UC Santa Barbara UC Santa Barbara Previously Published Works Title The Boy Problem: Educating Boys in Urban America, 1870-1970 Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/33g9c361 Journal AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW, 120(1) ISSN 0002-8762 Author Chavez-Garcia, Miroslava Publication Date 2015-02-01 DOI 10.1093/ahr/120.1.258 Peer reviewed eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California https://escholarship.org/uc/item/33g9c361 https://escholarship.org http://www.cdlib.org/ for their ethnic origins, noting that their assimilation into mainstream American culture remains incomplete. He characterizes their culture as “American Italian.” Many of them still experience persistent prejudice. Some retain allegiance to their homelands by playing soccer and bocce; they take pride in their Italian her- itage, but identify themselves as more American than Italian. Gems observes that despite Italian achieve- ments in the political, economic, and social life of the United States, “Italian-American monuments are no longer dedicated to Christopher Columbus, or even to national leaders, statesmen or -women, or military he- roes, but to athletic heroes in the popular culture” (pp. 214 –215). Sport and the Shaping of Italian-American Identity is a clear and engaging summary of the experiences of the first four generations of Italians in the United States. Those who are familiar with this saga will find little orig- inal material in Gems’s volume, but they will gain new knowledge about how sport enabled newcomers from Italy to gain entry into mainstream American society while preserving the customs and traditions of their home regions and villages. Gems’s book has a few weak- nesses. It is repetitive, and includes too many digres- sions on the Italian experience in the United States. It also lacks depth on the cultural meaning of soccer and bocce for Italian-American players and spectators. But, on the whole it is a major contribution to a subject ne- glected by specialists in immigration history, and it will enlighten readers from the general public who enjoy learning more about Italian-American participation in and contributions to American sports. GEORGE B. KIRSCH Manhattan College JULIA GRANT. The Boy Problem: Educating Boys in Ur- ban America, 1870–1970. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014. Pp. 230. $45.00. Julia Grant’s The Boy Problem: Educating Boys in Urban America, 1870–1970 came at an opportune moment when I struggled to understand why my eight-year-old son had difficulties in his fourth-grade class. Unable to sit for extended periods and complete his assignments on time, my son interrupted his peers and his teacher. Rather than linking my son’s problems to what Grant calls the current “moral panic” (p. 2) over bad boys of color, I learned that my son’s difficulties were, instead, tied to centuries’ old notions of acceptable and unac- ceptable behavior—in reality, learning styles—in and outside the classroom. Indeed, Grant’s book forces us to reconsider the ineffective and destructive ap- proaches in attempting to mold racially and ethnically diverse, migrant and immigrant, poor, working-class young boys into productive male citizens. She demon- strates that even when many European American boys in the early twentieth century had the opportunity to escape the clutches of poverty, prejudice, and the ghetto, entrenched racism, intimidation, and violence locked out African American boys from those same av- enues of social mobility, forcing them to occupy the cur- rent ranks of the “boy problem.” Today’s boy problem, she says, is a long-term “consequence of inadequate and punitive schools, poverty, race, ethnicity, and cul- tures of masculinity that emerge as an antidote to op- pressive social structures” (p. 1). Using a thematic and chronological approach, Grant’s study begins by exploring the evolution of mis- guided models for the socialization of the poor, immi- grant, ethnic, and working classes that emerged in the nineteenth century with the explosion of urban centers in the North. Spurred by massive immigration, indus- trialization, and urbanization, social reformers worried about the growing “dangerous classes” and illiteracy, lawlessness, and poverty found in the cities (p. 7). Rather than assisting parents, reformers established re- formatories, orphan trains, and public education aimed specifically at containing boys who they viewed as trou- blesome. Similar institutions for girls emerged, too, but on a smaller scale and they focused on containing sex- uality and inculcating domestic values, underscoring the gendered nature of social reform. The rise in anxieties and beliefs about the inherent, savage nature of boys, an ideology that emerged in the early twentieth century, led reformers to organize ath- letic programs and build boys’ clubs and recreation cen- ters, including the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), to tame and channel boys’ energies into use- ful activities. Compulsory and special education also figured prominently in the social reformers’ approach to handle particularly wayward and problematic boys. To control and contain poor, unruly, and unsupervised boys who posed a moral menace to the larger society, reformers invented the crime of truancy, giving school officials the power to police the bodies of school-age boys in public spaces. In the classroom, reformers turned to the accepted practice of measuring intelli- gence to determine boys’ fitness in the standard edu- cational setting. Reformers then sent boys who scored poorly on the intelligence tests to classes for “back- ward” or “subnormal” children or, in extreme cases, to institutions for the defective and uneducable. The rigid and intolerant culture of the schools, Grant demonstrates, contributed to the development of de- structive peer cultures of delinquency in the early and mid-twentieth century. Robbed of opportunities to demonstrate their promise in the classroom, boys re- sisted schooling, performed poorly, and simply stayed away. To affirm their racial, ethnic, and gendered iden- tities, many of these boys joined gangs and devised al- ternative ways of expressing their masculinity. When child welfare workers sought to reorient such youths to the school setting, they misunderstood the larger con- text in which the boys and gangs operated. Focusing on tapping into the boys’ masculinity as a way to transform their behavior, welfare workers ignored the larger so- cial structures that confined them in and outside the classroom and, in the