Review:
Provides valuable insights on the literary, artistic, and legal material on youth in selected times and places and in illuminating prevailing cultural values. "A History of Young People in the West..".contributes numerous insights to the growing literature on social and family history. -- David Wagner "Washington Times" The studies "A History of Young People" contains are interesting, and they have the great merit of making the work of some notable Italian and French scholars accessible to an Anglophone public. They are well translated, preserving the ornateness of the originals...Collectively, the lasting impression these volumes leave is of the exploitation of innocence, and the control exerted by those in authority--church, state or parents--over the lives of children growing up. -- Rosamond McKitterick "New York Times Book Review" [Provides] valuable insights on the literary, artistic, and legal material on youth in selected times and places and in illuminating prevailing cultural values. "A History of Young People in the West,.".contributes numerous insights to the growing literature on social and family history. -- David Wagner "Washington Times" The studies ["A History of Young People"] contains are interesting, and they have the great merit of making the work of some notable Italian and French scholars accessible to an Anglophone public. They are well translated, preserving the ornateness of the originals...Collectively, the lasting impression these volumes leave is of the exploitation of innocence, and the control exerted by those in authority--church, state or parents--over the lives of children growing up.--Rosamond McKitterick "New York Times Book Review " "A History of Young People in the West"...contributes numerous insights to the growing literature on social and family history.--David Wagner "Washington Times " One of the most fascinating features of the 17 essays, and introduction, that make up these two volumes is the predominance of that anxiety, from ancient Greece to Fifties American culture, to bring the young within the ideological embrace of the "polis", or state.--Seamus Deane "The Observer " Youth is a social construct; it is also a biological state. It therefore always shares some characteristics across cultures, for example the onset of early sexual maturity, while also reflecting each society's different expectations. Social class and gender will be crucial too in determining how these expectations are experienced by young people. So, given this model of what we understand by 'youth', a two-volume history of young people can only be a highly ambitious project...The editors of these two volumes and their translators are to be congratulated for providing some fascinating reading.--Nicholas Tucker "History Today "
From the Back Cover:
However swiftly it passes, youth is always with us, a perpetual passing phase, an apprenticeship to the myriad ways of the world, subject of panegyrics and diatribes, romances and cautionary tales from antiquity to our day . This two-volume history is the first to present a comprehensive account of what youth has been in the West and what it has meant through the ages. Brought together by Giovanni Levi and Jean-Claude Schmitt, a company of gifted historians and social scientists traces the changing character and status of young people from the gymnasia of ancient Greece to the lycees of modern France, from the sweatshops of the industrial revolution to the crucibles of Nazi youth.
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