| Acknowledgments | |
| Ch. 1 | Studying Public Television as American Public Culture | 3 |
| Ch. 2 | Childhood on the Contested Territory of Public Television in the United States | 35 |
| Ch. 3 | Negotiating Documentary Production: Authorship and Imagined Audiences | 61 |
| Ch. 4 | Public Television Documentary Poetics | 89 |
| Ch. 5 | Cutting across Cultures: Public Television Documentary and Representations of Otherness | 140 |
| Ch. 6 | Public Television Documentary and the Mediation of American Public Culture | 168 |
| App. A | Organizational chart of the Childhood Staff | 189 |
| App. B | List of Academic Observers and Advisors | 191 |
| App. C | Synopsis of the Childhood Series | 193 |
| Notes | 197 |
| References | 221 |
| Filmography | 234 |
| Index | 237 |