As a result, not only is how we define youth changeable, but we are also alert to the fact that age categories have fluid boundaries. Youth is a very nimble category, a shape shifter that has changed quite a bit over time. This is true for two reasons: Youth and old age are categories grounded in biology but defined by culture, and the fruitful areas of investigation historians of youth have opened are ones from which scholars of old age can learn. We have come a long way from assuming that there is something stable and fixed about life cycle experiences that are dependent on biology.
How can the historical study of aging benefit from what historians have learned by studying youth? As someone who has spent more than forty years learning about young people, I think that there is quite a lot of overlap between the two kinds of historical inquiry.
PHOTO COURTESY LIBRARY OF CONGRESS How the Old Can Learn from the Young Paula S.
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