| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Rodney Hessinger. Seduced, Abandoned, and Reborn: Visions of Youth in Middle-Class America, 1780–1850. (Early American Studies.) Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2005. Pp. 255. $45.00.

In this ambitious book, Rodney Hessinger explores the response of early national Philadelphia to disorderly, urban, middle-class youth, arguing that these young men predicted and indeed shaped emerging, middle-class values. Hessinger demonstrates that the leaders of colleges and churches, reformers, and advice literature authors worked to "seduce" these young men to internalize proper middle-class values. Mimicking Lockean methods of childrearing, these cultural authorities used persuasion rather than coercion in their crusade. This change in society's response to unruly young men, particularly in urban areas, emerged as the power of the rural patriarchs of colonial America declined. In Hessinger's formulation, men left the farm to work in the burgeoning cities instead of waiting for what had become a meager inheritance of land. Without parental oversight, these young men made their own rules as society struggled to tutor them into middle-class adulthood. Together, cultural authorities and the young men of the city crafted a model of manhood that emphasized both self-control and independence.

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