Inventing Modern Adolescence

Sarah Chinn is an extraordinarily creative scholar who draws on an unusually rich palette of sources to create this provocative work. Inventing Modern Adolescence, our immigration history to our contemporary concerns about youth in an original and exciting way. Virginia Yans, Board of Governors Distinguished Service Professor, in History, Rutgers Universi

Through close readings of literary and photographic texts, Chinn substantially revises and re-periodizes the history of youth culture in the United States, showing how non-elite cultural agents forged teenage identity decades earlier than historians have previously supposed. Robin Bernstein, Assistant Professor, Harvard University

In prose alive with the bold, fun-loving, risk-taking energy of the adolescents she studies, Sarah Chinn uncovers the American origins of the very idea of a rebellious and distinctive youth culture. Chinn's sharply original and convincing arguments show how the specific conditions of immigrant life fostered the generational conflict and leisure consumption that have come to seem the very nature of adolescence. Inventing Modern Adolescence describes in lively detail how 'the teenager,' that quintessentially American figure, was formed through the work and play of brave, independent, immigrant kids.

Karen Sánchez-Eppler, author of Dependent States

Sarah Chinn brilliantly reads Lewis Hine photographs, Abraham Cahan fictions, Margaret Mead anthropology, dance hall pamphlets, museum brochures, even White House reports to illuminate how early 20th-century working kids produced what we know today as 'adolescence.' What she does, remarkably, is make teen culture interesting, even meaningful, to adults. Paul Lauter, Allan K. & Gwendolyn Miles Smith Professor of Literature, Trinity College