Teacher. Writer. Public Historian.
Paul Ringel is an award-winning professor of history at High Point University in High Point, North Carolina. He teaches a variety of courses on the 19th and 20th-century United States, with a particular focus on race, sports, and popular culture. He was named High Point University Service Learning Professor of the Year for 2014-2015. His first book, Commercializing Childhood: Children’s Magazines, Urban Gentility, and the Ideal of the American Child, won the Children's Literature Association's 2015 Honor Book Award for "outstanding scholarship in the field of children's literature," and is available now. His forthcoming book, Kid History, Inc: Selling Children the American Past, focuses on how entertainment (including books, toys, movies, television, theme parks, and video games) has taught children about U.S. history over the past 150 years and how citizens can push those industries to present more accurate and diverse histories in the future.
Dr. Ringel has also written articles for a variety of outlets, including The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, Time, The Atlantic, and Smithsonian magazines, and scholarly journals such as The Public Historian and NINE: A Journal of Baseball History and Culture. As a public historian, he has worked as a consultant for the PBS television program The Time Warp Trio and leads the William Penn Project, a an oral history initiative dedicated to preserving and sharing the stories of alumni from High Point’s all-black high school from 1892 through 1968. Current projects include a biography of the Moores, an African American family from Wilmington and High Point, North Carolina, that covers six generations from emancipation through Black Lives Matter; a monograph on Boston’s Royal Rooters, a group of celebrity sports fans from the early 1900s; and a reboot of the popular 1970s children’s program Schoolhouse Rock!.
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"Paul Ringel’s impeccably researched and compellingly written Commercializing Childhood offers an important corrective to the assumption that children of previous centuries were “innocent” of the marketplace, or that they were unable to make choices among competing media...Commercializing Childhood, like many great histories, tells a story that seems quite familiar even as it covers largely uncultivated scholarly ground."
-- Anna Mae Duane, author of Suffering Childhood in Early America: Violence, Race, and the Making of the Child Victim
"Ringel's nuanced interpretations are alive to the contradictions inherent to the precarious cultural balancing acts of juvenile publishing, and this book presents these findings in a clear and engaging style. This is the sort of solid scholarship that truly adds to our knowledge, and I predict that this book will last as a standard resource for many years."
-- Karen Sanchez-Eppler, author of Dependent States: The Child's Part in Nineteenth-Century American Culture
WILLIAM PENN PROJECT
The William Penn Project is a classroom-based research project on High Point, North Carolina's African-American high school before desegregation.
BOSTON'S ROYAL ROOTERS
Boston's Royal Rooters is a research project on the nation's first group of celebrity sports fans and why they chose to devote themselves to the city's professional baseball teams.
