Shirley Temple Research Articles

The Velvet Revolution's Best Supporting Actors: Shirley Temple Black and U.S. Embassy Prague, 19891

Abstract This article discusses the contours of U.S. diplomacy in Czechoslovakia before and during the Velvet Revolution of 1989, showing how the U.S. embassy in Prague, in collaboration with the U.S. National Security Council (NSC) and State Department, crafted U.S. policy. Drawing on recently available primary materials (including declassified U.S. telegrams, Czechoslovak archival documents, unpublished memoirs, and original interviews), this article highlights the role of the U.S. embassy during the period from August to November 1989, including how key officials, above all Ambassador Shirley Temple Black, analyzed political developments, assisted Czechoslovak dissidents, and pursued extensive engagement with the Communist government. The article provides the first scholarly, granular account of U.S. diplomacy in Czechoslovakia during the November 1989 upheavals and contributes to the historiography on U.S. foreign policy and the end of the Cold War.

Baghdad Twist

Baghdad Twist

Challenging normalcy through stardom: childhood celebrity, disability, and Patty Duke’s Helen Keller

ABSTRACT What is it about girl stars, from Shirley Temple to Jodie Foster, that intensely and ambivalently capture the cultural imagination? I argue that child stars, often described as transitioning into adulthood too quickly or staying too long in childhood, challenge damaging social norms of bodily and behavioural development in ways that are sympathetic to disability experience. I use disability studies’ theory of ‘crip time’ and Kathryn Bond Stockton’s notion of the political potential of children ‘growing sideways’ alongside the case study of Patty Duke to demonstrate this productive subversiveness. Duke’s star persona, centred on her portrayal of the young deaf, blind, and uncommunicative Helen Keller in William Gibson’s Broadway play and Arthur Penn’s subsequent film, reveals the parallel developmental non-normativity of disability and child stardom.Through contradictory primary and paratextual evidence surrounding The Miracle Worker and Duke’s stardom, the application of crip time to notions of childhood celebrity, and a contextual understanding of public discourse surrounding childhood during the 1960s, I find that Duke and her characterisation of Keller embody a rejection of conventional understandings of ‘growing up’. Duke’s ambivalent childhood celebrity fractures the constructed ideal of normal development, revealing possibilities for valuable experience beyond the pressures of ableist notions of linear growth.

Black Girlhood in The Bluest Eye

For many Black girls, the realization that the world was not designed for them to flourish mars their childhood. 
 My presentation discusses how society fails Black girls, and how Morrison’s fictional writing mirrors how unforgiving life is to real Black children. Throughout the novel, the narrator Claudia uses “magical thinking” to explain the world’s cruelty. This manifests when she plants marigolds, childishly hoping their flourishing will simultaneously save Pecola and her baby (Morrison). Claudia believes in magic because the reality is incomprehensible for a child: that ​the idealization of whiteness ingrained in society created ​a soil in which neither marigolds nor Pecola could thrive. Similarly, she naively ​dismembers ​her "Shirley Temple" doll ​to discover the source of the “magic” that whiteness casts over her world (Morrison). Her belief in magic is easier than accepting the world values white plastic faces over living blackness. 
 ​I hope to demonstrate that Morrison’s novel goes beyond fiction: it encapsulates children’s perspectives and how they mature. Children live in fiction, an imaginary world of their creation, and childhood is the moment before they realize the weight of society. For Claudia​, Pecola, and many Black girls, the heaviness of realizing their world will ostracize and hurt them is growing up, there is nothing magical about adulthood. For a novel from 1970, The Bluest Eye is ​still relevant ​because we continuously rob Black girls’ innocence. Morrison presents an unconventional depiction of childhood, and my presentation reaches above to discuss how fiction reflects the real ways society disrupts Black girlhood.

Luxurious cinemites and the great depression: labour, stardom and Stand-In (1937)

Unlike more celebrated Hollywood-on-Hollywood films, Walter Wanger’s neglected screwball comedy Stand-In (1937) emphasizes the centrality of labour to studio-era production. Besides climaxing with a highly unusual, if carefully negotiated spectacle of industrial action by Hollywood’s rank and file workers, the film departs further from other self-reflexive movies by defining stardom in relation to labour and gender and by focusing on the topical and contentious issues of star salaries and child stardom (via a highly topical parody of Shirley Temple). With the aid of a wide array of primary and secondary materials – including newspapers and magazines, the entertainment trade press, and documents of the Production Code Administration – as well as detailed textual scrutiny, this essay examines Stand-In’s depiction of Hollywood and labour in relation to the economic, industrial and social challenges the Great Depression posed to studio production. The article proposes that the film’s comic framework allows it to deliver an uncommonly upfront, if conflicted critique of the contemporary motion picture business.

Evaluation of adaptivity of herbal peony varieties, depending on ecological and biological conditions of Moscow region

The study, maintenance, and replenishment of the genetic collection of the herbaceous peony in the All-Russian Horticultural Institute for Breeding, Agrotechnology and Nursery is conducted since the 80s of the XX century. The article provides information on the evaluation of reproductive ability: high-productive varieties were revealed – Dawn Pink, Early Scout, Vostok, Yubilej Revolyutsii, Seraphim, Goldich, Ufimskie Zori, Pervaya Radost’, Gloirette, Marry Eddy Jones, Pobeda, Podmoskovnye Vechera, Old Lace, Agidel’, Tomas Waar, Nezhnyj, Martha Bulloch, Mihail Lomonosov, Parkovyj, Pfeiff er’s Red Triumph, Odile et al., their reproductive capacity is estimated of 8-10 points; resistant varieties to Botrytis paeonie Qud were identified – Mamino Serdechko, Varen’ka, Orlenok, El’brus, Moguchij, Polonez, Rossiya, Brat Moguchego, SHkol’nyj Val’s, Valentina Tereshkova, Parkovyj 1, Zhemchuzhina Urala, Zor’ka, Rhapsody, President Wilson, The Fawn, Moon Glow, Yellow King, Waikiki, Белый парус, Sinbad, Gene Wild; varieties strongly aff ected by Cronartium fl accidum (Alb. et Schw.) Wint.) were identified – Lunnaya Doroga, Tajfun, Parkovyj 2, Nahodka, Agidel’, Ufimskie Zori, Kuril’skie Ostrova, Shirley Temple, M-me Calot, M-me Claude Tain, Goldich. The analysis of weather conditions in the years of research is given. Varieties that are resistant to adverse conditions are identified, their significance is determined and in the future the possibility of propagation and use in landscaping, as well as preservation in collection stands. Directions for further study of the collection’s varieties are outlined. Keywords: peony herbaceous, collection, decorative qualities, weather conditions, adaptability

The Blue Eyes vs Untrue Ideas: A Postcolonial Critique of Pecola’s Persistence to Fit in the White American Society in The Bluest Eye

Set in Ohio, the north side of America, the tone in The Bluest Eye features post-colonial treatment to its central character, Pecola Breedlove. This paper discusses how she experiences a sense of being completely ruined after she is raped by her father, and her quest for the blue eyes meets merely untrue ideas. The plot, as described in the paper, provides a post-colonial background of two racial conflicts regarding the blackness, and the white beauty in America. This paper critically draws on the idea of physical whiteness as being the only American standard of beauty while Pecola’s physical ugliness draws on how black people get seriously marginalized for their blackness of their own bodies. The storyline progresses to show how Pecola‟s tragedy becomes the central theme regarding the issue of seeing, and of being seen. The paper presents a binary opposite through the portrayal of black Pecola on one side, and Mary Janes, or Shirley Temple on the other. Consequently, the conflicts meet hardly any positive solution. Pecola receives exactly the behavior that the black slaves were used to receive from the whites in the past. From the historical perspective, The United States experienced inequality between the whites, and the blacks at that time when Morrison wrote this novel. She saw that the black race got segregated from the whites in the case of superiority. Racial tension also influenced the children in the schools, where the black ones were ridiculed there. However, the acceptance of the fair skin, actually, tormented black people both psychologically, and left a scar on them like Pecola Breedlove experiences.

Free and Easy? A Defining History of the American Film Musical Genre by Sean Griffin (review)

Reviewed by: Free and Easy? A Defining History of the American Film Musical Genre by Sean Griffin Douglas Long Sean Griffin, Free and Easy? A Defining History of the American Film Musical Genre Hoboken, NJ.: Wiley Blackwell, 2018, 368 pages, ISBN 978-1-4051-9495-2 With his 2018 book Free and Easy? A Defining History of the American Film Musical Genre, Sean Griffin joins a long list of authors who have tackled the genre, from Rick Altman, whose 1987 text The American Film Musical is foundational, to Jeanine Basinger, whose The Movie Musical was published in November 2019. What separates Griffin’s book from the others is his central question: What constitutes a film musical? For decades people have routinely declared the musical dead and, as he discusses in his final chapter, it is especially relevant question in an era when we could debate whether online video productions and social media posts of amateur musical performances qualify. Griffin, who teaches a musical film genre class at Southern Methodist University, challenges the reader to consider more than the post-World War II norm of the integrated musical, in which characters sing to share their feelings with others (think “You Were Meant for Me” from Singin’ in the Rain, 1952) or with themselves (think “Over the Rainbow” from The Wizard of Oz, 1939). This norm continued through a half century ago, when the failure of most post-Sound of Music roadshow musicals (Star! and Paint Your Wagon, among others) contributed to the death knell of the studio system. Chapter 9, “The Sound of Money: Musicals in the 1960s,” chronicles this phenomenon. To help the reader consider the relative primacy of the integrated musical, Griffin provides a chronology of musical film, starting with the developing art forms and technologies that merged in the late 1920s. Minstrelsy and vaudeville coincided with operetta to form the theatrical musical of the 1920s, which included the landmark integrated musical Show Boat (1927). Simultaneously, cinema and the phonograph led to the advent of sound films, which Griffin presents as an age of experimentation. The book’s title comes from Free and Easy (1930), a Buster Keaton comedy with a couple of musical numbers, the kind of film at the center of Griffin’s examination: Is it a musical? Griffin suggests that the genre has room for many intersections of song and dance and film, but explains in the middle chapters of the book about how the studios, particularly MGM’s Freed Unit, limited viewers’ ideas about the genre. Griffin writes, “The central aim of this volume is to argue that there has been far too much emphasis on the comfort of the familiar structure of the integrated musical, and not enough celebration of liberation from that definition” [page 8]. Much of the book is told in a chronology that reflects the histories of both the cinema and the United States: the earliest years of film musicals featuring revues and a glut of backstage musicals; Busby Berkeley’s experiments with a freed camera and showgirl bodies; the Production Code (Mae West out, Shirley Temple in); Depression-era optimism (“Pick Yourself Up,” “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?”); the American Songbook composers’ work in film (Porter, the Gershwins, Berlin); the wartime flag wavers like Yankee Doodle Dandy and This Is the Army; and the Paramount Decision that marked the end of the major studios that served as movie factories for genres such as musicals. For a while in the 1950s and ‘60s, Broadway adaptations carried the day, but the massive success of The Sound of Music (1965) and others led producers to throw millions at the roadshow attractions, with their intermissions and entr’actes, which felt out of step with the Woodstock generation, and ever since then, production of filmed integrated musicals has been sporadic. Rather than leaving it that, Griffin takes the reader on a tour of how pop music continues to guide production of musicals - again, depending on your definition. This means that in addition to familiar titles like Jailhouse Rock (1957) and A Hard Day’s Night (1964), Griffin includes concert documentaries [End Page 92] (including 1970s’ Woodstock), as well as the MTV music...

