Boy Scouts, the National Rifle Association, and the Domestication of Rifle Shooting

A collaboration between three institutions—the National Rifle Association (NRA), the Boy Scouts of America (BSA), and the manufacturers of guns and ammunition—created in the early years of the twentieth century a set of youth programs aimed at domesticating and naturalizing rifle shooting as a wholesome sport for preadolescent and adolescent boys. The BSA, in particular, had to persuade urban and suburban parents and community leaders that target shooting encouraged physical fitness, mental alertness, self-control, self-reliance, and an appreciation of the role of rifles in securing and maintaining American freedoms. Using BSA merit badge pamphlets and other materials created by these three organizations from 1910 to the present, this essay charts the rhetoric used to persuade boys and adults that boys should be taught to shoot rifles. The early appeals (1910-1940) stressed the origins of rifle shooting in American history, especially the romantic history of the west, but in the 1950s the appeal shifted to the wholesome, family-oriented dimensions of the sport. The urban violence and anti-war sentiments of the 1960s and 1970s complicated the persuasive messages, but the need to remasculinize America in the 1980s gave the youth shooting movements new life. Increased mass shootings at colleges and schools in the 1990s to the present have made the BSA-NRA partnership increaingly difficult to negotiate rhetorically

Children\u27s Folklore

A collection of original essays by scholars from a variety of fields—including American studies, folklore, anthropology, psychology, sociology, and education—Children\u27s Folklore: A Source Book moves beyond traditional social-science views of child development. It reveals the complexity and artistry of interactions among children, challenging stereotypes of simple childhood innocence and conventional explanations of development that privilege sober and sensible adult outcomes. Instead, the play and lore of children is shown to be often disruptive, wayward, and irrational. The contributors variably con-sider and demonstrate contextual and textual ways of studying the folklore of children. Avoiding a narrow definition of the subject, they examine a variety of resources and approaches for studying, researching, and teaching it. These range from surveys of the history and literature of children\u27s folklore to methods of field research, studies of genres of lore, and attempts to capture children\u27s play and games.https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/usupress_pubs/1059/thumbnail.jp

Lay and Expert Knowledge in a Complex Society: The AFS Teagle Foundation Project

The Teagle FoundationHow Do You Know What You Know? 2-3, Jay Mechling; Lay and Expert Knowledge in the Community College 4-5, Sean Galvin; Teaching to Live with Moving Horizons of Knowledge: Folklore Studies and New Social Problems 6-7, Jason Baird Jackson; Confronting Alternative Realities 8-9, Howard Sacks; Knowledge Gaps, Lay Experts and Feedback Loops 10-11, Sabina Magliocco; Fostering Critical Engagement through Experiential Learning 12-13, Danille Elise Christensen; Documenting Community Knowledges in Houston 14-15, Carl Lindahl; The knowledge gap as it relates to the concept of expert and lay knowledge 16-17, Tom Mould; What can student vets teach the teachers? An observer's perspective 18-19, Dorothy Noye

Folklore and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism

The notion of "sustainability"—which crosses the realms of the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities and shows up in public policy debates in the United States and abroad—requires a value system and behavior often at odds with the values of late capitalism, with its emphasis on consumption, pleasure, and narcissism. Weber, Veblen, and other intellectuals recognized this contradiction in the late 19th century. Almost a century later, Daniel Bell's book The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976) revived the debate just in time for the culture wars. This lecture poses a deceptively simple question: is folklore the friend or enemy of sustainability? Attempting to answer this question requires the folklorist to link the microsociology of knowledge, the usual realm of folklore studies, to the macrosociology of knowledge, especially to questions of national character