The untold story of the first-generation Jewish American toymakers who literally manufactured “the century of the child.”

In 1902, Morris and Rose Michtom invented the Teddy Bear―bound by clothing scraps, stuffed with sawdust, and given button eyes with a sad, longing expression―in the back room of their Brooklyn candy store. Together they launched the Ideal Toy Corporation, joining a set of other poor, first-generation Jewish toymakers: the Hassenfeld brothers of Hasbro, Ruth Moskowicz and Elliot Handler of Mattel, and Joshua Lionel Cowan of Lionel Trains.

From Barbie and G.I. Joe to Popeye, Superman, and Mr. Potato Head, Playmakers reveals how the toy industry created the idealized American childhood: an enchanted world, full of wild creatures and eternal struggles between good and evil, with endless realms of fantasy and beauty. For much of the twentieth century, every part of the American toy business was largely Jewish―the company founders, executives, and designers, as well as the factory workers, wholesale distributors, retail outlets, and armies of salesmen. A descendant of the founders of the Ideal Toy Corporation, Michael Kimmel shows how these poor, often Yiddish-speaking, tenement-dwelling children of immigrants invented a world they never experienced for themselves. Along with the toys and Jewish toymakers that climbed the ladder of success, Kimmel also portrays the rise of an entire culture focused on children, led by Jewish comic book creators, children’s authors, parenting experts, and child psychologists.

The first full-scale toy history of the United States, Kimmel’s story conjures the colorful, imaginative, restless spirits who followed the promise of the American Dream―and describes the ways in which the world they came from molded their beloved creations. Playmakers shows that the overlapping experiences of being a Jew, an immigrant, and a child in twentieth-century America―an outsider looking in, a person desperate to be accepted―created childhood as we know it today.

Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made available for future generations to enjoy.

Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made available for future generations to enjoy.

Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made available for future generations to enjoy.

When Charlotte Perkins Gilman's first nonfiction book, Women and Economics, was published exactly a century ago, in 1898, she was immediately hailed as the leading intellectual in the women's movement. Her ideas were widely circulated and discussed; she was in great demand on the lecture circuit, and her intellectual circle included some of the most prominent thinkers of the age. Yet by the mid-1960s she was nearly forgotten, and Women and Economics was long out of print. Revived here with new introduction, Gilman's pivotal work remains a benchmark feminist text that anticipates many of the issues and thinkers of 1960s and resonates deeply with today's continuing debate about gender difference and inequality. Gilman's ideas represent an integration of socialist thought and Darwinian theory and provide a welcome disruption of the nearly all-male canon of American economic and social thought. She stresses the connection between work and home and between public and private life; anticipates the 1960s debate about wages for housework; calls for extensive childcare facilities and parental leave policies; and argues for new housing arrangements with communal kitchens and hired cooks. She contends that women's entry into the public arena and the reforms of the family would be a win-win situation for both women and men as the public sphere would no longer be deprived of women's particular abilities, and men would be able to enlarge the possibilities to experience and express the emotional sustenance of family life. The thorough and stimulating introduction by Michael Kimmel and Amy Aronson provides substantial information about Gilman's life, personality, and background. It frames her impact on feminism since the Sixties and establishes her crucial role in the emergence of feminist and social thought. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1998.

Processing, Analyzing and Learning of Images, Shapes, and Forms: Part 2, Volume 20, surveys the contemporary developments relating to the analysis and learning of images, shapes and forms, covering mathematical models and quick computational techniques. Chapter cover Alternating Diffusion: A Geometric Approach for Sensor Fusion, Generating Structured TV-based Priors and Associated Primal-dual Methods, Graph-based Optimization Approaches for Machine Learning, Uncertainty Quantification and Networks, Extrinsic Shape Analysis from Boundary Representations, Efficient Numerical Methods for Gradient Flows and Phase-field Models, Recent Advances in Denoising of Manifold-Valued Images, Optimal Registration of Images, Surfaces and Shapes, and much more.

Processing, Analyzing and Learning of Images, Shapes, and Forms: Volume 19, Part One provides a comprehensive survey of the contemporary developments related to the analysis and learning of images, shapes and forms. It covers mathematical models as well as fast computational techniques, and includes new chapters on Alternating diffusion: a geometric approach for sensor fusion, Shape Correspondence and Functional Maps, Geometric models for perception-based image processing, Decomposition schemes for nonconvex composite minimization: theory and applications, Low rank matrix recovery: algorithms and theory, Geometry and learning for deformation shape correspondence, and Factoring scene layout from monocular images in presence of occlusion.

Here is the story of young Jeremiah Goldberg, a 10-year-old in the burg of Stillwater, California in 1880, a boomtown with mystery, murder, and intrigue at its core. For Jeremiah and his trusty pals, Rachel Burgoyne and Fong Lee, there's adventure to be mined, and Red Gold delivers the mother lode with aplomb. Like the dime novels featuring the setting-the-world-to-rights avenger McAlester, so beloved of our pint-sized hero, Red Gold tells the tale of a Jewish boy becoming a man when events threaten to turn Jeremiah's actual life into a story torn from the pages of pulp fiction.

Adriana Hofstetter is back and still marching to the beat of her own sixteen-year-old band. When Hollywood High School puts on a production of The Music Man, Adriana is there doing a story for the school paper. But when Bethany Miller, a student and cast member who has an unhealthy addiction to Instagram, doesn't come home from school and remains missing, Adriana goes on the hunt to find out what happened. Talking to irritating students, baffled teachers, and doubting detectives, Adriana is having no luck piecing anything together. With each passing day looking worse for Bethany Miller, Adriana must use all her wiles in trying to solve what happened. And then she receives a note, a one-word note: Stop. And then another threatening note is left on her apartment door. Can Adriana find the culprit before the culprit comes after her? Of course, best friend Billy Feldman is there to lend his support while playing one of the leads in The Music Man, mother Margaret is there to keep her eye on Adriana while listening to her loud, classic rock-and-roll, and Detectives Ramirez and Coyne are there to listen to and question what Adriana discovers. With colorful depictions of Hollywood, Adriana's trademark sense of humor, and a crime to be solved, Murder at The Music Man is funny, suspenseful, and a cautionary tale of addiction to social media.

Jonathan Goldman has a problem. He's just been ousted from the company he created. A one hit wonder singer/songwriter and now successful record producer, his life is suddenly thrown into complete and utter turmoil. His former business partners have only one goal - to ruin his life and do him as much harm as possible. At sixty, no other label will hire him. Alone, with only his handful of friends to rally around him, Jonathan Goldman is on a downward spiral from which he may never recover. And then... people begin to die. Written in vivid detail and a unique style, Rewind is a taut, suspenseful, chilling, and often funny look at how a decent person can be dragged through the mud by people who enjoy that particular pastime. It's also a colorful peek inside the music business, and the day-to-day process of how albums are actually produced.