CONFLICTING PATHS

We grow up--so simple, it just seems to happen--and yet there are endless variations in the way we do it. What part does culture play in the process? How much do politics and economics have to do with it? As the nation has matured, have the ways people grow up changed too? This book traces the many paths to adulthood that Americans have pursued over time. Spanning more than two centuries of intense transformation in the lives of individuals and the life of a nation, Conflicting Paths is an innovative history of growing up in America.

Harvey J. Graff, a distinguished social historian, mines more than five hundred personal narratives for what they can tell us about the passage from childhood to maturity. Drawing on diaries, memoirs, autobiographies, and letters, he builds a penetrating, complex, firsthand account of how childhood, adolescence, and youth have been experienced and understood--as functions of familial and social relations, as products of biology and physiology, and as cultural and political constructs. These first-person testimonies cross the lines of time and space, gender and class, ethnicity, age, and race. In these individual stories and the larger story they constitute, Graff exposes the way social change--including institutional developments and shifting attitudes, expectations, and policy--and personal experience intertwine in the process of growing up. Together, these narratives form a challenging, subtle guide to historical experiences and to the epochal remaking of growing up.

The most socially inclusive and historically extensive of any such research, Graff's work constitutes an important chapter in the story of the family, the formation of modern society, and the complex interweaving of young people, tradition, and change.

Harvey J. Graff, Director of the Division of Behavioral and Cultural Sciences and Professor of History, University of Texas at San Antonio, is the author of The Legacies of Literacy: Continuities and Contradictions in Western Society and Culture.

"An insightful and rich book that is a model of historical research and writing . . . Graff is successful in his attempt to integrate childhood, adolescence, and youth into the life path of growing up. While that life path approach is common in the social sciences, it is now first becoming widely used among historians. What is unique in this work, besides the breadth and a successful attempt in dealing with two hundred years of American history, is Graff's extension to include youth, and even beyond, since he often takes life stories to the point of marriage. Thus the book represents a major contribution to understanding the American experience . . . An important work."

--David M. Katzman, University of Kansas

"Conflicting Paths is bound to attract attention. Professor Graff is one of the most highly respected social historians. His publications consistently have been revisionist in scope, scholarly in execution, and lively in tone. This book is no exception. Graff clearly has command of the literature. The prose is clean and clear. Graff has succeeded in letting us hear for ourselves the range of emotions and experiences that young people recorded as they were growing up."

--W. Andrew Achenbaum, University of Michigan
 

March 6 1/8 X 9 1/4  1 table 448 pages ISBN 0-674-16066-5 (GRACON) $39.95t History/Cultural Studies

Harvard University Press 79 Garden St. Exhibits Cambridge, MA 02138