Age in America: The Colonial Era to the Present

by Corinne T. Field (Editor), Nicholas L. Syrett (Editor)

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781479831913
Publisher:	New York University Press
Publication date:	05/22/2015
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

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.

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​.

Table of Contents

Contents

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 23

Ann M. Little

2. “Beyond the Time of White Children”: African American Emancipation, Age, and Ascribed Neoteny in Early National Pennsylvania 47

Sharon Braslaw Sundue

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 69

Corinne T. Field

4. A Birthday Like None Other: Turning Twenty-One in the Age of Popular Politics 86

Jon Grinspan

5. Statutory Marriage Ages and the Gendered Construction of Adulthood in the Nineteenth Century 103

Nicholas L. Syrett

6. From Family Bibles to Birth Certificates: Young People, Proof of Age, and American Political Cultures, 1820–1915 124

Shane Landrum

7. “Rendered More Useful”: Child Labor and Age Consciousness in the Long Nineteenth Century 148

James D. Schmidt

8. “A Day Too Late”: Age, Immigration Quotas, and Racial Exclusion 166

Editorial Reviews

"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."

Howard Chudacoff

"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."

The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth

"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."

Patheos

"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."

Journal of American History

"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 America rebuts 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."-The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth

From the Publisher