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  • Children, Media, and American History: Printed Poison, Pernicious Stuff, and Other Terrible Temptations by Margaret Cassidy
  • Carly A. Kocurek
Children, Media, and American History: Printed Poison, Pernicious Stuff, and Other Terrible Temptations.
By Margaret Cassidy.
New York: Routledge, 2018. xviii + 118 pp. Cloth $150, paper $44.95.

Margaret Cassidy's Children, Media, and American History: Printed Poison, Pernicious Stuff, and Other Terrible Temptations offers a sweeping overview of children's interest in and use of new media as well as adult reactions to these new forms. Beginning with the nineteenth century, she deftly frames the ways in which historical reactions to new media forms have expressed anxieties about children and childhood, particularly during periods of broader social change. In doing so, she highlights the episodic nature of media anxiety, demonstrating the way that children's media—both the media produced for them and the media they choose to consume regardless of intended audience—has long been a topic ripe for moralizing and regulation. [End Page 131]

In the first chapter, Cassidy summarizes the type of moral instruction offered by early American children's literature. This moral instruction was challenged by the growing popularity of the novel and, indeed, the novel became a lightning rod for discourse about appropriate reading materials for children. As Cassidy argues, the characteristic tension here is between what adults believe children should read, watch, or listen to and what children want. This tension is highlighted again and again as new forms emerge. Chapter 2 covers the rise of penny presses and cheap fiction as well as the attendant moral panics, but the author is also careful to point out that responses were not universal. Some saw cheap fiction as a gateway to better reading, and the same inexpensive printing technology that facilitated the rise of pulp also made media production accessible to youth, some of whom ran their own amateur newspapers. This view of how new technologies enable children's media production is particularly informative and is as episodic and as critical as the moral outrage. Wrapping up the nineteenth century, Cassidy turns to "Flash and Fancy" for the third chapter, in which she considers deliberately provocative material, including pornography and various cheap amusements such as nickelodeons.

The next three chapters turn to the twentieth century. Cassidy addresses first film and radio, then rock 'n' roll, and finally, in chapter 6, television. This section of the book also offers a history of media effects research that is informative both as a historiography and as a consideration of the degree to which effects research is both fueled by and influences public concerns over youth media access. At a moment when researchers are being called on, once again, to help justify efforts to regulate youth access to media—in this case, video games—revisiting this particular history of the field is imperative. Further, thoughtful reconsideration of iconic figures like Fredric Wertham, known for penning Seduction of the Innocent, is worthwhile; as Cassidy points out, while some of Wertham's concerns may seem overblown, his assertion that racist depictions of minorities have a profound effect on how children view themselves anticipates the significant body of more recent research on race and media representation. In her conclusion, Cassidy turns to the present, suggesting, as she did in her introduction, that the episodic nature of cultural responses to children's media may help reassure us that children's media use is rarely, if ever, simply good or bad, and that the opportunities for cultivating independence and for exploring social relationships and aspects of identity offered by current media may be profoundly important for teenagers.

Rigorously researched and well written, Children, Media, and American History is ripe with colorful anecdotes and provocative examples that will fit well in the undergraduate classroom, and this book is well suited to adoption [End Page 132] for classes on children's media, media policy and regulation, youth culture, American studies, and history. If the book has a shortcoming, it is only that the already extensive history is not a tad more exhaustive. In particular, a chapter covering the early rise of video games, and the backlash to those in the 1970s and 1980s, would...

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