On seeking global history's inner child.

Globalization and childhood are both treacherously familiar terms. Fashionable categories used in serious and provocative scholarship, their wide currency owes too much to their indeterminacy. Almost any screed about social change, whether denouncing its direction or proclaiming its promise, acquires a tone of historical depth by attributing those changes to globalization. Almost any assessment of social values gains poignancy and power when connected to issues of childhood. Not that these moves are wrong or the motives for making them suspect; they are just too easy. Words guaranteed a warm reception tend to induce loose thinking.

There is no general protection against such dangers, but let me begin by making some distinctions: between globalization and global history and between childhood and children. Globalization indicates a process of change and places it in time. Hence analysis in terms of globalization gains substance when that process is addressed directly, establishing the chronological period, social conditions, and cultural context in which it is thought to operate. Much of the writing about globalization is more interested, however, in the future than the past; for that suffix--ization--can barely contain the teleological thrust within it. To temper that, it helps to consider whether the process of change under study could shift direction or cease to matter. Furthermore, the case for globalization ought to include more than economics. (1) Not only should ideas, technology, culture, and political pressures be taken into account but analysis must weigh the possibility that these processes may not all work toward a common end nor favor the same sort of change.

History is helpful here. Thinking in terms of global history, rather than globalization, reduces teleological temptations and opens inquiry to a broader view. Global history, or the new global history as some of us call it, (2) is clearly inspired by contemporary experience but encompasses more than the history of globalization. It calls for exploring the past thematically (rather than through an all-encompassing narrative) and doing so through significant global relationships (thus seeking more than the fact of parallel development in, for example, commerce, state making or modernization). A global history of the present does not have to be a history of globalization. Global history does not assume chronology but rather discovers the periodization appropriate to specific topics. It looks for widespread connections while recognizing that change can be discontinuous and that one set of changes may induce other contradictory changes. Because such openness provides little initial guidance, focused research in terms of global history requires a clear statement of the historical problem to be investigated and a strategy for recognizing global connections. This is less overwhelming that it sounds at first, and I will suggest some ways of looking for global relationships. The important point, however, is the benefit that comes from thinking first within the framework of global history, thereby creating more solid grounds for determining when to declare that a process of globalization is in play.

The historical problems of interest here have to do with childhood, and another distinction--between childhood and children--although obvious and familiar, is worth recalling. Childhood is a cultural concept, being a child is a stage of life rooted in biology. The meaning of childhood is deeply embedded, in a family, a particular culture, and the social conditions of a specific time and place. These multiple vectors of meaning make childhood both a telling social indicator and a peculiarly complex topic. Even within the family the meaning of childhood changes with age, gender, and family size; between families with location, income, and status. In different contexts childhood refers to different phases of life, carries different expectations, and offers different protections, opportunities, and dangers. These complexities are multiplied in historical comparisons and analyses of change, essential as they are. A simpler category--children--can therefore be helpful, providing data structured by biology and subject to social and chronological definitions that may serve as a measure of contextual differences and historical changes.

For all this complexity, the study of childhood offers special rewards for the student of change. There is the remarkable conservatism surrounding childhood, as parents recreate their own childhood and sponsor games and toys that recover memories of past eras. In the most urban, developed countries, twenty-first-century children play with steam engines and Victorian dolls in old-fashioned doll houses. Through a lifetime of change, adults maintain modes of speech and food preferences absorbed when they were children. Yet children are more likely to adapt to and even embrace the new than any other segment of society. Examining social change through the study of childhood thus pushes beyond issues of accepting or resisting change, revealing how amalgams of old and new are forever reconstituted. Attitudes toward young and old are fundamental to the daily functioning of any society, and the link between youth and history has long fascinated scholars. (3)

Although connecting childhood to global history challenges cognitive custom within each field, the potential value of doing so justifies the undertaking. Let me suggest some ways of prompting questions that can connect childhood to global history. Admittedly, global histories most commonly address topics--such as trade, investment, imperial rule, military power, religion, migration, technology--that contain within themselves some account of the means by which they spread. Childhood does not provide that help, which may in part explain why discussions of global history and globalization generally give scant attention to children. (4) Nevertheless, the kinds of questions useful in exploring the global histories of other topics can be applied to global histories of childhood. These questions arise, it seems to me, from inquiry into four sorts of global relationships: 1) the common circumstances of human life, 2) the dissemination of ideas and techniques, 3) the web of connections that tie institutions and groups together, and 4) the cultural encounters between societies.

To ask about the common circumstances in which children live is to start with human biology and the fact that the needs of infants are similar everywhere. But the universal constraints of demography, geography, climate, diseases, diet, status hierarchies, and gender roles, although different in each society, are also all affected by global events. That fact is reflected in fertility rates and infant mortality, earlier puberty, patterns of mortality, and a population's age profile, all therefore connected to global history yet tied to local mores, social structures, and behaviors. It makes a difference whether children live in cities or the countryside and whether their lives are spent primarily outdoors or within homes, schools, and workplaces. For individual children, these conditions are related to the source of family incomes, to children's roles in work and leisure, and to the forms of education they experience. Finally, all this affects and is affected by patterns of kinship, religion, and mobility (including changes in location, opportunity, and status). If biology dictates when babyhood begins, societies determine when the dependency of childhood ends. Children's dependence on their ecological, structural, social, and cultural environment invites comparison between groups and across time. Questions that begin by probing circumstances common to children prompt recognition of their particular conditions in specific societies. As research necessarily becomes more focused, the scholar's research agenda for investigating the lives of children in a specific place and time begins to take shape.

The dissemination of ideas, institutions, techniques, and customs is central to much of the work on global history and globalization. Little of it refers to children, and at first glance children and childhood hardly seem central. Yet the spread of Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, or contemporary fundamentalism does affect children's lives. (5) Concepts of family and childhood, religious and secular, are disseminated by missionaries, (6) empires, charities and relief agencies, NGOs, and UNICEF; and elements of those conceptions are subsequently maintained by international laws and treaties. (7) In every society some indidivudals, groups, or even regions serve as agents of transmission. Traders, teachers, writers, shamans and doctors in effect select and filter the importation of commodities, technologies, ideas, and mores, facilitating their adaptation to local society. Anthropologists referred to this as the middleman's role, and we can identify those agents who most affect children's lives. Migration, with its special impact on children, also carries behaviors affecting childhood across societies, especially through the movement of women from Scandinavia, Ireland, Latin America, the Philippines and India employed as givers of childcare in Europe, the United States, and Saudi Arabia. (8) Governments borrow from each other's regulations of child labor, laws protecting children, and provisions for public schools, juvenile courts and prisons. Among many indirect consequences, global markets can have an impact on children, not only in factories but on the streets. (9) Such possibilities for local case studies relating childhood to global history can refine our understanding of global modes of dissemination as they expand our understanding of changes in childhood. One predictable and salutary result of such studies will be deepening evidence of how global influences and local practices function not as conflicting forces but rather share in continuing processes of adaptive change and creativity. Even direct imitation is always partial, as much absorbed into local values and culture as a marker of global change. When that lesson of global history is forgotten, the social sciences risk recapitulating old errors about tradition as static and modernity as uniform, external and intrusive.

Webs of connection are the most tangible elements of global history, most visible in the links formed through imperial rule and economic interests. (10) As states extend their power through armies, officials and bureaucracies; as traders establish regular trade routes and entrepots; as businesses establish agents and branch offices, they create nodes of interaction and networks of communication. For centuries intellectuals, business people, and professionals of every category have maintained international connections, sometimes personal but more often sustained through formal structures. Labor organizations, political parties (none more prominently than communist parties), religious institutions, corporations, investment firms, trade associations, and a myriad of others establish lasting connections that affect society as a whole but also individuals and families. Their regular activities, special meetings, and newsletters maintain (an often highly selective) awareness of other peoples and places. They mold patterns of travel, information flow, and awareness of other lands; and they influence opinion about the desirability of various political, economic, and social policies. Most of these organizations are not primarily concerned with childhood, although their social impact is something any account of children's lives must recognize. As webs of connection thicken, less dominant organizations and more informal communications follow parallel paths, and many of these do principally aim at children: scouts, church groups, other youth movements, international schools, student exchanges, pen pals and internet users. Whereas the spread of formal schooling is an example of global diffusion, changes in child labor reflect the kind of direct power transmitted through webs of connection. The terms of factory labor, even when they incorporate some local mores, are often determined by international corporations and the competitive standard they set. To counterbalance that pressure, a web of international treaties and regulation is called upon. (11) Global webs of connection are important elements in the lives of children.

In the largest sense nearly all global relations involve cultural encounters, but the questions are somewhat different from those outlined so far. The impact of cross-cultural contacts on global history (12) includes many elements that center on young people. (13) As issues of cultural identity become self-conscious and salient in response to global influences, children become a focus of training in rituals, folklore, and language thought to be threatened. Museums are doubly a global phenomenon, institutions imitated around the world as a means to codify cultures challenged by global influences. Schools themselves, on the other hand, are loci of cultural encounter that present children with values and techniques external to the family; and systems of formal schooling import values and techniques from ever-widening circles. Because cultural conflicts are inherent in the colonial schooling of colonizers and natives alike, close study of them exposes underlying attitudes (imperial and indigenous) that determine much of childhood experience through imposed prescriptions as to age, kinship, work, gender roles, and class as well as cultural content. (14) Less formal cultural practices influenced by global encounters can be even more telling in their impact on children's lives, (15) Travel (by tourists, business personnel, migrants, and refugees), consumerism, newspapers, magazines, film, television, radio, and music carry conceptions of childhood expressed in behavior, dress, and aspirations. Nor is this entirely new. Nineteenth-century fashions in children's dress, literature, and toys spread among the middle classes in Europe, the Americas, and parts of Asia along with new rules of behavior for children and parents. Because such influences are so multiple and ubiquitous and because related changes in fashion are so striking, the risk is less that studies of childhood will overlook them than that their significance will be assumed. Taken to represent all sorts of social tension and structural change, they can pass unchallenged as explanation. In themselves, blue jeans, fast foods, and backward baseball caps may or may not have lasting impact on values or life styles. American rap where English is poorly understood and Japanese video games outside Japan may take on meanings quite different from those prominent in their place of origin. In that sense popular culture often gains in translation, allowing new styles to exist comfortably beside old customs. (16) The very existence of a youth culture is surely significant, however, and its essential openness to global influences must tend to accelerate some aspects of social change. Today, when no society seems impermeable to it, youth culture itself has become a symbol of globalization. These self-aware youth cultures affect patterns of consumption and thus the economy, spur redefinition of leisure, question established mores, and sometimes become associated with political positions (in opposition to war or communist rule or in support of fundamentalism or revolution). As they approach adulthood, children may come to challenge with ammunition globally transported the culture they were expected to embody.

