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Book Review
Canada and the United States
| Kriste Lindenmeyer. The Greatest Generation Grows Up: American Childhood in the 1930s. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee. 2005. Pp. xiii, 304. $27.50.
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| In this book, Kriste Lindenmeyer surveys a broader cohort of Depression youth than any previous historian. Probing the Depression's impact on infants, toddlers, children in the primary and secondary grades, dropouts, transients, the ill, youth on the farm, in school, and in work ranging from the street trades to the mills, she then turns the question around and asks how the responses of young people helped recast their social identities and roles. Writing with exceptional clarity, she maintains that government and children together in "the 1930s established the legal and cultural infrastructure for the ideal of American childhood that proliferated in the postwar years" (p. 5). Decorated with individual stories and dramatic anecdotes, hers is the most accessible survey yet of a sprawling generation conventionally studied only in its constituent parts. |
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