Children's Biographies of African American Women

"Although biographies for children have not been widely studied, they nonetheless serve as powerful vehicles for circulating the stories of historical figures and the values that animate those stories. By foregrounding the historical agent, biographical texts teach children about their own relationship with the past, the values of the present, and their responsibility to become the agents of the future. Biographies for young readers thus instantiate and perpetuate public memories, both to supply a source for models of judgment and action and to delineate an individual's role in an unfolding drama of action. VanderHaagen examines such texts as artifacts of public memory in order to show how biographies, often dismissed as conservative, should more accurately be understood as a complex rhetorical mix of conservative and progressive potential"--