Bob Schultz, a carpenter by trade, has written a timeless book for boys. Wisdom and common sense are gleaned from short chapters covering topics such as authority, inventiveness, and honesty as well as learning to overcome things like fear, laziness, and temptation. Boyhood and Beyond motivates boys to build their lives on a foundation of strong moral principles. Most importantly, these chapters will encourage boys to become the men God wants them to be as they develop a relationship with Him. This is a life book designed to be read and lived out in a boy's life, thus becoming one of his building blocks to godly character and, ultimately, manhood.

Vivian Gibson grew up in Mill Creek, a neighborhood of St. Louis razed in 1955 to build a highway. Her family, friends, church community, and neighbors were all displaced by urban renewal. In this moving memoir, Gibson recreates the every day lived experiences of her family, including her college-educated mother, who moved to St. Louis as part of the Great Migration, her friends, shop owners, teachers, and others who made Mill Creek into a warm, tight-knit, African-American community, and reflects upon what it means that Mill Creek was destroyed by racism and "urban renewal."

In this memoir of a roller-coaster career on the New York stage, former actor and dancer Bettijane Sills offers a highly personal look at the art and practice of George Balanchine, one of ballet's greatest choreographers, and the inner workings of his world-renowned company during its golden years. Sills recounts her years as a child actor in television and on Broadway, a career choice largely driven by her mother, and describes her transition into pursuing her true passion: dance. She was a student in Balanchine's School of American Ballet throughout her childhood and teen years, until her dream was achieved. She was invited to join New York City Ballet in 1961 as a member of the corps de ballet and worked her way up to the level of soloist. Winningly honest and intimate, Sills lets readers peek behind the curtains to see a world that most people have never experienced firsthand. She tells stories of taking classes with Balanchine, dancing in the original casts of some of his most iconic productions, working with a number of the company's most famous dancers, and participating in the company's first Soviet Union tour during the Cold War and Cuban Missile Crisis. She walks us through her years in New York City Ballet first as a member of the corps de ballet, then a soloist dancing some principal roles, finally as one of the "older" dancers teaching her roles to newcomers while being encouraged to retire. She reveals the unglamorous parts of tour life, jealousy among company members, and Balanchine's complex relationships with women. She talks about Balanchine's insistence on thinness in his dancers and her own struggles with dieting. Her fluctuations in weight influenced her roles and Balanchine's support for her--a cycle that contributed to the end of her dancing career. Now a professor of dance who has educated hundreds of students on Balanchine's style and legacy, Sills reflects on the highs and lows of a career indelibly influenced by fear of failure and fear of success--by the bright lights of theater and the man who shaped American ballet.

Come along for the ride as the less-than-intrepid, insecure author Francis 'Frank" J. Connelly picks up where By Reason of Childhood left off-walking down life's highway, represented by Cortelyou Road in Brooklyn, New York. Beyond by Reason of Childhood begins with Connelly en route to the U.S. Army induction center on Whitehall Street. From there, it's merely a series of hops, skips, and jumps to Fort Dix, New Jersey, for basic training; Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania, for Morse Code Intercept Operator training; and on to the mountains, valleys, and rice paddies of South Korea. Fourteen months later, after an honorable discharge from the military, Frank meets Anne Marie Fleming. The couple marry, and, as time slips away, they find themselves being compared to a five-and-dime (for their five children and ten grandchildren). Along the way, Connelly works at various jobs: hauling cable for Western Electric, growing hair for Wybrandt Hair and Scalp Specialists, and spending twenty years on the New York Police Department. Near the end of his career in law enforcement, mental and physical difficulties and the debilitating effects of hypoglycemia take their toll on Connelly. Will his story have a happy ending?

When Horace Greeley published his famous imperative, “Go West, young man, and grow up with the country,” the frontier was already synonymous with a distinctive type of idealized American masculinity. But Greeley’s exhortation also captured popular sentiment surrounding changing ideas of American boyhood; for many educators, politicians, and parents, raising boys right seemed a pivotal step in securing the growing nation’s future. This book revisits these narratives of American boyhood and frontier mythology to show how they worked against and through one another—and how this interaction shaped ideas about national character, identity, and progress. The intersection of ideas about boyhood and the frontier, while complex and multifaceted, was dominated by one arresting notion: in the space of the West, boys would grow into men and the fledgling nation would expand to fulfill its promise. Frontiers of Boyhood explores this myth and its implications and ramifications through western history, childhood studies, and a rich cultural archive. Detailing surprising intersections between American frontier mythology and historical notions of child development, the book offers a new perspective on William “Buffalo Bill” Cody’s influence on children and childhood; on the phenomenon of “American Boy Books”; the agency of child performers, differentiated by race and gender, in Wild West exhibitions; and the cultural work of boys’ play, as witnessed in scouting organizations and the deployment of mass-produced toys. These mutually reinforcing and complicating strands, traced through a wide range of cultural modes, from social and scientific theorizing to mass entertainment, lead to a new understanding of how changing American ideas about boyhood and the western frontier have worked together to produce compelling stories about the nation’s past and its imagined future.

The stomping of black-booted automatons; the drums beating in tune to murderous chants of hatred a retentive memory of a little girl has captured it all. Her early, serene Munich childhood wiped out: a school in flame, a journey alone to England ahead. Gone is the school she loved. Parted from her adored father with whom she endured prison and worse. Stored away safely is her memory of GRAF ZEPPELIN, the hideous faces of the Nazi leaders and her love of Munich. KINDERTRANSPORT to England aged nine without friend or language leaves her traumatised unused as she is to cope with caring for herself. Stays at holiday camps; with a kind, generous Jewish family in London, then it is off once more with Jewish schoolchildren to Bedfordshire weeks before WW2. A love affair begins with the English country-side and its animal inhabitants. Evacuated to an ancient farm house with no amenities whatever, where she is joined by her pious old grandmother, she settles down to school-life in this strictly orthodox school, new friends all refugees. Through her father, a well-known poet, she discovers what is happening to Jews in Europe early on and her faith is shattered. A contrasting tale of two childhoods, one recalling a deceptively idyllic beginning; the other an awakening in a strange but charitable land and the forever haunting realisation of what has been done to her people. This is a unique portrait of childhood.

For all that is known about the depth and breadth of African American history, we still understand surprisingly little about the lives of African American children, particularly those affected by northern emancipation. But hidden in institutional records, school primers and penmanship books, biographical sketches, and unpublished documents is a rich archive that reveals the social and affective worlds of northern Black children. Drawing evidence from the urban centers of Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, Crystal Webster's innovative research yields a powerful new history of African American childhood before the Civil War. Webster argues that young African Americans were frequently left outside the nineteenth century's emerging constructions of both race and childhood. They were marginalized in the development of schooling, ignored in debates over child labor, and presumed to lack the inherent innocence ascribed to white children. But Webster shows that Black children nevertheless carved out physical and social space for play, for learning, and for their own aspirations. Reading her sources against the grain, Webster reveals a complex reality for antebellum Black children. Lacking societal status, they nevertheless found meaningful agency as historical actors, making the most of the limited freedoms and possibilities they enjoyed.