Tag: magazines

Boys’ Life

~ Editors

Following up on Mischa Honeck’s interesting post, “Innocent Ignorance: Whitewashing an Empire with the Boy Scouts of America,” which includes a link to a 1914 Boy Scout Handbook, we have found a year’s worth of Boys’ Life from 1915 at the Internet Archive. This official BSA magazine contains stories, Scouting news, advice, photographs, advertisements, and more—some 580 pages of it in 1915. Below are four of the covers, one of them created by Norman Rockwell, an artist who was famous for capturing much that was ostensibly “innocent” about America.

Race, Gender, Respectability, and Knowledge

~ Editors

The stimulating blog Black Perspectives has published an online roundtable on Black Women and the Politics of Respectability that includes two posts clearly relevant to the history of knowledge. Instead of exploring the link between education and respectability that is familiar, for example, in European social history, these pieces scrutinize the special role played by respectability in African American communities as part of what W.E.B. Du Bois called “this sense of looking at one’s self through the eyes of others.”1 One response to this acute awareness of scrutiny in a racist society were “pedagogies of respectability,” produced for and circulated via black periodicals and films in the early twentieth century. See Jane Rhodes, “Race, Media, and Black Womanhood in the Early Twentieth Century” for more.

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