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 modernsociety, and the
complex interweaving of young people, tradition, and change.
General
Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate?
Let us know about it.
Does this product have an incorrect or missing image?
Send us a new image.
Is this product missing categories?
Add more categories.
Review This Product
No reviews yet - be the first to create one!