Finalist of the 2023 SHARP History of the Book Prize

Between 1932 and 1958, thousands of children read volumes in the book series Childhood of Famous Americans. With colorful cover art and compelling—and often highly fictionalized—narrative storylines, these biographies celebrated the national virtues and achievements of famous women like Betsy Ross, Louisa May Alcott, and Amelia Earhart. Employing deep archival research, Gregory M. Pfitzer examines the editorial and production choices of the publisher and considers the influence of the series on readers and American culture more broadly.

In telling the story of how female subjects were chosen and what went into writing these histories for young female readers of the time, Pfitzer illustrates how these books shaped children’s thinking and historical imaginations around girlhood using tales from the past. Utilizing documented conversations and disagreements among authors, editors, readers, reviewers, and sales agents at Bobbs-Merrill, “Fame Is Not Just for the Fellas” places the series in the context of national debates around fame, gender, historical memory, and portrayals of children and childhood for a young reading public—charged debates that continue to this day.

While adult concern about gender in children’s books has made recent headlines, this discussion is far from new. As Gregory M. Pfitzer reveals, the writers and editors at Bobbs-Merrill, the publisher of the Childhood of Famous Americans book series published between 1932 and 1958, thought carefully about how their books would influence the development of their male readers. These books emphasized inspiring tales over historical accuracy and were written in simple language, with characters, dialogue, and stories that were intended to teach boys how to be successful men.

But this was a specific image of American manhood. Published in an era when sociologists, psychologists, and other experts worried about male delinquency, the men envisioned in these books were steeped in Cold War racial and gender stereotypes, and questions about citizenship and responsibility. Based on deep archival research into the publication history of the series, “From Boys to Men” sheds light on current controversies on children’s books and presentations of gender diversity.

Recently publishers on the Christian Right have been reprinting nineteenth-century children's history books and marketing them to parents as "anchor texts" for homeschool instruction. Why, Gregory M. Pfitzer asks, would books written more than 150 years ago be presumed suitable for educating twenty-first-century children? The answer, he proposes, is that promoters of these recycled works believe that history as a discipline took a wrong turn in the early twentieth century, when progressive educators introduced social studies methodologies into public school history classrooms, foisting upon unsuspecting and vulnerable children ideologically distorted history books.

In History Repeating Itself, Pfitzer tests these assertions by scrutinizing and contextualizing the original nineteenth-century texts on which these republications are based. He focuses on how the writers borrowed from one another to produce works that were similar in many ways yet differed markedly in terms of pedagogical strategy and philosophy of history. Pfitzer demonstrates that far from being non-ideological, these works were rooted in intense contemporary debates over changing conceptions of childhood.

Pfitzer argues that the repurposing of antiquated texts reveals a misplaced resistance to the idea of a contested past. He also raises essential philosophical questions about how and why curricular decisions are shaped by the "past we choose to remember" on behalf of our children.

Prior to the mid-nineteenth century, most Americans "heard" rather than "read" national history. They absorbed lessons from the past more readily by attending Patriots' Day orations and anniversary commemorations than by reading expensive, multivolume works of patrician historians. By the 1840s, however, innovations in publishing led to the marketing of inexpensive, mass-produced "popular" histories that had a profound influence on historical literacy and learning in the United States. In this book, Gregory M. Pfitzer charts the rise and fall of this genre, demonstrating how and why it was born, flourished, and then became unpopular over time.

Pfitzer begins by exploring how the emergence of a new literary marketplace in the mid-nineteenth century affected the study of history in America. Publishers of popular works hoped to benefit from economies of scale by selling large numbers of inexpensive books at small profit. They hired authors with substantial literary reputations to make the past accessible to middle-class readers. The ability to write effectively for wide audiences was the only qualification for those who dominated this field. Privileging narration and effusive literary style over dispassionate prose, these artists adapted their favorite fictional and poetic conventions with an ease that suggests the degree to which history was viewed as literary art in the nineteenth century.

Beginning as a small cottage industry, popular histories sold in the hundreds of thousands by the 1890s. In an effort to illuminate the cultural conditions for this boom, Pfitzer focuses on the business of book making and book promotion. He analyzes the subscription sales techniques of book agents as well as the aggressive prepublication advertising campaigns of the publishers, including the pictorial embellishments they employed as marketing devices.

He also examines the reactions of professional historians who rejected the fictionalizing and poetic tendencies of popular history, which they equated with loose and undisciplined scholarship. Pfitzer explains how and why these professionals succeeded in challenging the authority of popular histories, and what the subsequent "unpopularity of popular history" meant for book culture and the study of history in the twentieth century.