When I was Little I Had Shirley Temple Curls; I Want to Write Something Political; Holding Hands with the Past; The They that Kill Us; Your Words Will be Repeated

Made by my mother every morningOnce I straighten my hairOnce! Years after hot comb burns on my earsIt was lank and stiffI realise I’d killed myselfMy image of myselfI longed for an AfroLet me be An...

Show Trial: Hollywood, HUAC, and the Birth of the Blacklist by Thomas Doherty (review)

Reviewed by: Show Trial: Hollywood, HUAC, and the Birth of the Blacklist by Thomas Doherty Justin Gautreau Thomas Doherty, Show Trial: Hollywood, HUAC, and the Birth of the Blacklist. New York: Columbia University Press, 2018. 424 pp. $29.95 hardcover. Reading Thomas Doherty's Show Trial is like time traveling to October 1947 with an expert film historian by your side. A prequel of sorts to his earlier book Cool War, Cool Medium (2003), Show Trial retraces the many steps that led to Congress's investigation of communist infiltration in Hollywood, only without "the lenses of left and right" that tend to frame other histories of HUAC (356). Not always satisfied with the official Congressional Record, for instance, Doherty turns to several contemporaneous sources, ranging from periodicals to studio correspondence, for a fuller understanding of events, in the process revealing just how "cinema-centric" the hearings could be (355). Show Trial's commitment to detail not only brings the spectacle to life but also retrieves the complexity of a period that has become too black and white in cultural memory. To preface his section on the hearings themselves, Doherty chronicles the extensive labor disputes of technicians and screenwriters in the 1930s, all of which unfolded in the context of the Popular Front movement. Given that the Front's most ardent members were communists, the battle between studio heads and screenwriters ultimately boiled down to a question of political alliances, a conflict that would lay the foundation for the 1947 hearings: "Reopening old wounds that never really healed, and exacting payback for grievances long nursed," Doherty explains, "the dueling testimony was about the political past as much as the political present" (14). Aside from inspiring labor disputes at the studios, the Popular Front also gave communists in Hollywood a stage to "project their vision" in the form of activist groups, most notably the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League (14). Enthusiastically backed by the stars, such publicity soon gained the attention of Congress in Washington, D.C., where Texas representative Martin Dies was busy monitoring political radicalism on domestic soil. In 1938, Dies launched the first official investigation of subversive activity in Hollywood, but the hearings soon lost steam after the committee accused nine-year-old Shirley Temple of endorsing communism. Still, as Show Trial's following chapters show, the Hitler-Stalin pact in 1939 would make the Communist Party in the United States all the more susceptible to federal persecution. The second part of Show Trial, "On Location in Washington," recounts the infamous J. Parnell Thomas committee hearings in detail, dedicating a section to each of the forty-one witnesses, friendly and unfriendly alike. Woven throughout this section is the fascinating rise and fall of the Committee for the First Amendment (CFA), a liberal group fronted by such stars as Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. Indeed, as its cover image suggests, Show Trial might be considered as much about the CFA's battles as the Hollywood Ten's. "[S]triv[ing] to straddle the space between HUAC and the Unfriendlies" (176), the CFA flew from Hollywood to Washington to protest the Thomas committee while vocally distancing themselves from communism. In the eyes of the press (and therefore the public), however, the fact that CFA members arrived just in time for the unfriendly testimony and not a day sooner made their un-American affiliation clear. Immediately after screenwriter John Howard Lawson's heated exchange with Thomas in the caucus room, members of the CFA found themselves between a rock and a hard place, unable to protest HUAC without being linked to the "obnoxious and disrespectful" communists (216). To make matters worse, the Hollywood Ten later credited the CFA with having supported their cause. Doherty writes, "In the public mind, the two groups were joined at the hip" (314). For the sake of [End Page 76] its members' careers, the CFA had little choice but to disband a few months after the trials. Bogart even told the press that he regretted the D.C. trip altogether, albeit through gritted teeth. The bleak fate of the Committee for the First Amendment reflected the binary mentality of the time, one that left no room for a...

