ABSTRACT
For at least the last five hundred years, adolescence has been a historically and culturally contingent transition between childhood and adulthood. For the past half-century, historians have explored the social construction of adolescence, how adolescents have adapted to and influenced its changing contours, and the youth cultures produced in the tensions between them. Families, institutions, laws, and developmental stages have saddled adolescents with a compulsory futurity that insists they will always be headed elsewhere. Boys’ and girls’ success or failure in becoming men and women has been measured through their capacities to grow up in the right ways, on the right schedules. Young people have acted on a continuum between conforming to and transgressing age roles designed to harness them. In the process, they have transformed expectations regarding identity, work, school, family, morality, nationalism, and the market.
