to November 21^st. Vassar College’s Professor Dollase is collaborating with Professor Toku of California State University, Chico (Curator of the Exhibition), Teresa Quinn (Director of Palmer Gallery), Monica Church (Associate Director of Palmer Gallery) and Margaret E. Craig (Professor of Art History at Dutchess Community College) to make this exhibition possible. My job this summer was to assist Professor Dollase in the planning of this exhibition, contribute to the gallery with English translations of manga, and prepare a speech about shojo manga to give at Vassar and Dutchess Community College on two unknown dates.

Now why should you come to this shojo manga art exhibition? What is shojo manga? Manga are Japanese graphic novels, and they are split into two categories: shojo manga (marketed towards a female audience) and shonen manga (marketed towards boys). My focus this summer was on shojo manga, which is such an important part of Japanese culture that there are even classes on manga in Japanese universities! Women of all ages read shojo manga, and it is distinguishable by its use of large eyes and cute, feminine men. Shojo manga isn’t just love stories and fantasies; there is an underlying importance in shojo manga artists’ usage of love, gender fluidity, and homosexual relations that suggests something important about the emotions of girls in Japan. Japanese girls strive for true love and a better life, but shojo manga also suggests that there are still issues with equality in heterosexual relationships.

Rose of Versailles by Riyoko Ikeda: A popular and influential shojo manga.

The art exhibition is comprised of pictures of the artwork in shojo manga, not the books themselves. As part of my internship, I translated two works from Japanese to English with the help of Professor Dollase. One of the translations will be in Vassar’s Palmer Gallery during the exhibition. With this addition, visitors can read some shojo manga stories and see the book form, instead of just viewing singular pictures of covers and pages in the gallery. Having visitors see actual manga books will help introduce them to Japanese popular culture. The rest of my project was dedicated to researching Japanese culture, reading manga from the 1960s to the 1990s, and using this knowledge to make a speech and PowerPoint presentation to present at later dates in the fall. My speech topic will be the importance of love in Japanese shojo manga, so I will be discussing the history of love in Japan, the variety of love portrayed in manga, and what this variety suggests about love and relationships for girls in Japan.

A page of the translation that will be shown in Vassar’s Palmer Gallery.

If you have time in the fall, please stop by either Vassar College or Dutchess Community College between October 30^th and November 21^st to delve into the interesting world of shojo manga!

This summer, I worked with Professor Lydia Murdoch on research for her current book project, Called by Death: The Politics and Public Mourning of Child Mortality in Nineteenth-Century England. This will be the first comprehensive history of the Victorians and child death. The book examines the ways in which discourses of grieving for dead children changed over the course of the nineteenth century and, in particular, how women drew upon their experiences of child death as they claimed a greater public role as authorities on political topics ranging from imperial expansion and factory production to working-class housing conditions and state welfare programs. My research this summer centered on women abolitionists in Britain in the nineteenth century. Professor Murdoch and I explored how these British women abolitionists contributed to political expressions of grief through their discussion of children who had died or were separated from parents under slavery.

My work consisted of researching and creating bibliographies of primary and secondary materials on British abolitionists. First, I looked at the Wilson Anti-Slavery Collection of British abolitionist pamphlets, a collection of nearly 500 total pamphlets spanning the entire nineteenth century. I collected pamphlets written by or for women that addressed themes of childhood, child death, and separation of families. Types of pamphlets ranged from Annual Reports of Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Societies to collections of stories and poetry for children, advertisements for Anti-Slavery Bazaars, and reports on the education of slave children. Many of these pamphlets attempted to garner sympathy from British women through depictions of the life of children in slavery, particularly through the scope of motherhood.

Next, I turned to the life of Mary Prince, a freed slave who struggled to survive in Bermuda, Turks Island, Antigua, and finally in England. Commissioned and edited by Thomas Pringle, Secretary of the Anti-Slavery Society, and transcribed by Susanna Strickland Moodie, sister of the historian Agnes Strickland, Prince’s slave narrative was the first account of the life of a black women to be published in Britain. Sarah Salih’s edited edition of Prince’s The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave (1831) provided a foundation for my research into Prince’s life.[1] In her autobiography, Prince equates the separation of slave children from their parents with death as she describes her mother shrouding her children and mourning their loss the day they were separated, making Prince’s story perfect for a project on child death in slavery. I found very few primary sources written about Mary Prince; most are newspaper articles that focus on a libel case regarding the validity of Prince’s narrative. I also collected a variety of secondary sources about Mary Prince; most focused on Prince’s voice and agency in her narrative. Despite the importance of Prince’s voice as a black woman in the British abolitionist movement, she was largely excluded from the movement by white women abolitionists, namely those who wrote the abolitionist pamphlets in the Wilson Anti-Slavery Collection, and she was treated as a victim of slavery rather than a fellow activist.[2]

I then looked through Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates for themes of child mortality and loss in Parliamentary speeches that centered around abolition. Speeches discussing children largely focused on the plights of children who were enslaved from birth.

