The Age of Youth
American Society and the Two World Wars

Reveals how young Americans and their education became intertwined with adults' views about US national security.

Masako Hattori (Author)

9781009303361, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 24 April 2025

243 pages
23.5 x 15.8 x 2 cm, 0.52 kg

'Masako Hattori offers an original and provocative socio-political look at the rise of a national security state during the long World War I era. She convincingly upends assumptions about youth and education by redefining them in the context of national security concerns. A brilliant look at diplomacy and its domestic roots.' Tom Zeiler, University of Colorado Boulder

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.

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.

Subject Areas: History of the Americas [HBJK]