Young Folks Research Articles

Reviewed by: The Children's Ghost Story in America by Sean Ferrier-Watson Anne W. Anderson (bio) Sean Ferrier-Watson. The Children's Ghost Story in America. McFarland, 2017. Sean Ferrier-Watson's The Children's Ghost Story in America opens a scholarly conversation about the ways in which ghosts have, over time, taken particular shapes in children's literature published in the United States. Ghost stories included in Ferrier-Watson's discussion involve the spirit of a dead person returning to the land of the living, as well as stories in which only the perception of a ghost—"a mock ghost story" (11)—is featured. Not included are stories featuring "reanimated corpses" (10), such as those about zombies or vampires, as Ferrier-Watson focuses on "qualities of the ghost that appear to transcend traditions, specifically those qualities that distinguish the ghost from some of its more gruesome doppelgangers" (11). Within these parameters, Ferrier-Watson traces the development of the ghost story in North American English-language children's literature from its early appearances in nineteenth-century periodicals, such as The Youth's Companion and St. Nicholas: An Illustrated Magazine for Young Folks, to its twenty-first century new-media manifestations termed creepypastas. Ferrier-Watson identifies three types of ghostly constructions in texts for young readers—as mock ghosts with rational explanations, as supernatural beings with otherworldly origins but little agency, and as transmediated and transnarrative creatures that take on increasingly horrific lives of their own—and he explores the sociocultural implications of such constructions. First, however, he steps back and describes some of the conditions that affected the transmission of ghost stories prior to the nineteenth century. [End Page 378] The English Reformation, coinciding with developments in printing, both disrupted and transformed English language ghost stories in general. In the introduction, Ferrier-Watson discusses how Protestant skepticism over the Catholic Church's teachings of the supernatural, as well as over the church's motives for perpetuating such teachings, led to a disdain for ghost stories. At the same time, folkloric ghost stories were moving from the fluidity of the oral tradition to being preserved in print, at least for adults. In the seventeenth century, Ferrier-Watson notes, John Locke "argued that children should be sheltered from stories of spirits and goblins" (14), an argument that may have influenced John Newbery and other early publishers in their choices of what material was appropriate for children and what was not. This double-standard resulted in the conspicuous absence of ghosts in stories published for children through the first half of the nineteenth century, notwithstanding the increasing popularity of ghost stories published for adults, most notably Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, published in 1843. When ghost stories for children appeared, beginning in the second half of the nineteenth century, they were mock ghost stories in which what appeared to be a ghost was quickly revealed as having a rational explanation. Characters who believed in the supernatural were deemed silly and gullible. Ferrier-Watson not only discusses a number of such stories in his first chapter, but he also includes, in the back matter, an extensive bibliography of mock ghost stories to encourage further research. While adults may have intended mock ghost stories to inoculate children against superstition, Ferrier-Watson suggests they provided American children with "a healthy sense of the uncanny" (40) and that they revealed various types of ghosting—making people invisible or relegating them to the shadows—that occurred among people of different classes and races. In chapter 2, Ferrier-Watson considers the ways in which mock ghost stories featuring girls—many of which were written by female authors—"became active locations for social and political reform, which very possibly influenced a new generation of women" (80). Mock ghost stories continued to be published through the first half of the twentieth century and still can be found today, but wars, technological developments, and other societal changes in the first decades of the twentieth century presaged a change in the kind of ghost stories written for children. In chapter 3, for example, Ferrier-Watson explains that, with the rise of modernism, adults began to believe children should be taught to confront...

