92: Julia Mickenberg's Learning from the Left

In Learning from the Left: Children's Literature, the Cold War, and Radical Politics in the United States, Julia Mickenberg argues that "by maintaining the democratic spirit of the 1930s through the Cold War, children's literature became a kind of bridge between the Old Left and the New Left generations" and contributed to the youth rebellions of the 1960s.  Working from a vast array of primary sources, including 33 author interviews, several hundred fiction and non-fiction books for children, and other archival materials, Mickenberg builds her argument by contextualizing close readings of children's books in their historical time and place.  While she is not the first to discuss dissent in a Cold War context, Mickenberg shows that this dissent was right out in the open in children's books; its very accessibility points to pervasive "counterhegemonic impulses" and the survival of the Popular Front in the midst of McCarthyism.

72: Jane Hunter's Gospel of Gentility

In The Gospel of Gentility: American Women Missionaries in Turn-of-the-Century China, Jane Hunter argues that women missionaries in turn-of-the-century China were able to use missionary work to greatly expand women's sphere even as they supported submissive roles for women and lived relatively circumscribed lives at the mission.  Hunter accesses this paradoxical construction of American womanhood in China primarily via the letters and private papers of some 40 female missionaries from different denominations who worked in China from 1900 to 1922, when some 60% of Protestant missionaries in China were women.  She also includes information from interviews and the archives of two mission boards.  Because their status as outsiders in Chinese culture throws the missionaries' gender norms in high relief, the book highlights the feminization of Protestantism and the ways in which American womanhood intersected with work, religion, and cross-cultural exchanges.

65: Nicola Beisel's Imperiled Innocents

In Imperiled Innocents: Anthony Comstock and Family Reproduction in Victorian America, Nicola Beisel links Anthony Comstock and moral reform crusades to class formation and nativist fears regarding increased immigration in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia in the Gilded Age.  Working from mostly published primary and secondary sources on anti-vice campaigns against abortionists, 'free love' advocates, gambling halls, and obscenity, as well as archival sources like the Josiah Leeds papers, Beisel argues that "moral reform movements... are properly seen as struggles over class reproduction."  In other words, anti-vice reformers were far less interested in the well-being of the people they tried to reform than they were in keeping vice and corruption from polluting their children and endangering their elite status.  By extension, vice reform revealed fears about both declining parental authority and an increased immigrant presence.