Age in America: The Colonial Era to the Present

Published by New York University Press 2015

Age in America

The Colonial Era to the Present

Edited by: Corinne T. Field and Nicholas L. Syrett

https://doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9781479870011.001.0001

Overview
Contents

About this book

Eighteen. Twenty-one. Sixty-five. In America today, we recognize these numbers as key transitions in our lives—precise moments when our rights and opportunities change—when we become eligible to cast a vote, buy a drink, or enroll in Medicare. This volume brings together scholars of childhood, adulthood, and old age to explore how and why particular ages have come to define the rights and obligations of American citizens.

Since the founding of the nation, Americans have relied on chronological age to determine matters as diverse as who can marry, work, be enslaved, drive a car, or qualify for a pension. Contributors to this volume explore what meanings people in the past ascribed to specific ages and whether or not earlier Americans believed the same things about particular ages as we do. The means by which Americans imposed chronological boundaries upon the variable process of growing up and growing old offers a paradigmatic example of how people construct cultural meaning and social hierarchy from embodied experience. Further, chronological age always intersects with other socially constructed categories such as gender, race, and sexuality. Ranging from the seventeenth century to the present, taking up a variety of distinct subcultures—from frontier children and antebellum slaves to twentieth-century Latinas—Age in America makes a powerful case that age has always been a key index of citizenship.

Author / Editor information

Field Corinne T. :

Corinne T. Field, a Lecturer in the Corcoran Department of History and Women, Gender, Sexuality Program at the University of Virginia, is the author of The Struggle for Equal Adulthood: Gender, Race, Age, and the Fight for Citizenship in Antebellum America.Syrett Nicholas L. :

Nicholas L. Syrett is Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Kansas and the author of The Company He Keeps: A History of White College Fraternities and American Child Bride: A History of Minors and Marriage in the United States.

Reviews

Many anthologies are quite rightly criticized for lacking focus, conceptual coherence, or uniformly high standards of quality and rigor.Age in Americarebuts such criticism and demonstrates that age is an analytic category that is, in its own way, as important as gender, class and ethnicity in understanding subjective experience, law and public policy over the course of American History.

Age in Americasuccessfully demonstrates a sort of ultimate intersectionality in which age shapes or is shaped by nearly every measure by which historians try to understand the human condition.

Howard Chudacoff,author of How Old Are You?: Age Consciousness in American Culture:
Impressive and original,Age in Americais a fascinating collection of scholarship that will find wide readership across many disciplines. Admirable for its chronological scope and focus, the editors have brought together many of the pioneers of age studies as well as childhood studies, resulting in a unique and synthesizing volume that is sure to open up new avenues for further research.

This volume provides much-needed historical perspective to our understanding of age, including shifts in age consciousness and the categorization, institutionalization, and personal experience of age....Many anthologies are quite rightly criticized for lacking focus, conceptual coherence, or uniformly high standards of quality and rigor.Age in Americarebuts such criticism and demonstrates that age is an analytic category that is, in its own way, as important as gender, class, and ethnicity in understanding subjective experience, law, and public policy over the course of American history.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	v
Acknowledgments Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Introduction Corinne T. Field and Nicholas L. Syrett Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
Part I. Age in Early America
1. “Keep Me with You, So That I Might Not Be Damned” Age and Captivity in Colonial Borderlands Warfare Ann M. Little Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	23
2. “Beyond the Time of White Children” African American Emancipation, Age, and Ascribed Neoteny in Early National Pennsylvania Sharon Braslaw Sundue Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	47
Part II. Age in the Long Nineteenth Century
3. “If You Have the Right to Vote at 21 Years, Then I Have” Age and Equal Citizenship in the Nineteenth-Century United States Corinne T. Field Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	69
4. A Birthday Like None Other Turning Twenty-One in the Age of Popular Politics Jon Grinspan Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	86
5. Statutory Marriage Ages and the Gendered Construction of Adulthood in the Nineteenth Century Nicholas L. Syrett Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	103
6. From Family Bibles to Birth Certificates Young People, Proof of Age, and American Political Cultures, 1820–1915 Shane Landrum Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	124
7. “Rendered More Useful” Child Labor and Age Consciousness in the Long Nineteenth Century James D. Schmidt Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	148
8. “A Day Too Late” Age, Immigration Quotas, and Racial Exclusion Yuki Oda Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	166
Part III. Age in Modern America
9. Age and Retirement Major Issues in the American Experience William Graebner Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	187
10. “The Proper Age for Suffrage” Vote 18 and the Politics of Age from World War II to the Age of Aquarius Rebecca de Schweinitz Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	209
11. “Old Enough to Live” Age, Alcohol, and Adulthood in the United States, 1970–1984 Timothy Cole Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	237
12. Age and Identity Reaching Thirteen in the Lives of American Jews Stuart Schoenfeld Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	259
13. A Chicana Third Space Feminist Reading of Chican@ Life Cycle Markers Norma E. Cantú Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	282
14. Delineating Old Age From Functional Status to Bureaucratic Criteria W. Andrew Achenbaum Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	301
About the Contributors Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	321
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	325

Language: English
Publisher: New York University Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Illustrations
- Other: 6 black and white illustrations

eBook

Published: May 22, 2015
ISBN: 9781479840595