Innocent Babies and Gray Heads: Ideas about Age in American History

Catalog description

This course will consider the influence of ideas about chronological age and the way these expectations have shaped life and public policy throughout American history. Come discover how American ideas about childhood, adulthood and old age have changed over four centuries. The course will investigate the wide variety of ideas about what chronological age tells us about who people are and what they are capable of. Boy kings, child brides, protected and idealized pastoral childhoods - all have been possible and promoted at times in American life. So, too, have both respect for old age and revulsion at the old existed. The course will consider how society decided how old is old enough to drink and how old is old enough to be drafted. This course will examine questions such as: What makes an adult anyway? Why were teenagers once considered adults? Why is 65 now retirement age?