My lovely pumpernickel loaves, this last semester of college has ended! I wrote a 103-page senior thesis (not counting front and back matter) called “The Arbiters of Childhood,” about how American adults viewed children and childhood in the 1950s. It covered topics from the juvenile delinquency panic to Brown v. Board of Education, mostly focusing on what the experts said with occasional excursions into how that filtered down to the average American. In my last chapter, I spent a little time discussing how the dominant 1950s model of the child is still with us today. As difficult and stressful as the process occasionally became, I’m really glad I wrote this thesis–both as a historian and as a person. It’s enabled me to do interesting scholarship in an area that fascinates me, to better understand my parents’ and grandparents’ generations, to think differently about childhood as a category, and to get hands-on experience of historical problems and processes. In some ways, I’m sad it’s over, but I don’t think my study of 1950s childhood, family life, and just life in general is done with. 1950s family history is a topic that, despite enjoying a great deal of fascinating scholarship already, still abounds with vast tracts of unexplored territory.
For now, though, I’ve done with my thesis and my classes (including piano lessons, which is kinda sad), and to my intense surprise they gave me a diploma. What were they thinking? NO ONE KNOWS. But I am apparently officially a Bachelor of Arts in History. This unexpected turn of events is so overwhelming that I need to take a week or two to recover from the shock. What I’m saying is, hiatus will continue for a little while longer, but I AM done with college and I DO plan to get back to blogging in the not-too-distant future!
Or, to put it another way:
