Obedient sons

As Glenn Wallach shows in this imaginative and revealing study, the meaning of the concepts of "youth" and "generations" has not always been the same. During the early colonial period, the Puritans established a distinctive way of talking about generations that emphasized continuity rather than conflict. Later echoed during the Great Awakening and the American Revolution, this language was at once conservative in motivation and activist in vision, investing the country's young men with a special responsibility for building a new society that preserved traditional values. In the first half of the nineteenth century, figurative as well as literal sons of the founding fathers expressed this sense of generational obligation in young men's voluntary associations and organizations promoting American art and literature, culminating in the "Young America" phenomenon of the 1840s and 1850s. By revealing the shifting meaning of language over time, including its gendered implications, Obedient Sons challenges historians to rethink many long-standing assumptions about the way Americans have understood their relationship to the past and the future.