Fantasies of Neglect: Imagining the Urban Child in American Film and Fiction by Pamela Robertson Wojcik

Reviewed by: Fantasies of Neglect: Imagining the Urban Child in American Film and Fiction by Pamela Robertson Wojcik Melissa Lenos (bio) Pamela Robertson Wojcik. Fantasies of Neglect: Imagining the Urban Child in American Film and Fiction. Rutgers UP, 2016. Pamela Robertson Wojcik’s latest book, Fantasies of Neglect: Imagining the Urban Child in American Film and Fiction, focuses on a collection of examples of urban children and the “fantasies of neglect” that inform the urban child archetype, as well as shifts in that representation throughout history. She samples texts across target audience ages, genres, and traditions of boys’ and girls’ stories. Although scholarship on representations of urban children exist, most have been more general explorations of filmic children, such as Childhood and Cinema by Vicky Levbeau (2008) and Karen Lury’s The Child in Film (2010), or explored childhood through the lens of motherhood, as in Lucy Fischer’s Cinematernity (1996). Texts focusing on childhood in literature often divide into the era-specific, such as Marah Gubar’s Artful Dodgers (2009) and Lara Saguisag’s more recent Incorrigibles and Innocents (2018), which examines childhood as depicted in nineteenth- and twentieth-century comic strips. Wojcik’s book achieves a rare bridge; it is useful for scholars of literature, film, children’s studies, and urban studies, and it maneuvers a coherent intersection between the fields. In addressing a variety of urban spaces, Wojcik also explores socioeconomic class: the characters examined include Harriet M. Welsch (of Harriet the Spy), who lives in luxury, and the poverty-bound Dead End Kids and urban black boys of “racial impasse” films. Wojcik also notes that urban child narratives—particularly those of girls—often suggest a dramatic class mobility that mirrors the child’s sense of freedom of movement within the city. Thus, according to Wojcik, Shirley Temple’s characters frequently transitioned between wealth and poverty (sometimes multiple times within the same narrative), and Little Orphan Annie’s comic strip was sustained through the unreliability of Daddy Warbucks, who would “vanish repeatedly, ‘re-orphaning’ Annie over and over again” (87). These initially disparate-seeming areas of focus converge in Wojcik’s overarching purpose: an historical examination of the figure of the “urban child” and the transformation of the trope as a reflection of shifting American ideals in parenting and children’s texts. Fantasies of Neglect is divided into thematic chapters. Representations of boys are particularly addressed through Universal Studio’s “Dead End Kids” of the 1930s and 1940s, while the girls include Shirley Temple, Jane Withers, and Little Orphan Annie. Wojcik bypasses a focus on these child stars themselves, noting that much of what has been previously written on the topic explores the labor of child actors, stage parents, or autobiographical nature of some directors’ child-focused texts, specifying that she is less interested in the “labor of the child star herself” and more in how the “filmic representations of [End Page 323] children engage issues of labor and economics” (39). A chapter on the class-focused portrayals of “neglect” is followed by an examination of consistently problematic portrayals of black urban boys. Wojcik ends with reflections on neglect and failure, particularly in the shift in attitudes on children’s freedom and the often-imagined dangers that have led to contemporary “helicopter parenting.” Throughout the book, Wojcik includes examples from film and literature, primarily American texts. Wojcik’s final, most fascinating (and potentially provocative) chapter digs further into the concept of helicopter parenting and the way much of American parenting culture has shifted from “a model of largely benign neglect to one of total supervision” (171). The chapter provides a gloss of the birth of “stranger danger” culture in the late 1970s and early 80s following several high-profile child abductions and “Satanic Panic” hysteria. Aside from intensifying the mommy wars, Wojcik notes that this cultural shift also generated a noted change in representations of the urban child, highlighting the example of Jonathan Safran Foer’s 2005 Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (and the 2011 Stephen Daldry film adaptation) and the foregrounding of our cultural transition through the protagonist Oskar. Although Wojcik demonstrates that earlier urban boys’ stories tended to focus on groups while urban girls were solitary...

Hitler and Film: The Führer's Hidden Passion by Bill Niven

Reviewed by: Hitler and Film: The Führer's Hidden Passion by Bill Niven Jan-Christopher Horak (bio) Hitler and Film: The Führer's Hidden Passion By Bill Niven. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2018. 295 pp. Given the large number of books published on the Nazi film industry in general and on Adolf Hitler in particular, I was skeptical initially that Bill Niven's book, Hitler and Film, would offer anything more than a rehash of information available elsewhere, even if scattered. However, Niven's book does present new research, making it worthwhile reading for specialists, even if some chapters are only of interest to general readers with no prior knowledge of the subject. Niven begins by discussing Hitler's film-viewing habits at his mountain retreat at the Berghof and also in Berlin's Reich Chancellery. It is well known in academic circles that Hitler, like Stalin, was an incurable movie buff, but just what he saw has been less clear, as was the fact that Hitler apparently watched movies obsessively every night from the mid-1930s to the start of the war. He had a preference for films with rich visuals and a bias against dialogue-heavy films, privileging the newest German productions, but also was a big fan of Laurel and Hardy. Indeed, Hitler viewed many foreign films that were banned in the German Reich, including American films, such as Shirley Temple's Captain January (1936) and Greta Garbo's Camille (1936), the latter despite its Jewish director, George Cukor. Hitler was apparently also sometimes involved in the banning of a film or in lifting a ban. Thus, Hitler initially banned a couple of anti-Communist propaganda films, White Slaves (1937) and Strong Hearts (1937), until the filmmakers had made changes, making the works even more stringently anti-Communist. When Paramount asked Hitler to lift a ban on The Jungle Princess (1936), the Film Censorship Office released the film in [End Page 205] March 1938, despite its director, Wilhelm Thiele, being a German-Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany (37). At other times, Hitler advocated for the production of specific propaganda films, even though he personally preferred mindless entertainment. Thus, Hitler got involved in the production of a documentary short about euthanasia, Victims of the Past (1937), arguing that its repellent images would convince Germans of the need for such a policy. He was also directly involved in the production of a Karl Ritter film about the Spanish Civil War, In Battle Versus the World Enemy: German Volunteers in Spain (1939), but it was of course his sponsoring of Leni Riefenstahl and her Nazi Party Rally films that demonstrate most clearly Hitler's propagandistic agenda to produce films of high artistic quality and still convey ideology, as Niven notes: "Politics, then, must find expression in culture, and culture must be imbued with politics; the two were intertwined, for Hitler, in a reciprocal relationship" (59). As Niven's fifth chapter indicates, Adolf Hitler was ubiquitous in the German newsreels, at times attending premieres of German films he wished to support, including Dawn (1933), a film about World War I U-boats, and Hitler Youth Quex (1933), about a Hitler Youth who becomes a martyr for the cause. But Hitler's appearance in the newsreels was specifically designed to create the cult of personality that was Hitler. An Ufa short, Our Führer (1934), was released specifically for the German "elections" in August 1934, which formally ratified the unification of chancellor and president in Adolf Hitler. The weekly newsreels thereafter took pains to portray Hitler as a man of the people, always in attendance at major holidays and events, and a man of peace who was reluctantly forced to wage war against enemy aggressors, even as he planned invasions behind the scenes. The high point of Hitler's visibility was the period of Nazi victories from September 1940 to the defeat of France in 1940. Thereafter Hitler's image became ever scarcer, as the war took its toll on his physical appearance. As Niven notes, "Because many Germans had abandoned themselves to Hitler, when he abandoned them by not showing himself, some of them, at least...

This War Ain’t Over: Fighting the Civil War in New Deal America by Nina Silber

Reviewed by: This War Ain’t Over: Fighting the Civil War in New Deal America by Nina Silber Thomas Aiello This War Ain’t Over: Fighting the Civil War in New Deal America. By Nina Silber. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018. Pp. xvi, 232. $32.95, ISBN 978-1-4696-4654-1.) An hour from my university sits the Jefferson Davis Memorial State Historic Site, made a state park during the Depression-era administration of Georgia governor Eugene Talmadge. The monument on the grounds tells less about the Confederacy’s demise and more about the Talmadge administration’s use of the Civil War. According to the historical marker there, Confederate president Jefferson Davis was “the revered leader of the Lost Cause,” and when he was captured at this spot, “his hopes for a new nation, in which each state would exercise without interference its cherished ‘Constitutional rights,’ [were] forever dead.” Nina Silber’s new book, This War Ain’t Over: Fighting the Civil War in New Deal America, does a masterful job of describing the political and cultural uses of the Civil War in the 1930s and 1940s by southern white bigots like Talmadge and by a variety of national interest groups. Georgia, for example, was the home of Margaret Mitchell and the setting of the film Gone With the Wind (1939), which became a theater for the negotiation of “the present-day politics of white supremacy” (p. 5). Such politics were evident across the South and across the [End Page 952] country, but were rivaled by several other agendas with an interest in the Civil War’s legacy in the early twentieth century. Advocates of the New Deal and the officials who helped craft its policies, for example, emphasized the memory of Abraham Lincoln to justify the program’s heavy federal hand, but they denuded Lincoln of the racial consequences of emancipation, realizing that they would only stoke demands for African American civil rights and alienate much of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Democratic base—those same white southerners who flocked to see Gone With the Wind and the Jefferson Davis capture site. But Silber’s analysis goes further. Because of the economic devastation that affected so many white people, politicians and cultural critics began appropriating antebellum slavery to equate it with the suffering of interwar whites. Among those making the case were white American communists and labor activists, who “spoke the language of bondage during the Depression years”—wage slavery or “white” slavery—to indict a broken economic system (p. 72). Precisely because of the real historical resonance of the racial consequences of the Civil War, however, and in response to the rhetorical appropriation of slavery, emphasis on Lincoln and the Civil War during the time of both Jim Crow and rampant economic devastation was also a stakes game for the black leaders of the burgeoning civil rights effort. For them, Lincoln and radical figures like John Brown created a legacy that civil rights advocates of the 1930s inherited and continued. And that inheritance was undeniably racial. The NAACP was beginning its long fight for desegregated schools and stumping for a federal antilynching law, and both the Civil War and Reconstruction served as useful analogues for the group’s actions. Silber moves seamlessly from political memory to cultural memory, and the cultural memory she discusses spans a wide gamut of film and literature: from D. W. Griffith’s Abraham Lincoln (1930) to John Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln (1939); and from Mervyn LeRoy’s I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932) to Shirley Temple’s The Littlest Rebel (1935). Silber covers the poetry of Carl Sandburg and the photography of Dorothea Lange, all in an effort to track a history of memory that was itself an overtly contested space. The nuanced portrait moves deftly between race and class issues, political screeds and bestselling novels, pinpointing the lived memory of the Civil War for a variety of interwar and World War II–era groups while simultaneously tracking the evolution of those images over the course of the 1930s and 1940s. This War Ain’t Over is a necessary addition to the historiographies of both the...

