
Babes in Tomorrowland: Walt Disney and the Making of the American Child, 1930–1960
Nicholas Sammond
In vivid detail, Sammond describes how the latest thinking about human development was translated into the practice of child-rearing and how magazines and parenting manuals characterized the child as the crucible of an ideal American culture. He chronicles how Walt Disney Productions’ greatest creation—the image of Walt Disney himself—was made to embody evolving ideas of what was best for the child and for society. Bringing popular child-rearing manuals, periodicals, advertisements, and mainstream sociological texts together with the films, tv programs, ancillary products, and public relations materials of Walt Disney Productions, Babes in Tomorrowland reveals a child that was as much the necessary precursor of popular media as the victim of its excesses.
Product Details
About Nicholas Sammond
Reviews for Babes in Tomorrowland: Walt Disney and the Making of the American Child, 1930–1960
Erika Doss
Journal of American History
“For those interested in a broad and soundly theoretical discussion of our changing social conceptions of childhood, and the economic and social sources of those conceptions, this book makes for valuable reading. . . . [A] vivid, extremely detailed history of child rearing in the early twentieth century, and a media company that blossomed alongside it.”
Chris McGee
The Lion and the Unicorn
“Marvelously rich in source material and thoughtful in approach, Nicholas Sammond’s Babes in Tomorrowland is a history of American child-rearing practices in the mid-twentieth century. . . . [It] will be engaging reading for all interested in American childhood studies.”
Martha Hixon
Children's Literature
“With Babes in Tomorrowland, Nicholas Sammond offers a fine genealogy of Disney (the man and the industry), middle-class tastes and the intellectual and market regulation of ‘the good child’ from the Great Depression to the early 1960s. Sammond draws upon a staggering wealth of primary and secondary sources to make an impressive case about how the rise of Walt Disney was closely tied to the rise of child development theory, media standards and anxiety over childhood.”
Randal Doane
Journal of Consumer Culture