Works Cited and Sources
Bernstein, Robin. Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood and Race from Slavery to Civil Rights. NYU Press, 2011.
Chudacoff, Howard P. Children at Play: An American History. New York University Press, 2007.
Deloria, Philip J. Playing Indian. Yale University Press, 1999.
Paul B. Ringel. Commercializing Childhood: Children’s Magazines, Urban Gentility, and the Ideal of the Child Consumer in the United States, 1823-1918. University of Massachusetts Press, 2015.
Sánchez-Eppler, Karen. The World and Works of the Nelson Brothers. 2014, https://www.ats.amherst.edu/childhood/.
Youth’s Companion. Boston. 1836-1929.
Sources
The Nelson brothers are certainly not the only children to create their own “World.” In 1897, G. Stanley Hall, the first president of the American Psychological Association, published The Story of a Sand-pile, (E.L. Kellog and Co., 1897) in which he provided a detailed report on an elaborate miniature community built and sustained over many summers of family sand-play. The late Robert Silvey had produced an alternate world in his own childhood, and together with psychiatrist Stephen MacKeith undertook the first systematic research into what the pair called “paracosms,” soliciting accounts of childhood play-worlds from both children and adults in twentieth-century Britain. Their findings on the nature and patterns of such play are reported in Stephen MacKeith and David Cohen, The Development of Imagination: The Private Worlds of Childhood (Routledge, 1992). The writing by children that has received the most scholarly attention is also rooted in such world-making: like the Nelsons, the Brontë siblings recorded the histories of their imaginary worlds in tiny handmade books; much of the Brontës’ juvenilia, edited by Christine Alexander, is available in Tales of Glass Town, Angria, and Gondal: Selected Early Writings (Oxford University Press, 2010). Alexander also co-edited with Juliet McMaster an excellent critical anthology on the youthful writing of a wide array of British authors: The Child Writer from Austen to Woolf (Cambridge University Press, 2005), which includes a chapter by Alexander on child-made periodicals. I have written about another nineteenth-century New England family whose children created extensive libraries of home-made books in “Practicing for Print: The Hale Children’s Manuscript Libraries.” Journal of the History of Childhood & Youth (March, 2008). The Hales, like the Brontës, were a highly educated and literary family, as were the boys whose sand-play was recorded by G. Stanley Hall. What is so unusual about the Nelson archive is that it preserves the cultural production not of an educated elite, but of farm boys. Kenneth B. Kidd’s chapter “Farming for Boys” in Making American Boys: Boyology and the Feral Tale (University of Minnesota Press, 2004) discusses the literary celebrations of farming written in anxious recognition that American boys were increasingly abandoning family farms.