As the selections show, growing up is an experience that varies with historical and cultural circumstance. Key factors, however, do emerge from the book as conceptual and interpretive themes which organize and differentiate the experience. They are sex, gender, social class, ethnicity, race, geographic residence, and the changing meanings and significance of age itself. Concrete social patterns of actual life experiences are emphasized, and are typically discussed and interpreted in terms of cultural assumptions, prescripts, and norms.
Throughout the reader, and in determining the selections, major emphasis falls upon the discovery and transmission of new information, understandings, and interpretations. The purpose is to identify emerging questions, debates, and conflicting interpretations which challenge many of the traditionally accepted ideas and thus to open many issues and questions for discussion and research.
Available both in hardcover and paperback, Growing Up in America is a valuable resource for courses in social history, on women, children and the family, and on the history of education.
Harvey J. Graff is Director of the Division of Behavioral and Cultural Sciences and Professor of History at The University of Texas at San Antonio. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Toronto and the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, and has written extensively on various aspects of interdisciplinary social history.
| 662 pages
ISBN 0-8143-1899-1 cloth, $45.00 ISBN 0-8143-1900-9 paper, $15.00 |
Wayne State University Press
The Leonard N. Simons Building 5959 Woodward Avenue Detroit, MI 48202 (313) 577-6120 |
Part I. Approaches
Adolescence in Historical Perspective, Glen H. Elder, Jr.; Archetypal
Patterns of Youth, S.N. Eisenstadt; Psychological Development and
Historical Change, Kenneth Keniston; Documents in Search of a Historian:
Toward a History of Children and Youth in America, David J. Rothman
Part II. Early America: The Colonial Beginnings
Developmental Perspectives on the History of Childhood, John Demos;
In Search of the Historical Child: Miniature Adulthood and Youth in Colonial
New England, Ross W. Beales, Jr.; "Til Death Do Us Part:" Marriage
and Family in Seventeenth Century Maryland, Lorena S. Walsh; Autonomy
and Affection: Parents and Children in Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake Families,
Daniel Blake Smith; Youth, Maturity, and Religious Conversion: A
Note on the Ages of Converts in Andover, Massachusetts, 1711-1749, Philip
J. Greven, Jr.; Parental Power and Marriage Patterns: An Analysis of
Historical Trends in Hingham, Massachusetts, Daniel Scott Smith
Part III. First Transitions, 1780 to 1870
Growing Up in Rural New England, 1800-1840, Joseph F. Kett;
Young Women in the Second Great Awakening in New England, Nancy F. Cott;
The Setting: Growing Up in the Quaker Community, Thomas L. Webber;
The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in Nineteenth-Century
America, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg; Privacy and the Making of the
Self-Made Man: Family Strategies of the Middle Class at Midcentury, Mary
P. Ryan; Youth and Industrialization in a Canadian City, Michael
B. Katz and Ian E. Davey; Women, Children, and the Uses of the
Streets: Class and Gender Conflict in New York City, 1850-1860, Christine
Stansell
Part IV. Comings of Age, 1870 to 1920
Social Change and Transitions to Adulthood in Historical Perspective,
John Modell, Frank F. Furstenberg, Jr., and Theodore Hershberg;
Domestication as Reform: A Study of the Socialization of Wayward Girls,
1856-1905, Barbara Brenzel; Heathens and Angels: Childhood in the
Rocky Mountain Mining Towns, Elliott West; Socialization and Adaptation:
Immigrant Families in Scranton: 1880-1890, John E. Bodnar; Act Your
Age: Boyhood, Adolescence, and the Rise of the Boy Scouts of America, David
I. Macleod; The Discovery of the Adolescent by American Educational
Reformers, 1900-1920: An Economic Perspective, Selwyn K. Troen;
Changing Education Strategies among Immigrant Generations: New York Italians
in Comparative Perspective, Miriam Cohen
Part V. Framing the Present, 1920-1980
Dating Becomes the Way of American Youth, John Modell; Children
in the Household Economy, Glen H. Elder, Jr.; Age in Crestwood Heights,
Toronto, Ontario, John R. Seeley, R. Alexander Sim, and E.W.
Loosley; The Family: Peer Group in the Urban Village, Herbert J.
Gans; And How Did They Grow in the Working-Class Family? Lilian
Breslow Rubin; Child-Keeping: "Gimme a Little Sugar," Carol B. Stack;
Ambivalence: The Socialization of Women, Judith M. Bardwick and
Elizabeth Douvan
Part VI. Reflections on Past, Present, and Future Position and Behavior Patterns of Youth, David Matza; The Adultlike Child and the Childlike Adult: Socialization in an Electronic Age, Joshua Meyrowitz
Index