Rebecca L. de Schweinitz
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Contact Information
- Department:
History, Department of
- Office:
JFSB 2162
- Phone:
801-422-1594
- Email:
rld@byu.edu
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Links:
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Research
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My current research places young people and ideas about young people at the center of the civil rights movement. Like other recent civil rights scholarship, it recognizes the long history of the civil right movement. Specifically, it locates the emergence of a youth-centered racial liberalism as well as the beginnings of a significant, youth organizing tradition in the decade of the Great Depression. It identifies World War II as a significant event in the struggle for racial equality, both for its impact on young people growing up in that era and for the ways it and the Cold War helped link national security concerns to the push for equal educational opportunities and the end of segregated education. My research suggests that the Brown ruling was indeed significant but for reasons that other scholars have not previously identified. The 1954 decision raised the expectations of young blacks in particular and affected their everyday lives. Moreover, it, and the arguments upon which it was based, shaped national media reports about the movement, the responses of white southerners, the tactics of African American organizers, and the ways the American public understood the movement. My current project shows that America's post-war domestic-centered political ideology, its beliefs about children and childhood, encouraged, but also shaped and ultimately limited, support for African American civil rights. It also helps to explain the timing and successes of the movement by exploring the generational differences that led to the widespread youth activism of the 1950s and 60s.
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I have begun work on a second major project which follows my interest in using childhood as a lens for understanding larger questions about race in American history. For this project I plan to look at the ways that shifting notions of childhood from the colonial period to the 1890s influenced slavery, the movements to defend and do away with it, and efforts to extend as well as to limit citizenship rights to freed blacks following the Civil War. My preliminary research for this project suggests that while other ideas and issues informed the creation, persistence, and eradication of the institution, historians of childhood can offer new ways of understanding American (and perhaps a larger Atlantic world) slavery. I plan to explore the ways that traditional, economic ideas about childhood may have helped to shape slavery. I plan to look closely at possible connections between legal codes governing child-labor, child-apprenticeships, illegitimacy, family relationships, and black slavery. What my research to date suggests (see the third sample in this file) is that following the Revolution, white southerners used traditional notions (or slightly modified traditional notions) of childhood to justify slavery. Northerners, however, were more influenced by the rise of sentimental notions of childhood. Indeed, newly emerging sentimental ideas about children and families influenced the nation's first abolition statutes and the ways that abolitionists, black and white, attacked the institution.
My research indicates that, just as scholars have shown that shifting ideas about freedom shaped American slavery, so too did shifting ideas about childhood. I believe that examining contemporary ideas about childhood will help us to better understand America's movements to preserve and to end slavery. Conversely, I believe that by examining the antebellum debate over slavery we will see evidence of the growth of sentimental notions of childhood. Debates over slavery reveal America's (and perhaps a larger Western) transition to modern views of families and children and capture the tensions between older, instrumental notions of childhood and newer emotional notions of childhood vying for legitimacy in nineteenth-century America.
Education
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Ph.D.
U.S. History
University of Virginia
2004
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M.A.
U.S. History
University of Virginia
1997
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B.A.
History
Brigham Young University
1992
Professional Affiliations
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Family Studies Center
2
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Women's Research Institute
3
Publications
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Rebecca de Schweinitz
(2005).
The "Shame of America": African-American Civil Rights and the Politics of Childhood.
The Politics of Childhood: International Perspectives, Contemporary Developments.
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Rebecca de Schweinitz
(2000).
Preaching the Gospel of Church and Sex: Mormon Women's Fiction in the LDS Young Woman's Journal, 1889-1910.
Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought.
Awards
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C. Van Woodward Prize, Runner-up
Southern Historical Association
2005
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Nevins Prize, Nominee
Society of American Historians
2004
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Post-Doctorate Fellowship
Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, Yale University
2005
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