Rewriting and Re-Whiting The Little Colonel: Racial Anxieties, Tomboyism, and Lloyd Sherman

Rewriting and Re-Whiting The Little Colonel:Racial Anxieties, Tomboyism, and Lloyd Sherman Dawn Sardella-Ayres (bio) The Little Colonel books, Annie Fellows Johnston's popular series for children, were published in America between 1895 and 1912. The bestselling books feature Lloyd Sherman, the tomboyish heroine who is nicknamed the "Little Colonel" for her imperious ways and hot temper, like her Confederate colonel grandfather. The series originated with The Little Colonel in 1895, intended at first as a singular story, but soon book followed book almost annually due to public demand. Issued in multiple languages and read worldwide, their popularity was capitalized upon with merchandise, including games, paper dolls, picture postcards, and diaries.1 When Johnston published her autobiography, The Land of the Little Colonel, in 1929, she had a reputation as her generation's "best beloved story-teller" (ix), the natural successor to Louisa May Alcott. In 1935, a highly successful film adaptation starred Shirley Temple in the titular role, and broke boundaries with its first interracial dance scene between Temple and Bill "Bojangles" Robinson. But by this time, Johnston's books were already diminishing in popularity, and within two generations they had all but disappeared from library shelves and schools. There has been very little critical discussion of them subsequently. The Little Colonel series was produced in a time of radical social change, and was written and published when Reconstruction in the American South was giving way to Jim Crow laws, enforcing racial segregation. This coincided with a number of pro-South movements which endeavored to preserve the culture of the antebellum Southern plantation as a positive element of American history. With portrayals of life in a small Kentucky town (fictionalized as "Lloydsboro"),2 Johnston's series can function as "Lost Cause of the Confederacy" literature, promoting ideology that centered the South as a site of true civilization and a kind of American nobility.3 I argue that Johnston's books have much to communicate about the way American girlhood was portrayed at the time and in that place. By examining the collective cultural inheritance of the first Little Colonel book, and by exploring the complicated racial and class anxieties it communicates in the context of white privileged perspectives about [End Page 79] girlhood and national identity, it is possible to read Lloyd's behavior as negotiation of those racial and gendered circumstances. I interrogate Lloyd Sherman as a hybrid American girl who ostensibly consolidates the best of North and South in one traditional literary "Beautiful Child,"4 examining her social power, boundary transgressions, and agency. However, when she is contextualized within a framework of gender, class, and racial performativity, Lloyd actually reveals particular American and Southern anxieties. By considering issues of gender through hybridity, transgression, performance, and constructed race, Lloyd's function as heroine in the first book also reveals her as an object of her grandfather's patriarchal reclaiming. Literary Heritage and Contexts The plot of the first Little Colonel book centers on how a bitter Kentucky colonel is finally reconciled with his daughter, Elizabeth, and her Yankee husband, Jack, through the actions of his five-year-old granddaughter, Lloyd. Although Jack Sherman is "a splendid fellow, and enormously wealthy," Old Colonel Lloyd forbade Elizabeth from marrying Jack because "he was a Northerner. That was enough for the old Colonel," who "hates Yankees like poison" (20). The couple eloped to New York, and continued to live there for the first five years of their daughter Lloyd's life. But bad investments and a bank failure necessitated their move to Lloydsboro, while Jack goes West to "make more" money (21), the point where the novel begins. Once in Lloydsboro, Lloyd disobeys her mother and her mammy, Mom Beck, to sneak to her grandfather's house, where the Old Colonel catches the child eating up all of the strawberries in his garden. The Old Colonel is shocked at Lloyd's disheveled appearance and lack of propriety, and yet is captivated by her winsomeness, even though he doesn't initially recognize her as his own granddaughter, his kin. The Colonel's extreme hatred of Northerners, especially the Yankee, Jack Sherman,5 drives The Little Colonel's main conflict. From...

‘Call her moonchild’: Christina Ricci’s enduring embodiment of impure youth and whiteness

ABSTRACTWith a focus on how Christina Ricci performs the ‘bad girl’ body, one that renegotiates idealised forms of whiteness and ventures into performances of ‘white trash’, this article demonstrates how the actress’s evolution from child to adult star was smoothed by a youthful physicality in adulthood, and a consistent performance of bodily taboos in both periods. By examining Ricci’s physical presentation and associations with transgressive girlhood across a range of media, I argue that her persona deconstructs notions of female white purity by portraying childlike innocence alongside adult knowingness and sexuality. In considering how Ricci’s distinct physicality relates to that of Shirley Temple, Ricci’s body is revealed to playfully subvert idealised representations of the female child and childlike women. Ricci is shown to have made a career out of playing extreme variations of the ‘dirty little white girl’, whose ‘dirtiness’ aligns her with various kinds of ‘Other’ but who is as likely to pose her own threat to others as to need saving. As such, and in an extension of a term used to describe one of her characters, Ricci is conceived of as a ‘moonchild’; a figure whose external whiteness depends on physical and behavioural darkness for it effect.

