Paul Ringel

Background

About Paul Ringel

I am an award-winning teacher, scholar, and public historian. My book Commercializing Childhood: Children's Magazines, Urban Gentility, and the Ideal of the Child Consumer in the United States won the 2015 Children's Literature Association Honor Book Award for outstanding scholarship in the field of children’s literature. My next book, Kid History, Inc: Selling Children the American Past (scheduled for publication in 2025) focused on the history of how children have learned U.S. history outside the classroom through mediums such as books, toys, movies, theme parks, and video games. Recent publications have appeared in media forums including The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Smithsonian and Time magazines, and I have contributed scholarly essays in The Public Historian, NINE:A Journal of Baseball History and Culture, and anthologies from Oxford University and the University of Georgia Presses. My public history projects range from exhibits and websites on local history to nationally syndicated television programs. My work focuses on intersections of consumer culture, childhood and youth, sports (particularly baseball), race, and gender in nineteenth- and twentieth-century U.S. history.