"This book is thoroughly researched, demonstrates an excellent understanding of magazine literature and culture, and provides biographical background and social history as contexts for the literature under examination."—Carol J. Singley, author of Adopting America: Childhood, Kinship, and Narrative Identity in Literature
"Ringel's nuanced interpretations are alive to the contradictions inherent to the precarious cultural balancing acts of juvenile publishing, and this book presents these findings in a clear and engaging style. This is the sort of solid scholarship that truly adds to our knowledge, and I predict that this book will last as a standard resource for many years."—Karen J. Sanchez-Eppler, author of Dependent States: The Child's Part in Nineteenth-Century American Culture
"Paul Ringel's book plays a small but important role in helping readers understand the evolution [of editorial decision-making]."—The Atlantic
"This is a fine account of the complex history of literary gentility as expressed in an effort to reach out to children readers and especially their parents. The book illuminates changing attitudes toward children and definitions of childhood--for example, by recognizing popular acceptance of n extended childhood in stories directed to older youth."—Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth
"Paul Ringel's impeccably researched and compellingly written Commercializing Childhood offers an important corrective to the assumption that children of previous centuries were 'innocent' of the marketplace, or that they were unable to make choices among competing media. Interweaving analysis of the content of children's periodicals with a savvy recovery of the editorial struggles over which content to include, Ringel traces the tension between profit and pedagogy as it emerged in some of the earliest days of children's periodical culture in the U.S."—American Periodicals
"Scholars of children's literature, nineteenth-century periodicals, and the American print market more broadly will find Commercializing Childhood a momentous resource. Ringel deftly weaves together extensive research and keen analysis in a work that should prove approachable and absorbing for readers with any level of familiarity with children's periodicals and nineteenth-century print culture . . . It is sure to become a scholarly standard for many."—Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada
"Ringel's nuanced and well-argued text offers ways to read children's periodicals as significant records of ideas about children's education and socialization."—History of Education Quarterly