Figure 1- Sarah Parker Remond

The final portion of my research focused on the life of Sarah Parker Remond, a black abolitionist from Salem, Massachusetts who gave a series of lectures in Britain from 1859-1866 (See Figure 1). Her lectures focused particularly on the sexual abuse of female slaves and separation of families under slavery, and were recorded in both British and American publicans, including the Warrington Guardian, Warrington Times, Warrington Standard, Anti-Slavery Advocate, Bolton Chronicle, The Morning Chronicle, Manchester Times, The Liberator, among others. As for child mortality, Remond concentrated on the case of Margaret Garner, a slave woman who killed her children rather than see them taken into slavery.[3] The amount of primary sources on Remond’s lecture series is extensive; these accounts speak to Remond’s incredible influence as a black women abolitionist in the public eye during this time.

Figure 2- “Am I not a Woman and Sister,” from the Annual Report of the Edinburgh Ladies’ Emancipation Society (1867)

Figure 3- “The Negro Mother’s Appeal,” from Anti-Slavery Scrapbook (1829)

Professor Murdoch will use the sources I collected to write this chapter on women abolitionists and child death and complete her book. This preliminary research has revealed a thick fabric of women’s voices in the British abolitionist movement. However, this fabric is largely dominated by white women’s voices. The pamphlets in the Wilson Anti-Slavery Collection written by white women victimized slaves and elevated white abolitionists. They include startling images of black powerlessness—black women kneeling before white women for aid, or slave children reaching up to the aid of a white woman savior (See Figures 2 & 3).[4] They erased the possibility of black resistance to slavery, which as we know from Mary Prince, Sarah Parker Remond, and countless others, was a powerful force in the abolition of slavery and women’s rights. Nonetheless, through their publications, stories, and lectures mourning the suffering and death of children under slavery, all of these women gained political agency in the public sphere.

[1] Mary Prince, The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave (1831), edited by Sarah Salih (London: Penguin Books, 2004).

[2] Clare Midgley, Women Against Slavery: The British Campaigns 1780-1870 (London: Routledge, 1992), 91.

[3] “Lecture on American Slavery by a Coloured Lady,” Warrington Times (January 29, 1859, no. 4): I.

[4] Midgley, Women Against Slavery: The British Campaigns 1780-1870, 204.

Recusant Readership and the Library of Catherine of Braganza

Recusant Readership and the Library of Catherine of Braganza

Professor Dorothy Kim & Nicholas Hoffman ‘14

Catherine of Braganza is seldom discussed both within and outside of the academic sphere. An Infanta of Portugal, she is usually mentioned in the context of her marriage to Charles II of England, and a poor, often neglectful marriage it was. However, a closer analysis of her life reveals a rich history—of scandal, isolation, and recusant readership. A staunch Catholic, she was forced to navigate the complicated and often dangerous socio-political playing field of the English Restoration. During the hysteria of the Popish Plot, Titus Oates even accused her of being an agent of the Vatican sent to orchestrate the assassination of the King. In defiance of suggestions that she convert (or that Charles should divorce her or even have her kidnapped), she disregarded the volatility of her political status and commissioned the printing of numerous Catholic texts, in some cases at the expense of her printers who were arrested and thrown in prison for their dissension.

I had the privilege of working with Professor Dorothy Kim on evaluating and expanding upon a complete bibliography for Catherine, reading through each text in search for clues as to how she was able to publish and maintain this private library of what her public saw as “licentious” or “libelous” texts. I researched London printers, the migration of her private chapel between Whitehall and Somerset House, all mentions of her reading habits, her correspondence back home in Portugal, the various laws passed against her form of readership, and inventories of her goods (some of these sources only available in Portuguese) and delved into any mention of her religion. A majority of my time was spent poring over the Calendar of State Papers: Domestic Series, of the Reign of Charles II—an exhaustive volume that chronicles all the internal affairs of Charles’ reign.

Using resources online and at the Huntington Library in Pasadena, California, significant headway has been made in the scholarship surrounding Catherine of Braganza. The endeavor was fruitful, revealing links between Catherine and various monasteries, both in England and on the Continent. One volume that can be traced back to her was discovered in Australia. In addition, the original bibliography of all texts that mention her has been greatly expanded.

Framing Black Fiction

Professor Eve Dunbar’s commitment to exploring the spectrum of Black literary production, and more broadly black art production, lead to this particular Ford Scholars project in which Laci Dent and I assisted Professor Dunbar in the exploration of the relationships between the visual arts and Black literary fiction. We began the project constructing portfolios on a host of Black literary fiction authors and an editor of many Black Authored titles, to provide Professor Dunbar with detailed contextualized views of the subjects we would interview. In our research of archives, literary fiction, academic writings and interviews, we focused on the links between the visual arts and the authors work and processes. We focused on why it might be beneficial to understanding mass culture through exploring these links between visual arts and black authorship.