Microbes don’t stand a chance against monotreme milk, and fluorescent beaks necessitate seabird shades

Got monotreme milk? Platypuses easily win the title of weirdest mammal. These crazy-looking critters have the ability to shoot deadly venom from their feet, and they lay eggs rather than give birth to live young. So it should come as no surprise to learn that their milk is unusual too and may present a new avenue for combating antibiotic resistance. Australian scientist Janet Newman and colleagues at the Commonwealth Scientific & Industrial Research Organisation and Deakin University identified monotreme lactation protein (MLP), which is expressed only in monotreme milk, as having antibacterial activity against Staphylococcus aureus and Enterococcus faecalis—the respective causes of staph and urinary tract infections (Acta Crystallogr., Sect. F: Struct. Biol. Cryst. Commun. 2018, DOI: 10.1107/s2053230x17017708). MLP has a novel, tightly coiled subunit of α helices in its structure, which the team refers to as the “Shirley Temple fold,” group leader Tom Peat tells Newscripts. Monotremes like the

Docile Child and Pedophilic Sentimentality: Sexual Implications in Shirley Temple’s Movies

본 논문은 20세기 초에 활동한 미국 아동 여성 배우 셜리 템플의 섹슈얼리티 문제를 다룬다. 특히 아동 여성의 섹슈얼리티가 감성적인 형태로 은폐되는 방식, 이른바 “감 성적 섹슈얼리티”의 실체에 집중한다. 셜리 템플의 영화 속에 내제된 소아성애적 시선 들은 대공황 시기에 두드러졌던 성적 환상, 즉 유순한 여성에 대한 남성적 욕망을 자극하는 것이었는데, 이것은 대공황을 겪으며 드러난 가부장적 실패를 여성 신체의 전유를 통해 치유하려던 20세기 초기 미국 영화계의 노력의 일환이었다. 이를 이해하기 위해서는 실패한 백인 남성의 욕망을 만족시키며 여성에게 부과된 사회적, 문화적 제약들을 자연스럽게 내면화하도록 강요한 시대적 맥락, 다시 말해 남성의 가부장적 여성 소유권을 재확인하고 자본주의적 가족 이념을 미성숙한 여성의 신체를 통해 재생 산하려한 20세기 초반 미국의 사회문화적 구조 속으로 셜리 템플의 섹슈얼리티를 위치시킬 필요가 있다. 또한 이 영화들은 미국 영화산업의 영화제작규정이 제정되어 성적 장면들의 묘사를 제한하기 시작한 시기에 개봉되었던 만큼, 백인남성의 도착적 욕망을 가족 드라마 장르의 형식을 이용하여 친숙한 형태로 변형시켜 그려낸다. 결국 셜리 템플의 영화들은 여성을 억압함으로써 정신적 탈출구를 마련하고자 했던 실패한 가부장제의 집단 무의식이 아동의 섹슈얼리티를 통해 복잡하게 구조화되고 재현되던 방식을 보여주는 것이다.This essay explores the “sentimental sexuality” of the child movie star Shirley Temple. The pedophilic child fetishism implicit in her movies, which stimulated a male fantasy of an obedient female during the Great Depression, was an outcome of a cultural dynamic where the U.S. film industry attempted to find a way to relive the patriarchal failure of the era in a female body. Assuring the male ownership of a female body, this essay argues, Shirley Temple’s sentimental sexuality satisfies a paternal white gaze and, more importantly, “functions both to expose the constraints and limitations that the capitalistic unclear family imposes on women and, at the same time, to ‘educate’ women to accept those constraints as ‘natural,’ inevitable-as ‘given’” (Kaplan 124). Released by the time the Production Code Administration began prohibiting sexually suggestive scenes, Shirley Temple’s movies use family drama as a basic platform to stabilize the potential perversity of a white adult male desire. Such a construction of female child images promised the emotional stability of the nation under the Great Depression, while simultaneously fulfilling a patriarchal fantasy that identified female sexuality with child immaturity.

Our Gang: A Racial History of “The Little Rascals.”

Our Gang: A Racial History of “The Little Rascals.”

Fantasies of Neglect: Imagining the Urban Child in American Film and Fiction by Pamela Robertson Wojcik