process, re-inscribed the same no- tions they sought to overturn. Finally, Grant focuses on African Americans, detail- 258 Reviews of Books AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW FEBRUARY 2015 by guest on F ebruary 13, 2015 http://ahr.oxfordjournals.org/ D ow nloaded from http://ahr.oxfordjournals.org/ ing their experiences in the educational setting in the twentieth century, particularly in the 1940s and 1950s, when they came to the attention of the school author- ities in the wake of the Great Migration. Grant details how deeply entrenched racism prevented them from gaining a foothold in the educational system and, in- stead, funneled disproportionate numbers of them to special schools and reformatories. When community leaders brought race and the failure of the educational system to national attention, the focus was primarily on girls and not on boys’ poor school performance. In- stead, the gaze shifted to the boys’ participation in gangs. Grant closes her study with an examination of the most significant developments in special education and juvenile justice in the 1960s and 1970s. While new pol- icies and practices were developed to intervene in the lives of some of the most poorly performing school chil- dren, poor and racial and ethnic minorities, they were largely ignored in favor of mainstreaming and, later, inclusion of “special needs” children, not necessarily boys of color. Boys and boys of color, in particular, she concludes, continue to be overrepresented in special education and the juvenile justice systems. Grant’s study is successful for its engaging prose and ability to reach across a broad variety of fields, includ- ing education, juvenile justice, and childhood, youth, and gender studies, to delineate the interlocking his- tories of institutions of social control for young people and reveal the deeply entrenched ideologies of gender, class, ethnicity, and race that shaped their establish- ment and their development in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Though not her focus, the inclu- sion of Latino boys in her analysis would have brought new insight to understanding how social reformers’ fixed notions of gender, class, ethnicity, and race in the twentieth century served to disempower many, if not most, boys of color in classrooms throughout the United States today. This reviewer would have also wel- comed the discussion of African American boys’ expe- riences within each chapter rather than in a separate chapter at the end of the book, for it appears as an af- terthought, though this likely was not the intention. Ul- timately, she argues, we must transform how we think about boys’ and girls’ learning styles in the classroom as well as peer cultures of masculinity if we are to enable students of all backgrounds to reach their educational potential. MIROSLAVA CHÁVEZ-GARĆIA University of California, Santa Barbara ROBERT MACDOUGALL. The People’s Network: The Po- litical Economy of the Telephone in the Gilded Age. (American Business, Politics, and Society.) Philadel- phia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. Pp. 332. $55.00. In an increasingly interdependent world, the expansion of transportation and communication networks to cover more territory and connect more people often seems natural and inevitable. As Robert MacDougall reminds us in this insightful comparative history of late- nineteenth and early-twentieth-century telephone net- works in the United States and Canada, however, the introduction of technologies of reach such as the rail- road, telegraph, and telephone has frequently been more contentious and contingent than is commonly perceived. Questions regarding access to and authority over telephone networks produced fierce commercial, political, and cultural battles in both countries. In the United States, they also generated the independent te- lephony movement, a viable alternative to the domi- nance of the American Telephone and Telegraph Com- pany (AT&T) and its predecessor, American Bell. One of MacDougall’s objectives is to uncover the dramatic but forgotten early history of the North Amer- ican telephone networks. The drama of those early years has been neglected, he argues, because AT&T has written or commissioned much of the published history of the telephone. Even independent scholars have re- lied heavily on the records in the AT&T archives. There is also a tendency in the history of technology to treat the most recent device or system as the most logical one and ignore the choices made along the way and possible alternative outcomes. Consequently, the history of the telephone has focused on the gradual expansion of AT&T’s high quality network across the nation. Mac- Dougall has scoured trade journals, the records of AT&T’s early rivals, and municipal archives to shed light on the independent movement and its “vision of ‘a telephone for the people’” (p. 4). The independents favored decentralized, locally owned and locally ori- ented telephone networks that offered less expensive but lower quality service to a broader swath of the pop- ulation. A second objective is to highlight the role of political economy in shaping technological outcomes. According to MacDougall, the key determinants in the develop- ment of the independent telephony movement were the involvement and relative power of municipal govern- ments. In areas where local government actively en- gaged the telephone industry, there was more compe- tition, wider and earlier access to telephone service, and a more frivolous culture of telephone use. In towns and cities without such municipal involvement, there was less competition, better quality but more expensive telephone service, and a more formal telephone cul- ture. MacDougall’s third objective is to compare the de- velopment of the telephone networks in the United States and Canada. In regions of the United States with active municipal governments, such as the Midwest and the West, independent telephony thrived. In 1907, “in- dependents controlled more than half of the six million telephones in the United States” (p. 2). In Canada, where Parliament regarded the telephone as a work for national benefit and cities had much less political power, municipal politicians accepted local monopo- lies. Ironically, the nationalist vision of the telephone in Canada ultimately undermined attempts to create a sin- Canada and the United States 259 AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW FEBRUARY 2015 by guest on F ebruary 13, 2015 http://ahr.oxfordjournals.org/ D ow nloaded from http://ahr.oxfordjournals.org/