Author Martha Southgate left, Author Victor Lavalle right

The intensive research periods culminated in a series of interviews with authors, Tayari Jones, Kiese Laymon, Victor Lavalle, Martha Southgate, and editor at Random House, Chris Jackson, all of whom displayed a diverse set of relationships with visuality in their art production. Yet all of the interviews touched upon interesting narratives of progress, liberation, and black artist tradition. In the interview with Chris Jackson he highlighted disjunctures in the work of contemporary black authorship, Martha Southgate yearned to see greater interest in the diverse production of work on the lives of Black people today, and Kiese Laymon lamented the potential for love and honesty that is threatened when Black youth, in particular, don’t have access to diverse representations of themselves across media forms. These topics of nurturing, building, setting the tools for empowerment, and love for Black art production sprung from the theorization upon visuality in authorship, all of which has inspired my own personal work to look towards fiction as a space of radical imagination and theorization upon social ills, specifically pertaining to racist, patriarchal, and capitalist exploitation and marginalization. The research and interviews conducted lead everyone involved in the project with a plethora of deductive studies to explore.
Laci Dent explains how the Ford Scholarship continues to influence her work and thought production, “I was interested in the idea of black identity being tied to iconicity in the visual realm (film, television, and etc). I’m interested in depicting black subjects in the visual realm as in ‘process’, as ‘thinking’ beings who are subjective and hold claim to some form of consciousness. Later in the summer, I’m shooting a short film in New Orleans called “Shared Wounds” that challenges the troubling nature of blackness in visuality.”

The Power of Music: Working with Orphaned Children in Uganda

by Samantha Smith (’14) and Malinda Kathleen Reese (’16)

This summer we worked with Professor Christine Howlett in Nansana, Uganda, collaborating with a Japanese organization called the Ashinaga Foundation, which helps orphans achieve higher education in Japan and Uganda. At their Ugandan location, Ashinaga has over 800 registered orphans, all of whom lost one or both parents to HIV/AIDS. In addition to providing psychological care and scholarships for everyone at Ashinaga Uganda, they also house the Terakoya School, a primary school for P1 to 4, and these were the kids that we saw everyday. “Madam” Christine, as the kids knew her, taught music to all 70 students in rotating groups, but we focused on 30 exceptional students who will ultimately meet with the Vassar College Choir in Tokyo in the spring of 2014 to workshop a show that will then make a world tour in the summer of 2015.

As Christine’s assistants, we worked with the students in class on perfecting their solfège (a teaching technique using hand symbols to represent pitch) and on learning several new songs. The repertoire included American, Hebrew, and South African folk songs as well as contemporary choral works. Most of our students also regularly train in traditional Ugandan dance, and they brought their love of movement into our classroom, creating a dance to every song or even adding gestures to accompany lyrics. In addition to getting to know all of the students at school, we accompanied the teachers and staff of Ashinaga on several home visits, where we would meet their families. This home visit system is a way for Ashinaga to ensure that the kids have as stable a home situation as possible, and for us it was a window into a completely different side of these kids’ lives.

The most moving thing about working with the students at Terakoya was seeing the sheer joy that they could find in any activity, whether it be school work, singing or dancing. Their dedication to performing their best and sharing that joy with others was a major catalyst behind the remarkable improvement that we saw in their pitch, listening skills, and vocal control in just three weeks.

What Does Francophone Comic Art Say?

In the six weeks of our project, Professor Célérier and I set out to redesign her course called “What Does Francophone Comic Art Say?”. The course will be taught in the spring of this coming school year and will be cross listed as French and Francophone Studies as well as Africana Studies.

First, we re-evaluated the former course syllabus and assessed each article and comic book on the assignment list in order to ensure that each assignment was relevant toward the goals of the course. Then, after weeding out the less pertinent articles and comic books, we began our research for potential replacements that would better suit the curriculum. Finally, we implemented the new articles and made further changes to the course schedule. One of these changes was the assignment of a portfolio by each student due at the end of the course. The first part of this portfolio would showcase all of the written assignments completed by the student throughout the semester, demonstrating the student’s progress in the his/her French writing skills. The other part of the portfolio would reveal the student’s process in crafting their own comic by showing each step of the creative procedure up to the final draft. This final draft would then be turned into a poster which the student would orally present to the class during the last two weeks of class.

All in all, this project was a significant learning experience for me because while I had the privilege to express my own opinions as a student in the redesign of this course, I had the opportunity to involve myself in the whole process and realize all of the work that goes into teaching such a course. I learned so much about the African Francophone culture, something that I had always wanted to study. Thank you to everyone who has allowed me to have this wonderful research experience. It has been a fruitful six weeks.

