Age of Youth - American Society and the Two World Wars

The Age of Youth tackles the complicated relationship between youth, national security, and education from World War I to World War II. It reveals how the United States created a time-specific political and social category of youth that relied on the expectation that military-age men should devote themselves to the future of their country. Analyzing policies from the Reserve Officers' Training Corps, the New Deal, wartime military training programs, and those governing the post-World War II occupation of Japan, Masako Hattori demonstrates that the priorities of national security conditioned young people's access to education in the US in the first half of the twentieth century, in both wartime and peacetime, and explores how the evolving link between youth, education, and national security shaped and reshaped the cultural concept of "youth" in American society.

List of contents

Introduction; 1. Uncle Sam's Khaki university and the first world war; 2. Educational institutions and military training in the 1920s and the 1930s; 3. The great depression, national security, and the redefinition of youth; 4. Conscripting youth for World War II; 5. Reimagining youth during wartime; 6. Youth in US- occupied Japan; Conclusion; Index.

About the author

Masako Hattori is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the National University of Singapore.

Product details

• Authors: Masako Hattori, Masako (National University of Singapore) Hattori
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press ELT
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 30.06.2025
• EAN: 9781009303361
• ISBN: 978-1-0-0930336-1
• No. of pages: 243
• Series: Military, War, and Society in Modern American History
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > History > Regional and national histories; Non-fiction book > History > Miscellaneous; First World War, HISTORY / United States / 20th Century, Second World War, History of the Americas, Age groups and generations