Mickenberg, Julia L.

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Mickenberg, Julia L.

PERSONAL:

Education: Brown University, A.B., 1990; University of Minnesota, Ph.D., 2000.

ADDRESSES:

Office—University of Texas at Austin, American Studies, 1 University Station, Austin, TX 78712. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Pitzer College, Claremont, CA, visiting assistant professor of history, 2000-01; University of Texas at Austin, assistant professor, 2001-07, associate professor of American studies, 2007—.

AWARDS, HONORS:

P.E.O. Scholars Dissertation Fellowship, 1998-99; Harold Leonard Memorial Film Fellowship and Research Travel Grant, 1998-99; Smithsonian Pre-doctoral Fellowship, National Museum of American History, 1998; Spencer Foundation Dissertation Fellowship, 1999-2000; Andrew Mellon Fellowship, Huntington Library, 2001; Children's Literature Association Faculty Research Grant, 2005; Harry Ransom Humanities Center Fellowship, 2005; Travel to Collections Grant, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College Library, 2008; Research Support Grant, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, 2008; Pacific Coast Branch Award from the Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association, Hamilton Book Award Runner-up from University of Texas Cooperative Society, Grace Abbott Book Prize from the Society for the History of Children and Youth, Children's Literature Association Book Award, all for Learning from the Left: Children's Literature, the Cold War, and Radical Politics in the United States.

WRITINGS:

Learning from the Left: Children's Literature, the Cold War, and Radical Politics in the United States, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 2005.

(Editor, with Philip Nel) Tales for Little Rebels: A Collection of Radical Children's Literature, New York University Press (New York, NY), 2008.

Contributor to books, including Breaking Boundaries: New Perspectives on Women's Regional Writing, edited by Sherrie A. Inness and Diana Royer, University of Iowa Press (Iowa City, IA), 1997; Girlhood in America: An Encyclopedia, edited by Miriam Forman-Brunell, ABC-CLIO (Santa Barbara, CA), 2001; The American Child: A Cultural Studies Reader, edited by Caroline Levander and Carol Singley, Rutgers University Press (New Brunswick, NJ), 2003; and Jews in American Popular Culture, edited by Paul Buhle, Praeger (Westport, CT), 2006.

Contributor to journals, including American Literature, Annals of Iowa, Children's Literature Association Quarterly, Lion and the Unicorn, MELUS: Multi Ethnic Literature of the United States, Reviews in American History, American Literary History, and American Quarterly.

SIDELIGHTS:

University of Texas at Austin American studies professor Julia L. Mickenberg specializes in the study of the history of childhood and education, women's history, nationalism, children's literature, and mid-twentieth century cultural politics. In Learning from the Left: Children's Literature, the Cold War, and Radical Politics in the United States, she combines several of these interests. The book, according to H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online contributor Rebecca de Schweinitz, "explores mostly less well-known children's literature of the post-World War II period … and suggests that leftists found in the expanding children's book field a relatively ‘free’ and potentially powerful way to share their radical views about economic conditions, social justice, race, and sometimes even gender." Mickenberg proposes that the rise of children's literature came at a time when people were developing a new appreciation for the importance of childhood education and the ability to influence children's future behavior by the way in which they were taught. People understood that the world could be changed by controlling the messages transmitted to the next generation.

During the 1940s and 1950s, as the Cold War was building, the concept of control through literature was expanded by radical leftist writers. These writers were interested not only in transmitting their messages across generations, but also in finding an outlet where their work could escape censorship. Robert Morrow, writing in the Canadian Journal of History, explained: "Mickenberg shows persuasively the set of circumstances that opened this door. In a changed political atmosphere, leftist authors learned to weave their values subtly into their books. Cold War demands for science and history education enlarged the market for trade books to complement textbooks on those subjects." The leftists soon discovered that they could successfully write trade books, which did not receive nearly as much political scrutiny as textbooks. In addition to taking advantage of the trade book market, "Mickenberg argues that children's literature became a ‘key outlet’ for leftists, a place where they could pose significant challenges to the status quo and still ‘operate below the radar of red-hunters,’" de Schweinitz further stated. "By and large blacklisted writers and their spouses found a haven in children's books in that tense time," wrote Barbara Bader in Horn Book, "because trade books (as distinct from textbooks) attracted little attention." In other words, although their work for adults ran the risk of being suppressed because of their politics, books written for children were not scrutinized nearly as closely, and therefore radical ideas could pass by unnoticed.

