| Book Reviews | The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 131.1

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| Book Reviews | The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 131.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Reviews

Seduced, Abandoned, and Reborn: Visions of Youth in Middle-Class America, 1780–1850. By Rodney Hessinger. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005. 255p. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $45.)

Seduced, Abandoned, and Reborn is aptly subtitled. This is a book about ideas—ideas middle-class urban white Americans held about youth in the early national and antebellum eras. Set in Philadelphia, this book explores the "problem of youth" utilizing a series of case studies examining the rise of seduction narratives, the establishment of colleges and Sunday schools, advice literature for urban clerks, and antimasturbation literature. While these subjects have been explored by specialists concerned with religion, education, sexuality, and gender, Hessinger brings these topics together under the rubric of exploring bourgeois culture—and posits the overarching thesis that middle-class cultural identity was forged through the struggles to guide and control youth—thus placing the "problem of youth" at the center of antebellum cultural development.

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