Growing Up in America offers substantial and dramatic evidence that the history of childhood has come of age. Its authors demonstrate the breadth and depth of interest, as well as high quality of work, in a field that is finally attracting the attention it deserves. Strongly influenced by new social history and its concern for the powerless and inarticulate, Growing Up in America provides illuminating insights on children from infancy to adolescence and from the colonial period to present. "The very title of this fine and enormously instructive anthology of essays makes its quiet but important point---that children grow up in a particular nation, rather than in a family or home isolated from the influence of social, cultural, political, and historical forces. . . . An admirably diverse and instructive collection." -- Georgia Historical Quarterly

Growing Up America brings together new scholarship that considers the role of children and teenagers in shaping American political life during the decades following the Second World War. Growing Up America places young people-and their representations-at the center of key political trends, illuminating the dynamic and complex roles played by youth in the midcentury rights revolutions, in constructing and challenging cultural norms, and in navigating the vicissitudes of American foreign policy and diplomatic relations. The authors featured here reveal how young people have served as both political actors and subjects from the early Cold War through the late twentieth-century Age of Fracture. At the same time, Growing Up America contends that the politics of childhood and youth extends far beyond organized activism and the ballot box. By unveiling how science fairs, breakfast nooks, Boy Scout meetings, home economics classrooms, and correspondence functioned as political spaces, this anthology encourages a reassessment of the scope and nature of modern politics itself.

Brings together the childhood memories of a hundred men and women, young and old, who reflect on family life, interaction with the gentile world, and the meaning of peace

Those personal accounts resurrect the essential experience of children's work, play, education, family relations, and coming of age from their own perspectives. Steering a middle path between the myth of wholesome farm life and the reality of work that was often extremely dangerous, Riney-Kehrberg shows both the best and the worst that a rural upbringing had to offer midwestern youth a time before mechanization forever changed the rural scene and radio broke the spell of isolation. Down on the farm, truancy was not uncommon and chores were shared across genders. Yet farm children managed to indulge in inventive play---much of it homemade---to supplement store-bought toys and to get through the long spells between circuses.

In North-American and European cities, youth live in precarious social and economic conditions. The issue of employment has become a political problem. In this volume, sociological, economical and ethnographical perspectives are used to explain ethnic discrimination, inequalities at school, unemployment and marginalization. Work remains a central value in young peoples' lives who not only are victimized but also try to find escapes. Originally in French, this extended and updated book contains contributions by Enrico Pugliese, Saskia Sassen, Min Zhou, François Dubet, Paul Anisef, Paul Axelrod, Ida Susser and others.