R2P: The Recent History of Humanitarian Intervention

Samantha Prior ’14

Professor Robert Brigham – History Department

US Army soldiers coming down a street in Kismayo, Somalia. Soldiers from the 9th PSYOPS, Fort Bragg, North Carolina, ride in M998 High-Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle (HMMWV) broadcasting messages to the Somali locals that line the street on both sides. Elements of the 10th M ountain Division, Fort Drum, New York, walk along side the HMMWVs providing security. This mission is in direct support of Operation Restore Hope. http://farm6.staticflickr.com/5177/5414662835_25e5ce0da7_o.jpg

US Army soldiers coming down a street in Kismayo, Somalia.
http://farm6.staticflickr.com/5177/5414662835_25e5ce0da7_o.jpg

In 2005 the concept that had been coined “Responsibility to Protect” or “R2P” was included in the outcome document from the UN World Summit and was formalized by the Security Council the following year. R2P seeks to reconcile the issues of state sovereignty and the prevention of mass atrocities, which are often seen as at odds with each other. At the core of R2P is the idea of “humanitarian intervention.” The three “pillars” of R2P are as follows:

1. The State carries the primary responsibility for protecting populations from genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing, and their incitement.

2. The international community has a responsibility to encourage and assist States in fulfilling this responsibility.

3. The international community has a responsibility to use appropriate diplomatic, humanitarian and other means to protect populations from these crimes. If a State is manifestly failing to protect its populations, the international community must be prepared to take collective action to protect populations, in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations.

http://farm5.staticflickr.com/4039/4360446526_88f135a88a.jpg

The concept of R2P is often viewed as born of the series of mass atrocities that occurred throughout the 1990s, including (but not limited to) the crises in Somalia, the Balkans and Rwanda and the way the international community responded to (or did not respond to) them. As can be seen with recent examples such as Libya and Syria, this idea and the debate surrounding it is continually relevant in the world today.

The remains of victims of the Rwandan Genocide
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/db/Rwandan_Genocide_Murambi_skulls.jpg

The case of the Rwandan Genocide is particularly compelling with regard to the development of these ideas due to the extreme nature of the violence and the astonishing lack of action on the part of important actors such as the United States and the United Nations. The project that I am working on in conjunction with Professor Brigham is researching the attitudes and actions of the Clinton Administration during the development of the genocide in Rwanda for a planned book on the topic.

President Clinton
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The aim of the research is to get an idea of how Clinton’s policy regarding humanitarian intervention was being formed and reformed, and how that was translated into the policy concerning Rwanda. There is an impressive amount of primary source documents available online through resources such as the NSA, State Department and the Public Papers of the President. The declassification of documents related to Rwanda is ongoing so more information is continually being made available. My primary task is finding and reading these documents to see if they contain pertinent information. Here is an example of a document I might encounter (alone with some of my annotations – in purple): Rwanda – Geneva Convention Violations. In addition to being exposed to a plethora of fascinating documents and information, this project has given me greater awareness and appreciation of what goes into the process of writing such a book, which is akin to many of those that I encounter in the course of my studies.

Historic and Prehistoric Archaeology in the Mid-Hudson Valley

This summer, I had the pleasure of working with Professor Lucy Johnson and three URSI students studying the archaeology of the Mid-Hudson Valley. In the field, we excavated at two prehistoric rock shelters on the Shawangunk Ridge: Peterskill Rock Shelter and Paint Mine Rock Shelter. There we found a wide variety of flakes and flake fragments, in addition to one perfectly formed, complete Late Archaic spear point. Given the large number and lithic artifacts and the dearth of pottery found at our sites, we speculate that these sites were used as temporary shelters for hunting parties on the ridge.

We also spent a few days excavating at two local historic archaeological sites: a burned-down hotel in Lake George, NY, and the buried kitchen garden of Matthew Vassar’s estate, Springside. Over the course of the summer, I had the opportunity to learn and apply the basic principles of archaeological excavation, including practicing how to keep accurate and detailed records, dig test pits, and interpret stratigraphy.

Along with working in the field, I helped Professor Johnson analyze and catalogue artifacts from the site of New Hampton in the Hudson Valley, and from the Aleutian Islands in Alaska. Professor Johnson and I catalogued and bagged a large set of bone tools from the Aleutian Islands which she had collected several years ago, and when that was completed, I sorted artifacts from the New Hampton site into flakes, flake fragments, core fragments, and stone tools, and then analyzed and catalogued their characteristics.

Through performing these analyses, and continuing to excavate in sites like Peterskill and Paint Mine (which have until now remained unstudied by modern academic archaeologists), we hope to better understand the prehistory of the Hudson Valley, a region which has not been excavated and studied nearly as much as it deserves to be.

Sean Keller, ’16