Book Reviews

cating for the inclusion of superhero playin early childhood contexts. The concluding chapters would be a good place in thebook to summarize and support morestrongly how and why children shouldhave the right to engage in this type ofplay. While the author references children’s emotional development connected
to superhero play within the book, thesechapters would be an excellent place toemphasize the importance of this type ofplay for children’s emotional development
and mental health.
Given the current concerns aboutmass shootings in the United States, awar in Ukraine, and a global pandemic,
it is essential to note that allowing children’s superhero, power play, and playwith themes of death and killing is probably even more important now to support
their social-emotional development andprocessing of the world. Calling All Superheroes: Supporting and Developing Superhero Play in the Early Years is a timely andvaluable resource for educators worldwide
to consider and reflect on superhero play
and all the related controversial playthemes.
—Jeanne Galbraith, State University ofNew York at Geneseo, Geneseo, NY

Playful Visions: Optical Toys andthe Emergence of Children’sMedia CultureMeredith A. Bak
Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2020.
Acknowledgments, introduction,conclusion, notes, and index. 276 pp.
$30.00, paper. ISBN: 9780262538718

What makes children so impressionable? In Playful Visions: Optical Toys andthe Emergence of Children’s Media Culture, Meredith Bak reframes this loaded
question by tracing how such anxieties
arose from a nineteenth-century culture
in which visions of childhood emerged
from engagement with optical play. For
instance, the image of the impressionable child arose from optical theories on
persistence of vision that posit vision asliterally leaving impressions through “aninscriptive, percussive process in which
the eye’s surface is struck or marked”(p. 10). Through this and other cultural
notions of visuality, Bak argues thatnineteenth-century optical play served
as “a key component in the formation ofmodern middle-class childhood” (p. 26).
Childhood, it turns out, is literally a matter of optics. Yet, as Bak demonstrates, thecultural optics that frame and construct
playful visions of childhood do not constitute a singular vision. Instead, each newly
invented optical toy rekindled culturaldebates through which recurring paradoxes were continually reimagined. Thus,
Bak takes particular care in tracing how
discursive constellations coalesced arounddifferent optical toys with “distinct material features that invite different forms ofinteractivity, manipulation, and social andindividual play” (p. 19).
To this end, Playful Visions is organized as a series of case studies in which
each chapter traces how one such constellation orbits a different kind of optical play.
After contextualizing her project with two
introductory chapters that situate opticaltoys within childhood and media culture,
Bak begins her case studies by exploring
how the visual and verbal play mediated

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P L AYby the thaumatrope expanded “conceptions of children’s literacy to include visualacuity and the capacity to play with, rather
than simply understand, language” (p. 27).
Then, in a chapter on “Seeing Things,” Bakwidens her scope by exploring the socialand material contexts for optical toys. For
instance, Bak explores how parlor play
paradoxically both relies on middle-classleisure culture and alludes to industrialized factory labor. A chapter on moveable
toy books then considers how nowfamiliar debates on media spectatorshiparose around optical books that afforded
self-directed children’s play. Debatesaround color education and the kaleidoscope in the following chapter allow Bak
to consider the intertwining of scientificand aesthetic in the construction of the
middle-class subject. Demonstrating theshifts and contradictions that characterized these changing cultural optics, Bak’s
next chapter on the stereoscope notes
how “the decades-old practices of opticaldiscernment that persistence-of-vision
toys sought to instill” (p. 192) was contradicted by how “the stereoscope industry
and its supporters endeavored to sell themediated gaze as the ‘real’ thing” (p. 193).
Further complications arise in the finalchapter, which considers how traditional
optical toys have been resurrected withaltered significance after the emergenceof screen-based media have subtly altereddiscourses of visuality and childhood.
As these case studies scrutinize howocularcentric thinking influenced theconstruction of modern childhood, Playful Visions itself becomes an exercise inoptics. While many of the central cultural tensions analyzed in this book will
be familiar to readers who are conversantin contemporary or nineteenth-century
rhetoric around childhood, reframing
these tensions around the specific material
culture of optical toys presents them in anew light. In particular, Bak’s toy-centered
optics makes two notable contributions byframing childhood culture through the
doubled lenses of material culture andmedia culture.
While childhood culture is verymuch shaped by cultural imaginaries,
Bak’s toy-centered optics grounds theseotherwise airy imaginaries in materialculture. Backed by thorough archival
research on the toys themselves and thecultural conversations that surrounded
them, Bak consistently shows how larger
concerns of nineteenth-century society
are refracted through the cultures andmaterial practices of optical play. In sodoing, Bak also shows how broader cultural formations that construct and sustain
middle-class society, including scientificand psychological theories, pedagogical and developmental doctrines, andracial and gender inequities are similarly grounded in material practices. Thisemphasis on materiality provides a vital
perspective for understanding how thetactile and visual performance of play contributes to the development of ideological
yet embodied subjects.
Furthermore, Bak’s toy-centered
optics frame this material culture as anearly form of media play that sets the stage
for contemporary concerns around children’s media use. Resisting the tendency
to reduce early optical toys to mere precursors to cinema, Bak does justice to optical toy media as they played out in theirown time while also offering nuanced analyses of the “shared currents of optimism

Book Reviews

or anxiety that seem to run through time”(p. 22). Thus, Playful Visions describes play
as a perpetually contested space that wasand still remains “inseparably bound to
broader media and technology cultures”(p. 223). In particular, it shows how contemporary concerns over media spectatorship arise from longstanding culturaldebates around visuality that helped define
modern childhood.
This multilayered study presents
unique and compelling optics on thegenerative interplay between childhood,material, and media cultures. By deftly
weaving together widely varied source
material, eloquently engaging how cultural ideas echo across history, and rigorously contextualizing its histories withincultural theories, Bak paints a profound,holistic picture of the complex cultural formations that coalesce around play, provingthat charting these cultural constellations
around optical toys has a distinctive merit.
While Playful Visions is clearly a mustread for scholars invested in the cultural
history of optical toys, its insightful andnuanced optics will also appeal to anyone
interested in how playful visions frame theinterconnected anxieties and optimisms
pertaining to childhood, material, andmedia cultures.
—J. Rey Lee, Cascadia College, Bothell, WA

Playing with History: AmericanIdentities and Children’sConsumer Culture
Molly Rosner
New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UniversityPress, 2021. Contents, introduction,conclusion, acknowledgments, notes,index, and photographs. 193 pp. $29.95,
paper. ISBN: 9781978822078
In Playing with History: American Identities and Children’s Consumer Culture,
Molly Rosner examines how children’s
toys, dolls, and books (collectively referredto as didactic amusements) promote aparticular version of American history.
While many might consider these didactic amusements frivolous, Rosner conveys
the weight of the political and ideological messages sold to children during thetwentieth century. The book begins by
exploring the early days of the toy industry
followed by four case studies from different eras in which she focuses on a specificartifact of childhood to examine messages
about America and race, class, gender, andethnicity.
In chapter 1, “Made in America: The
Rise of the American Toy Industry,” Rosner considers how the toy industry created toys and marketing that contributed
to gender and racial roles in the decadesaround the turn of the twentieth century.
The section entitled “The Marketing andDistributing of Class and Racial Roles”
provides a critical examination of urban
growth, the infrastructure of toy production and transportation, and Christmas.
Rosner considers how department stores
and Christmas window displays added
to class divisions. Children on the streets
were able to participate only as voyeurs of
the trappings inside. The section entitled“Racialized Toys during Jim Crow” provides a critical analysis of the lack of toysthat represented Black children by juxtaposing white character toys with Blackcharacter toys, as well as the limited

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