Reviewed by: Fantasies of Neglect: Imagining the Urban Child in American Film and Fiction by Pamela Robertson Wojcik Dewar MacLeod Fantasies of Neglect: Imagining the Urban Child in American Film and Fiction. By Pamela Robertson Wojcik. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2016. x + 256 pp. Cloth $90, paper $27.95. Fantasies of Neglect explores the shifting mythologies of childhood through film and literature in the twentieth century. Pamela Wojcik places the urban imaginary alongside the traditional rural "cult of rusticity" that frames much of children's literature. The more modern urban myths similarly evoke images of nostalgia for a more innocent and free time. The images of urban childhood she explores depend upon dual (and often contradictory) fantasies of neglect (usually by the mother) and freedom (especially special mobility) that derives from neglect. Drawing upon a wide range of scholars from history, literature, film studies, and critical theory, Wojcik situates her valuable work in a deep dialogue with critics and advocates for children with the specific goal "to recover a different way of imagining kids in the city" (171). Wojcik examines how the texts serve to negotiate the anxieties of a given era, giving expression to contradictory discourses. During the Great Depression, films starring the Dead End Kids depicted children in the city that was both the dangerous terrain of social problems and a site for freedom, mobility, and community that was not available within the disintegrated family. While the movies often addressed the specific conditions of urban life in the Depression, they also spoke to the larger contradictions of modernity, balancing "social miserabilism" with "a sense of mobility, spatial freedom, and play" (40). One of the strongest sections of the book is the chapter on "Shirley Temple as Streetwalker," where the author depicts the child star's city films as offering a benign urban vision for the powerful and liberated "new girl" who can approach men in the street, go off alone with them, and end up reforming and rehabilitating these men (62–69). While Temple was in many ways an exceptional (and unusual) actress and character, Wojcik considers her "within potentially contradictory discourses about urban girlhood in the period related to sexuality and risk, on the one hand, and girls' mobility and freedom, on the other" (69). Whereas traditional myths of children invoke the city as a danger to their inborn purity, Temple's innocence depends upon her knowingness. From the perspective of the twenty-first century (and even to some critics at the time), Temple's encounters with men in the city cannot but seem disquieting, even creepy. Wojcik demonstrates how they navigate modern crises of both [End Page 464] femininity and masculinity through the agency of a girl. Similarly, Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz reinforces the "potent and prevailing fantasy of the urban girl as mobile, free, and powerful, an adventurer rather than a victim" (99). Midcentury films and books shifted the perspective from the social causes of neglect to "individual personality and psychological well-being" (101). Heavily influenced by Erik Erikson's stages of development, the postwar discourse placed the impossible burden on mothers to do neither too much nor too little, lest they damage the child's psyche. The author astutely examines The Champ (comparing the 1931 and 1979 films), Mary Poppins (book and movie), Kramer vs. Kramer, Little Fugitive, and Harriet the Spy, demonstrating how "children's texts are generally double-voiced, speaking both a child's perspective and an adult's at the same time" (137). However, the choice of texts feels forced and not fully coherent, and the chapter is a bit too diffuse, as the city comes in and out of focus. In the chapter on black urban boyhood, the author shows how the fantasy of neglect in this case "locates the problems of the black community within the black community itself, as a self-perpetuating cycle of misery caused by weak family structures and bad parenting" (145). Wojcik offers fascinating analyses of films that complicate and challenge the mainstream discourse. The texts, produced largely within the African American community, present "archives of unhappiness" that articulate anger but offer little hope. The Planet of Junior Brown, however, counters the...

British Children's Cinema: From The Thief of Bagdad to Wallace and Gromit by Noel Brown

Reviewed by: British Children's Cinema: From The Thief of Bagdad to Wallace and Gromit by Noel Brown Kathy Merlock Jackson (bio) British Children's Cinema: From The Thief of Bagdad to Wallace and Gromit. By Noel Brown. London: Tauris, 2017. In the 1968 film version of Oliver!, the musical adaptation of Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist, blond, angelic child actor Mark Lester walks forlornly through the orphanage dining hall, timidly holds out his empty gruel bowl, and says softly to Mr. Bumble, "Please, sir. I want some more." This memorable Dickensian image of childhood innocence graces the cover of Noel Brown's British Children's Cinema. Although Hollywood eclipses London in its production of movies for and about children, Brown reminds readers that Oliver! is but one of Britain's many important contributions. A professor of film at Liverpool Hope University, he presents his most recent book as the third in a trilogy, following The Hollywood Family Film: A History, from Shirley Temple to Harry Potter and (with Bruce Babington) Family Films in Global Cinema: The World Beyond Disney. Brown argues that "children's films and family films deal with serious meanings and constitute an important and unique form of cultural expression" (3). Taking a combined chronological and thematic approach, he looks at Britain's output of live-action and animated family and youth films for the twelve-and-under audience, beginning in the silent era and continuing into the twenty-first century, highlighting key entertainers, trends, and studios. Brown categorizes his book as a cultural [End Page 490] history that "explores the complex, ever-changing relationship between children's cinema and British culture and society" (2). He regards children's films as a genre, "a body of films with their own internal structures and externally-imposed significations" (5). Focusing on genre rather than audience, he does close textual readings and explores common themes. Brown demonstrates deep respect for his subject matter. Acknowledging that both British films and children's films have been marginalized, he gives them their due by showing how they function as important reflectors of industry and culture. The book begins with a discussion of British film in the silent era, when children went to see movies but movies were not made expressly for them. Brown notes that no references to "children's film" appear in periodicals of the time, although many films, especially those based on literary classics such as Oliver Twist (1912) and David Copperfield (1913), were suitable for young viewers. Film exhibitors attracted children with cheap tickets and matinee showings, building a loyal audience. Almost immediately, though, authorities raised concerns about children skipping school to go to the movies and watching content not appropriate for them. The British Board of Film Censors was established in 1912 and developed a classification system that barred youth from content deemed too adult. The arrival of the talkies, with their added threat of unsuitable language, caused further alarm. Prior to 1935, Brown contends, Britain had no children's cinema, as youths watched family films and Hollywood fare, but that changed with the release of Emil and the Detectives (1935), the first British film made especially for the child audience and with a cast mostly of children. Directed by Milton Rosner, it was simply a B-movie remake of a German film and quickly fell into obscurity, but it did mark the beginning of a popular subgenre of British children's adventure films that lasted until 1960 and included titles such as Elephant Boy (1937), The Thief of Bagdad (1940), Hue and Cry (1947), and Innocent Sinners (1958). Sabu, the Indian boy who played the role of "child as outsider" in Elephant Boy, became Britain's first child star. Brown points out that thematically, films in this cycle emphasize "children's agency and autonomy . . . with adults typically relegated to the background; however, moral subtexts and overtones are always present" (13). Except for some family fare and comedies featuring star performers such as George Formby, Will Hay, or Arthur Lacan, British children's movies in the 1930s and '40s were rare. Children enjoyed British slapstick with a populist bent and self-parody but were also attracted to Hollywood fare...