AHA Session 238
Saturday, January 10, 2026: 3:30 PM-5:00 PM
Grant Park Parlor (Palmer House Hilton, Sixth Floor)
Chair:
Anita Casavantes Bradford, University of California, Irvine
Session Abstract
It has been more than eighty years since Philip Ariés groundbreaking study Centuries of Childhood (1960), in which he ties the conceptualization of childhood as a special status within the family to the emergence of a large commercial middle class in early modern Europe. So influential was this book that it launched the history of childhood as a subfield of historical study; nevertheless, efforts to integrate children and adolescents into the historical narrative have not been as successful as, for example, feminist reclamations of women’s history. Through this panel, we seek to draw attention to the exciting potential of age as a category of historical analysis. What does the historical study of children and adolescents reveal that the historical study of adults does not? We ask that question specifically in relation to concepts of citizenship and state power, tying the emergence of youth culture to nation-building projects in the politically charged climate of the Great War. Fundamentally, our presentations interrogate the dynamics of power between adults, particularly adults representing the state or institutions sympathetic to the state, and adolescents. We consider the importance of this dynamic in the identity-making of youths. One important aspect of this identity-making was as members of the “imagined community” of the nation (in the case of the US) or empire (in the case of Japan). On the other hand, the growing emphasis on adolescence as a life stage separate from adulthood opened space for youths to claim values and identities of their own, making them more than just passive recipients of adult indoctrination. In this panel, we consider youth culture formation as a dialogue in which adolescents, too, had a voice.
The three presentations offer a wide array of perspectives on the question of identity formation and the construction of youth in the early twentieth century, not only in terms of gender, race, class, and sexuality, but also in scale from macro to micro. This is evident from the diverse range of sources used. At the macroscale, considering transatlantic connections between the US and France, we have the records of patriotic leagues and women’s societies that encouraged US American children’s philanthropic mobilization in the war effort. On the mesoscale we uncover Japanese girls’ active participation in their own identity-making and fandom through the reader submission columns of popular girls’ magazines. Finally on the microscale, we dive deep into the personal writings of Mary Freeman, a Black girl navigating the segregation policies of rural Kansas. Putting sources of such varying genres into conversation gives us a more holistic picture of youth cultures in the early twentieth century. Most importantly, it enriches the archive with voices that have previously gone unheard, those of children and youths.
