/pdf/assessment-sensitivity-relative-truth-and-its-applications-a5z5l9llis.pdf

Assessment Sensitivity: Relative Truth and its Applications

This historiographical article addresses the Midwest as a cultural geography of colonial amnesia, explores the relationship between the Midwest and the field of U.S. western history, and calls for historians of the Midwest to substantially revise regional narratives in much the same manner that new western historians did during the 1980s and 90s.

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Untaming the Mild Frontier: In Search of New Midwestern Histories

The 1907–1915 campaign to create San Francisco’s Pioneer Mother Monument provides both a case study of conservative uses of maternalism and a window into the political mutability of maternalist rhetoric. Ella Sterling Mighels, a pioneer descendant, utilized the monument campaign to promote white women’s moral influence over middle-class men, to argue against Asian immigration and labor unrest, and to inculcate old-fashioned moral values among urban children. Although some of Mighels’s contemporaries cited pioneer mothers as proof of women’s fitness for suffrage, Mighels herself used the pioneer mother to argue against suffrage. The final statue, created by the sculptor Charles Grafly, failed to encapsulate Mighels’s multivalent political message and to express her ideals about gender, race, class, and morality.

San Francisco's Pioneer Mother Monument: Maternalism, Racial Order, and the Politics of Memorialization, 1907–1915

abstract:This essay investigates the phenomenon of \"embedded\" mental states in fiction (i.e., a mental state within a mental state within yet another mental state, as in, \"Mrs. Banks wished that Mary Poppins wouldn't know so very much more about the best people than she knew herself\"), asking if patterns of embedment manifest themselves differently in children's literature than they do in literature for \"grownups.\" Looking at books for three age groups (nine to twelve, three to seven, and one to two), Zunshine finds significant differences in their respective patterns of embedment, while also arguing that a critical inquiry into complex mental states is not just a cognitive but also a historicist project. Drawing on research in developmental psychology, rhetorical narratology, and cultural history, as well as on digital data mining, this essay seeks to broaden the interdisciplinary and interpretive range of cognitive literary studies.

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What Mary Poppins Knew: Theory of Mind, Children's Literature, History

Louise Erdrich's children's novels "count coup" on previous attempts to render American Indian life, especially those found in beloved books by Laura Ingalls Wilder and others. Through intertextual connections, she revisions stereotypical images of American Indians that have, until more recently, pervaded children's literature. Analyzing Erdrich's novels within the framework of Catherine Rainwater's counting coup paradigm suggests a way to negotiate the problems posed by classic texts rather than eradicate them altogether, allowing American Indian texts to triumph over the problematic images while celebrating more culturally-sensitive depictions, thus finding a place alongside of, not just in response to, canonical children's texts.

"Counting Coup" on Children's Literature about American Indians: Louise Erdrich's Historical Fiction

Beyond their status as classic children's stories, Laura Ingalls Wilder's ""Little House"" books play a significant role in American culture that most people cannot begin to appreciate. Millions of children have sampled the books in school; played out the roles of Laura and Mary; or visited Wilder homesites with their parents, who may be fans themselves. Yet, as Anita Clair Fellman shows, there is even more to this magical series with its clear emotional appeal: a covert political message that made many readers comfortable with the resurgence of conservatism in the Reagan years and beyond.In ""Little House, Long Shadow"", a leading Wilder scholar offers a fresh interpretation of the ""Little House"" books that examines how this beloved body of children's literature found its way into many facets of our culture and consciousness - even influencing the responsiveness of Americans to particular political views. Because both Wilder and her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, opposed the New Deal programs being implemented during the period in which they wrote, their books reflect their use of family history as an argument against the state's protection of individuals from economic uncertainty. Their writing emphasized the isolation of the Ingalls family and the family's resilience in the face of crises and consistently equated self-sufficiency with family acceptance, security, and warmth.Fellman argues that the popularity of these books - abetted by Lane's overtly libertarian views - helped lay the groundwork for a negative response to big government and a positive view of political individualism, contributing to the acceptance of contemporary conservatism while perpetuating a mythic West. Beyond tracing the emergence of this influence in the relationship between Wilder and her daughter, Fellman explores the continuing presence of the books - and their message - in modern cultural institutions from classrooms to tourism, newspaper editorials to Internet message boards.""Little House, Long Shadow"" shows how ostensibly apolitical artifacts of popular culture can help explain shifts in political assumptions. It is a pioneering look at the dissemination of books in our culture that expands the discussion of recent political transformations - and suggests that sources other than political rhetoric have contributed to Americans' renewed appreciation of individualist ideals.

Anita Clair Fellman

Papers

Little House, Long Shadow: Laura Ingalls Wilder's Impact on American Culture