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to Do History: Young People
Motion
Picture Autobiographies
Herbert
Blumer and the Payne Fund Project
The
Payne Fund research project
was created out of fears about the impact of movies on youth.
Nineteen social scientists worked on the project and published
eleven reports. Herbert Blumer, a young sociologist who would
later go on to a distinguished career in the field, wrote a volume
called Movies and Conduct (1933).
Blumer
asked more than fifteen hundred college and high school students
to write “autobiographies”of their experiences going
to the movies. The sociologist collected comments from young people
describing how the movies led to dissatisfaction with their lives
and conflicts with their parents.
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