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Gilbert Patten, writing as Burt L. Standish, made a career of generating serialized twenty-thousand-word stories featuring his fictional creation Frank Merriwell, a student athlete at Yale University who inspired others to emulate his example of manly boyhood. Patten and his publisher, Street and Smith, initially had only a general idea about what would constitute Merriwell's adventures and who would want to read about them when they introduced the hero in the dime novel Tip Top Weekly in 1896, but over the years what took shape was a story line that capitalized on middle-class fears about the insidious influence of modern life on the nation's boys. Merriwell came to symbolize the Progressive Era debate about how sport and school made boys into men. The saga featured the attractive Merriwell distinguishing between “good” and “bad” girls and focused on his squeaky-clean adventures in physical development and mentorship. By the serial's conclusion, Merriwell had opened a school for “weak and wayward boys” that made him into a figure who taught readers how to approximate his example. In Frank Merriwell and the Fiction of All-American Boyhood, Anderson treats Tip Top Weekly as a historical artifact, supplementing his reading of its text, illustrations, reader letters, and advertisements with his use of editorial correspondence, memoirs, trade journals, and legal documents. Anderson blends social and cultural history, with the history of business, gender, and sport, along with a general examination of childhood and youth in this fascinating study of how a fictional character was used to promote a homogeneous “normal” American boyhood rooted in an assumed pecking order of class, race, and gender.

This volume discusses why faculty and administrators of academe should care about implementing family-friendly policies and practices, as well as how they can advocate for policy changes.In section one, the book's focus is on empirical studies that demonstrate the need for innovative programs and policies for faculty at colleges and universities. These pieces explore issues such as the value of work/life programs for employee retention, the need for a variety of family support policies including elder care, and the influence of workplace culture on the use of existing policies. Section two includes case studies of the process of formulating family-friendly policies and their adoption at a variety of universities. The subjects of these chapters include use of the Family and Medical Leave Act, the enactment of a parental leave policy, the development of a unique “life cycle professorship program,” and strategies used to implement new policies. The case study chapters provide descriptions of the identification of faculty and staff needs and the process of policy development as well as advice to faculty and administrators who seek to develop similar policies at their institutions.