When I first sat down at the tables in Special Collections, my attention was immediately grasped by a book titled “Your Manners are Showing” by Betty Betz. The book was hardcover and had a simple and colorful cartoon drawing of boys and girls socializing at a social event. It was also bound by a spine … Continue reading “Your Manners are Showing” →

The visit to Special collections was extremely riveting! To be able to see the way individuals of different generations perceive their ideas of what a teenager was and how they acted was really interesting to see. The one piece of writing that caught my eye was the monstrous collection of Life magazines from the 1940’s. … Continue reading Life Magazine’s View on Teenagers →

For this blog entry I chose to write about the book X: A Fabulous Child’s Story by Lois Gould. Upon first glance, this book did not grab my attention in the same way that many of the other brightly colored, graphically appealing comic books did. As you can tell, it is rather dull and ordinary … Continue reading X // Marina Sullivan →

Blog Entry 2: Special Collections Your Manners are Showing: Comparing Teenage “Know How” Now and Then When I picked up the  hardcopy of the book Your Manners are Showing: A Handbook of Teenage Know How I immediately had to grin. I cannot remember the last time I spoke with someone about my manners. It must … Continue reading Your Manners are Showing: Comparing Teenage “Know How” Now and Then →

Jacqueline Joo From the visit to Special Collections, I looked at a large collection of Life Magazine published in November and December of 1948  but chose to focus on a few pages that were specifically about the American adolescent culture. Though magazines today have diminished in popularity in lieu of social media and more modern … Continue reading “Teen-agers” in Life Magazine →

On our visit to Special Collections, I found myself fascinated by The Secret Language by Ursula Nordstrom. I knew that Ursula Nordstrom had changed children's literature into what we know it to be today. She altered and subverted the mold of what it meant to write and publish for children, so I wanted to see … Continue reading A Book Written by an Editor: The Secret Language by Ursula Nordstrom →

During our visit to Special Collections, I was really drawn to the Calling All Girls publications, but for the sake of this entry, I’ll refer specifically to the September 1960 edition. I would definitely call this a magazine or a periodical, but it was pretty small (a bit smaller than an average novel), and the … Continue reading The Cultural Significance of “Calling All Girls” →

Going into Special Collections, I was a little overwhelmed by the amount of material in the area, but I was immediately drawn to the etiquette grouping of items. One book that especially caught my eye was the big pink book with “Seventeen” written on it.  It was called The New Seventeen Book of Etiquette and … Continue reading Etiquette of the Teenage Girl →

During our visit to Special Collections, I immediately noticed how strongly gender and sexuality inform young adult literature. So many of the texts for teen girls, especially the comics and magazines, focused on the form of the female body, and how to make the female body appealing to men. There was a definite disparity between … Continue reading Sex Facts & Falling In Love: Gendered Experiences of Sexuality for Teen Boys & Girls →

Age is but a number, as they say, but in late-1940s America a new term of "age"entered the nation's lexicon. This new term was "teen-ager" and though this is not how the word is written today, it seems this was the form used in most publications in the late-1940s and throughout the 1950s. The piece … Continue reading “Teen-Age” Life and Forgotten Lives in Life Magazine →