A 1930s Childhood


Book Description

Do you remember collecting birds' eggs and cigarette cards? Or the first appearances of wrapped sweets like Mars and Milky Way? The 1930s was a time of great progress, as engines took over from horses, and electric light from gas and oil. In the background, change was everywhere, with the Mallard speed record, the abdication of the King, and the increasing spectre of the impending Second World War. It was a time of home cooking, and day-trip holidays, when families kept chickens and children played with bows and arrows. This delightfully nostalgic book will take you right back to a different age, recalling what life was like for those growing up in the 1930s.




Rockbridge


Book Description

The child of a small town in Midwest America tells of growing up in Rockbridge in the 1930s. Anecdotes recount childhood exploration, adventures, mishaps, and rebellion with friends, neighbors, and family. My piano teacher lives across the alley while down the alley Betty Jean had a partially opened pack of Lucky Strike and we proceeded to light up. Winter brings skating on creeks and sledding until the orange ball of the sun slipped behind the cold watery sky. Alongside these tales are refl ections by the child, revealing and honest. They contrast attitudes of the 1930s with childhood perception.




Cities of Childhood


Book Description




The Little Girl Who Fought the Great Depression: Shirley Temple and 1930s America


Book Description

"[An] elucidating cultural history of Hollywood’s most popular child star…a must-read." —Bill Desowitz, USA Today For four consecutive years she was the world’s box-office champion. With her image appearing in periodicals and advertisements roughly twenty times daily, she rivaled FDR and Edward VIII as the most photographed person in the world. Her portrait brightened the homes of countless admirers, among them J. Edgar Hoover, Andy Warhol, and Anne Frank. Distinguished cultural historian John F. Kasson shows how, amid the deprivation and despair of the Great Depression, Shirley Temple radiated optimism and plucky good cheer that lifted the spirits of millions and shaped their collective character for generations to come.




The Vanished Landscape


Book Description

Paul Johnson recalls, with warmth and affection, his childhood in the Potteries - and a unique industrial landscape that has now gone for ever Paul Johnson, the celebrated historian, grew up in Tunstall, one of the six towns around Stoke-on-Trent that made up `the Potteries'. From an early age he was fascinated by the strange beauty of its volcanic landscape of fiery furnaces belching out heat and smoke. As a child he often accompanied his father - headmaster of the local art school and desperate to find jobs for his students, for this was the Hungry Thirties - to the individual pottery firms and their coal-fired ovens. His adored mother and father are at the heart of this story and his older sisters who, as much as his parents, brought him up. Children made their own amusements to an extent unimaginable today, and his life was extraordinarily free and unsupervised. No door was locked - `Poverty was everywhere but so were the Ten Commandments.' The book ends in 1938 as the 11-year-old author queues at the town-hall for a gas mask.




The Greatest Generation Grows Up


Book Description

Kriste Lindenmeyer shows that the experiences of depression-era children help us understand the course of the 1930s as well as the history of American childhood. For the first time, she notes, federal policy extended childhood dependence through the teen years while cultural changes reinforced this ideal of modern childhood. In all, the thirties experience worked to confer greater identity on American children, and Ms. Lindenmeyer's story provides essential background for understanding the legacy of those men and women whom Tom Brokaw has called "America's greatest generation."




Neolithic Childhood


Book Description

Neolithic Childhood examines how in the interwar years the artistic avant-gardes in Europe and beyond reacted to the "crisis" of almost everything, from the barbarism of technological mass war to the hypocrisies of colonial discourse. The perceived need to re-establish European civilization after the disaster of the First World War led to an interminable reconstruction of origins and beginnings - making ground zero the limiting function of modernity. Based on the writings of the anti-academic art historian Carl Einstein (1885-1940), the exhibition is devoted to despair over the present and the pressing interest in altering humanity, as manifested from the 1920s to the 1940s in the artistic avant-gardes and the sciences. Exhibition: Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, Germany (13.04.-09.07.2018).




Childhood


Book Description

The celebrated Danish poet Tove Ditlevsen begins the Copenhagen Trilogy ("A masterpiece" —The Guardian) with Childhood, her coming-of-age memoir about pursuing a life and a passion beyond the confines of her upbringing—and into the difficult years described in Youth and Dependency Tove knows she is a misfit whose childhood is made for a completely different girl. In her working-class neighborhood in Copenhagen, she is enthralled by her wild, red-headed friend Ruth, who initiates her into adult secrets. But Tove cannot reveal her true self to her or to anyone else. For "long, mysterious words begin to crawl across" her soul, and she comes to realize that she has a vocation, something unknowable within her—and that she must one day, painfully but inevitably, leave the narrow street of her childhood behind. Childhood, the first volume in the Copenhagen Trilogy, is a visceral portrait of girlhood and female friendship, told with lyricism and vivid intensity.




The Little Engine That Could


Book Description

"I think I can, I think I can, I think I can..." Discover the inspiring story of the Little Blue Engine as she makes her way over the mountain in this beloved classic—the perfect gift to celebrate the special milestones in your life, from graduations to birthdays and more! The kindness and determination of the Little Blue Engine have inspired millions of children around the world since the story was first published in 1930. Cherished by readers for over ninety years, The Little Engine That Could is a classic tale of the little engine that, despite her size, triumphantly pulls a train full of wonderful things to the children waiting on the other side of a mountain.