By exploring the past through biographies of famous Americans, radical writers in the 1940s and 1950s were able to reinterpret the country's history through their own eyes. "Leftist biographers first recast Davy Crockett, famously hostile to Native Americans and other non-whites, as a champion of the people," Bader declared, "only to abandon the attempt to co-opt American folk heroes, like Crockett, in favor of elevating African Americans and women." In addition to heroes like Crockett drawn from the American pantheon, these leftist authors, Mickenberg claims, also introduced new protagonists to the young. "Harriet Tubman," Morrow wrote, "became a particular favorite because, in Communist analyses, she had suffered ‘triple oppression’ as African American, worker, and woman." These biographies passed conservative censors or commentators largely unscrutinized because they were seen as insignificant. "To most people," Bader concluded, summarizing Mickenberg, "a kids' biography of Abraham Lincoln or Davy Crockett simply didn't matter."

In general, critics celebrated Mickenberg's attempt to understand the rise of radical children's literature even when they felt she had not fully proven her thesis. "Her notes," Morrow declared, "certainly attest to an impressive breadth of materials." However, he concluded, "we are left to impute that books with clear messages echoed by 1960s youth were a source of their radicalism." "Mickenberg," Bader stated, "tends to cherry-pick her evidence and then to claim or infer more than it demonstrates." "Perhaps leftists' success in children's publishing," suggested de Schweinitz, "has to do with a larger liberal sensibility about childhood and youth—a postwar liberalism centered on children and ideas about childhood, and one to which Americans of all (or many) political stripes adhered."

"I am interested in linking seemingly unrelated phenomena," Mickenberg told CA, "and I am a compulsive researcher, drawn almost like a detective to the archive in search of hidden secrets. I am partly driven by a desire to show the complexity, richness, and significance of seemingly unimportant phenomena. My paternal grandparents provided great inspiration for my work: they cared deeply about social justice and also convinced me to care about writing and about words (my grandmother was a school librarian and a crackerjack crossword puzzler, and my grandfather was an amazing storyteller). I have been especially interested in the 1930s, a historical moment in which anthropologists, sociologists, artists, and writers sought to make meaning out of American culture, but my research has also brought me to both the preconditions of that era (the dawn of the ‘modern’ age) and to its outgrowths (the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s). In addition to being drawn to figures who are often marginalized from historical narratives, children and women, I have also been interested in romantics, utopians, and radicals who have tried to imagine different ways of being and becoming in American society. I am deeply flattered that total strangers are interested in reading my writing, and I hope that they will take away from it an appreciation for the quirkiness and richness in the material and people I am writing about."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

American Historical Review, October, 2007, Lisa Jacobsen, review of Learning from the Left: Children's Literature, the Cold War, and Radical Politics in the United States, pp. 1212-1213.

Canadian Journal of History, spring-summer, 2007, Robert Morrow, review of Learning from the Left, p. 147.

Children's Literature, annual, 2007, Gillian Adams, "How the Old Left Became the New Left and Then Almost Mainstream," review of Learning from the Left, p. 223.

Horn Book, July-August, 2006, Barbara Bader, "Red, White, and Blue?," review of Learning from the Left, p. 477.

Journal of American History, December, 2006, Robert C. Cottrell, review of Learning from the Left, p. 927.

Library Quarterly, July, 2006, Christine A. Jenkins, review of Learning from the Left, p. 373.