Julia Mickenberg

In retrospect, Russia in the 1930s was not the place to be. But from the Revolution to the purges there were thousands of westerners that made their way to the Soviet Union, many of them American women of all stripes.

Mickenberg’s American Girls in Red Russia covers many of these American women, from Isadora Duncan to Margaret Bourke-White to Sylvia Chen and many more of the great and the good, as they head to Russia chasing the utopian dream of a society that valued the equality of women. And before Stalin stepped in to destroy the ideals of the Revolution in an ocean of blood, many of these women found what they were looking for. Some however disappeared during the purges while others escaped by the skin of their teeth and a few swallowed their pride and parroted the party line.… (more)

So far, very academic. I'm mainly interested in the selections themselves, but there's so much annotation they're difficult to pick out.
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Update - it's gotten much better. Lots of good stories are in fact mixed in with the text. And of course the text is valuable to scholars, activists, and even interested parents & teachers.
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And done. I don't understand the organization exactly - the dullest & most didactic sections are at the start. However, many of the selections are absolutely priceless and still relevant, and are worth the attention of any Rebel, Little or Grown. For example, I especially enjoyed Oscar the Ostrich" by Jerome Schwartz (aka Jerome Lawrence) and the excerpt from [b:North Star Shining a Pictorial History of the American]. Also included, among many others, were bits by Langston Hughes, Pogo, and Dr. Seuss."… (more)

On Friday morning at ChLA 2011, I wasat the coffee bar with Julia Mickenberg, Assoc. Prof. American Studies at U.T. Austin, who authored one of the books I read in preparation for the the conference. Learning from the Left: Children's Literature, the Cold War, and Radical Politics in the United States won the 2008 ChLa Book Award and is a beautifully written "study of children's literature and the Left in the mid-twentieth century. It is a work of history as well as a work of literary analysis." (p. vii)
I was born at mid-20th century and, as a child, read many of the books discussed. I thanked Julia for her book "which explained my life."

As a child I learned a democratic, egalitarian spirit from the books I read and carried those values with me into adulthood. "While school textbooks taught children to uphold the values of the Cold War, many of the trade books they checked out of the library or bought in bookstores taught them just the opposite." As McCarthyism drove leftist writers and educators underground they entered "the hidden world" of children's literature. Some titles and authors mentioned in the book:

Millions of Cats, Dr. Seuss, the All- About Books and the Landmark Books, Jack London, Little Golden Books, Penny Parker, Nancy Drew, most Lincoln biographies for children, Langston Hughes (whose poetry I selected as my reading for UIL competition when I was in high school), many science and nature books, etc.

"Few..." of the authors of these books "wished to 'propagandize' children... they wished to make children autonomous, critical thinkers who questioned authority and believed in social justice.... to strengthen a sense of community, of the need to work with others to solve problems or accomplish tasks." (page 11) "They wished to give children tools of critical thinking, a distrust of received authority, and insights into the dynamics of biological and technological development and operation. They wanted to share their internationalist, cooperative, and democratic outlook and what they perceived as an ability to rationally evaluate aspects of an irrational society." (p. 182)

In some sense this little book is a biography of the "flower children" and so many of my friends who travelled about and made foolish and wise choices while "looking for themselves" during our college years. It is one explanation of how and why the radicalism of the 1960s grew out of the placid (and repressive) 1950s and how and why some children of the South marched for Civil Rights. Although Mickenber cautions, "It would be impossible (and far too reductive) to draw some kind of cause-and-effect link between childhood reading and the rebellions of the 1960s. Even so, the generational lines are not merely coincidental." p. 276

I highly recommend Mickenberg's Learning from the Left, which I read in the Kindle edition, to anyone with an interest in literature, history, American culture, education, or to anyone who seeks to understand the roots of the sharp political divide and partisanism which is the bane of current U.S. politics. We might also read a some children's literature and see if we can "strengthen a sense of community, of the need to work with others to solve problems."… (more)

From a historical aspect, this is a very well researched work and one that is needed. The authors have gathered many of the old stories, poems, cartoons and other works from a bye gone era and made them available in a very readable format. For the most part, the works presented in this 273 page book are pure Lenin, Marx, Stalin and their ilk as to subject matter and reason for existence. Being interested in this sort of thing, I found this collection to be quite valuable. The authors have given us a wonderful introduction and history before each piece is presented. Many of the works are quite blatant in their strident voice and it is very obvious what their authors were trying to present. Others are a bit sneaky, and it is good to have a good commentary to accompany them.
The reader should be warned though; this IS NOT a collection of works that will be well accepted by modern youth. This is not a collection of children’s bed time stories. Now I say this with the assumption that the parents are not died in the wool communists of the Stalin type. If that is your thing, then perhaps the stories will be right down your ally. I suppose children could be read these things as a background for the study of a completely failed system.

I am giving this one four stars because it is very well done and very well presented. Some of the stories addressing racial equality, human rights and women’s rights, are actually pretty good and make good points.… (more)