The Rise and Fall of the American Teenager, Thomas Hine
Hine describes American teen-age as a twentieth-century invention
designed, more or less intentionally, to keep teenagers out of the
serious labor market while grooming them as a consumer market. The
details are interesting either if you're thinking about current
problems of development, and what social systems have worked or failed
to work, or if you want some background for old fiction. Good bits are
the demographics of the US during the Revolution (half the population
under sixteen, most of them working adult jobs as soon as they were
strong enough) through Lowell mill girlhoods, Flaming Youth,
Depression-era laws keeping teenagers out of work - driving them into
delinquency or the unprepared high schools, and effectively forcing the
age-segregated youth culture we think of as 'teenagerhood' today. He
doesn't think our policy of refusing self-determination based on age is
a very good one, especially when the legal system is swinging towards
treating juvenile crimes like adult ones.
Also has a popularizing but not trendy sense of humor and a
helpful, though not scholarly, bibliography.
So wrote clew in
History (20th c.).