Reflections on Pacific Northwest Regionalism on an Edge of Empire1 Katrine Barber (bio) “The Pacific Northwest is simply this,” New York Times journalist Timothy Egan wrote in 1990, “wherever the salmon can get to.”2 Many agreed with him (although others were quick to point out that the range of salmon is extensive, even transnational). Regional icons like Douglas fir trees and salmon evoked the “geographical isolation and natural wealth” that historian Bill Lang identified as Pacific Northwest characteristics.3 More importantly, their anadromous life cycle meant they symbolized migration and indigeniety both, central and often opposing traits of Pacific Northwest regional identity. Salmon rely on balanced bioregions through which they journey thousands of miles–from the cool, rushing waters that course through the forest canopy to the mouth of the Columbia River, and into the Pacific Ocean, after which they return to their natal streambeds to spawn. They travel great distances and yet are deeply rooted to home. This short essay addresses three divergent forms of Pacific Northwest regionalism and argues that each is partial and political. Regionalism tied to iconographic nature, such as in Egan’s definition, linked the vitality of the region to its resources, problematically as those resources waned. Regionalism animated by settler attachment to (and cooptation of) Indigenous material culture simultaneously froze Indian cultures in a seemingly authentic past and erased contemporary Native peoples. Alternatively, a syncretic sense of place that intertwines settler colonialism and Indigenous regionalisms while recognizing asymmetrical power relations can reintroduce Indigenous land and resource claims back into narratives of place, recentering the contests for lands that script the very debates over the meaning of the far west. While regional definitions reflect their geographic and temporally [End Page 93] setting—they are supposed to be distinctive, after all—they are all arguments about place and people. Regionalism tied to iconographic nature was animated by crisis. In the 1990s and early 2000s, regionalists defined the Pacific Northwest by its natural elements—fish, water, trees, mountains—at a time when all seemed threatened. Salmon runs were in steep decline while the fishing industry was collapsing, an owl (to be reductionist) threatened to permanently interrupt an economy reliant on timber harvests, and historian Richard White questioned the “nature” of the region’s largest river in his important book, The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River (1995). Out of the economic and environmental crises of the period, northwesterners defined themselves by what they feared they might lose, the natural beauty and wealth that seemingly made their place distinctive. In Egan’s words, these resources were a “bond to a better world” that was fast receding.4 Timothy Egan’s definition of the region bespoke its possible extinction: if salmon disappeared, so would the Northwest. Like Frederick Jackson Turner in his seminal address to the American Historical Association, The Significance of the Frontier in American History, Egan proposed a regional definition on the cusp of change. Turner’s westward line of delineation between savagery and civilization had ceased to exist when he argued that the Frontier experience was the basis for American exceptionalism in 1893. Nearly one hundred years later, Egan shared Turner’s nostalgia for the place that was, as well as anxiety over the place that was becoming. The very idea of its death reversed how many viewed the region in the twentieth century. Less than fifty years before Egan’s book, geographers and historians described the Northwest as emergent, untapped, full of promise, an infant among the nation’s sections. “It is a region of young folk,” declared the editors of Economic Geography in 1942, “of young industry, of young burning ambition.”5 Likeminded historians spooled out optimistic assessments of the region and its distinctiveness. They opposed the views of people like renowned pioneer Jesse Applegate who thought the region “added no new fact to human knowledge—has produced no high illustration of any fact already known, has produced no warrior, scholar in any branch of human knowledge, in fact not a single name that for any merit or acts of its possessor deserves to live in the memory of mankind.”6 Years later, H. L. Davis, the region’s first...

Young Folks Research Articles

Articles published on Young Folks

Socioeconomic impacts of drug and substance abuse on secondary school students in Nigeria from 1980 to 2023: A narrative review of the extent of published studies

Editor, Reader, and Value for Money in Young Folks

“Lucky Enough”: The Music and Stories That Make Vaughan's Lounge, New Orleans, Louisiana, United States

Review: Digital Black Feminism, by Catherine Knight Steele

YOUTH’S CONSUMPTION PATTERN OF SOCIAL NETWORKING PLATFORMS

Staying with the White Trouble of Recent Feminist Westerns

APA Member Speaks on Pediatric MH Crisis in Congressional Briefing

Material Romance: Kidnapped In and Out of Young Folks Paper

Value Addition Through Higher Education: With Special Reference To Skill Development In North East India

The effectiveness of current informative material in improving awareness and opinion of undergraduate students towards organ donation: a comparative, randomized survey study

Yorùbá Sexual Related Symbo-Figurative Expressions: A Metaphorical Description

Abusing Youth: Theologically Understanding Youth Through Misunderstanding Disability

(Not Enough) Labor Day

“The young folks [want] to go in and see the Indians”

Why Muscles Look and Act the Way They Do: Uncovering the Nexus Among Form, Function, Behavior, and Evolution.

The Sociology of Childhood and Youth in Canada

The Children's Ghost Story in America by Sean Ferrier-Watson

Reflections on Pacific Northwest Regionalism on an Edge of Empire

Youth: Our New Cultural Theorists

The Century of the Child

Lead the way for us

Editage

Paperpal

R Discovery

Mind the Graph

Young Folks Research Articles

Articles published on Young Folks

Socioeconomic impacts of drug and substance abuse on secondary school students in Nigeria from 1980 to 2023: A narrative review of the extent of published studies

Editor, Reader, and Value for Money in Young Folks

“Lucky Enough”: The Music and Stories That Make Vaughan's Lounge, New Orleans, Louisiana, United States

Review: Digital Black Feminism, by Catherine Knight Steele

YOUTH’S CONSUMPTION PATTERN OF SOCIAL NETWORKING PLATFORMS

Staying with the White Trouble of Recent Feminist Westerns

APA Member Speaks on Pediatric MH Crisis in Congressional Briefing

Material Romance: Kidnapped In and Out of Young Folks Paper

Value Addition Through Higher Education: With Special Reference To Skill Development In North East India

The effectiveness of current informative material in improving awareness and opinion of undergraduate students towards organ donation: a comparative, randomized survey study

Yorùbá Sexual Related Symbo-Figurative Expressions: A Metaphorical Description

Abusing Youth: Theologically Understanding Youth Through Misunderstanding Disability

(Not Enough) Labor Day

“The young folks [want] to go in and see the Indians”

Why Muscles Look and Act the Way They Do: Uncovering the Nexus Among Form, Function, Behavior, and Evolution.

The Sociology of Childhood and Youth in Canada

The Children's Ghost Story in America by Sean Ferrier-Watson

Reflections on Pacific Northwest Regionalism on an Edge of Empire

Youth: Our New Cultural Theorists

The Century of the Child