These four categories can be used as modes of inquiry, frameworks for thinking about global history. They can be helpful in opening the mind to some of the less obvious ways in which global history has relevance for a specific program of research. By stimulating new questions--and good questions lie at the heart of significant research--they prod the scholar to move beyond familiar issues, interpretations, and common assumptions. The researcher, of course, must decide which questions to pursue, weighing relevance, potential significance, and feasibility. These choices will largely determine the kinds of data needed, their likely sources, and the methods to be employed. One critical element remains. In addition to undertaking the research itself and adjusting to the surprises and detours it will bring, the scholar must establish the central historical problem or problems the research is to address. Whereas global history seems to invite limitless inclusion, well-defined problems require a tighter standard of relevance. A framework drawn from global history can then be useful in revealing whether the issues involved in the selected historical problems are distinctively new or historically recurrent, embedded in one society or common to many, connected to or separate from global historical processes.

Globalization is one description of those processes. Powerfully suggestive, it raises vital concerns about the contemporary world. By positing common influences and pressures across countries, it invites comparison and stimulates generalization. (17) Its very currency can, however, invite intellectual laziness and blurred meanings, offering easy answers before the critical questions have been carefully posed. Many presuppositions about globalization--that it is homogenizing, undermines ties of family and kinship, is locally depowering and merely an agent of foreign capitalism--are themselves an effect of globalization, the spread of a vocabulary describing change that barely engages local reality. The corrective requires more than firmer definitions. Criteria normative in global history need also to be applied in assertions about globalization. For example, how are global relations specifically involved in the topic being investigated? Can it be shown that these relations are part of a continuing historical process? The various elements (ideological, cultural, political, technological, and economic) that make for globalization need then to be sorted out, the ways in which they function analyzed, and an appropriate periodization set forth. Several benefits follow. Well-formulated historical problems can be addressed in light of theoretical work on global history and globalization. The shifting balance and reciprocity between local and global influences, so troubling for easy generalizations, become useful evidence for analyzing the process of social change--precisely because that process, even when clearly a result of globalization, is not an irresistible juggernaut that rolls in only one direction but rather a piecemeal series of reinterpretations and responses expressed through concrete activities rooted in specific needs, cultures, and choices. (18)

To study childhood in relation to global history and globalization offers the opportunity to connect the particulars of ordinary life with patterns of change across the world and over time. While building on the achievements of social history (with its penchant for history from below, the history of everyday life, and microhistory) this research adds new layers of historical significance for the study of childhood. At the same time, these fresh investigations also contribute to a better understanding of global history and globalization. If global influences alter the length of childhood beyond biological dependence, affect the promise and purpose of childhood and change its very meaning, then demonstrating that will be as important to theories of global history as to discussions of childhood. Much of the considerable scholarship on childhood already invites a global view. (19) Only individual studies can show when global factors lead to childhood's gaining special status, being differently defined or more formally protected. Such studies will tell us the circumstances in which childhood becomes surrounded by visions of opportunity or a prelude to unemployment. They can assess whether the children of Latin America, Japan, and Europe have so much in common as to be a factor in globalization, making childhood itself a motor of social change.

Studies of childhood placed in a global framework can also use, and cast new light on, other larger bodies of scholarly literature. Globalization is most frequently thought of as the spread of capitalism, with its often disruptive impact on patterns of trade and production and on the material conditions in which people live. Research on childhood can offer a fresh look at that aspect of globalization. Discussions of imperialism, world systems, and dependency often proceed from the top down, emphasizing dominance and subordination, the use of power, and the intentions of map-drawing statesmen and profit-seeking entrepreneurs and corporations. Studying children allows the scholar to start from a kind of neutrality that allows a fresh look. For children, the impact of globalization, however harsh, is likely at first to be indirect. The responses that emerge from local society and culture may incorporate other, conflicting global influences, giving agency to families and children themselves.

Women's history and family history, mature and interdisciplinary fields of study, also offer ways to investigate the nexus between childhood and global history. In these fields, too, extant literatures rich in findings, controversies, and theories allow new views of global processes. The history of that literature also teaches something that global historians would do well to keep in mind. It took decades of painstaking work to establish that the modern, nuclear family is not so modern, that kinship patterns can be maintained even as they usefully adapt to social change, that the impact of industrialization on families was not so simply destructive as once thought, and that family structures did not merely receive the impact of industrialization but had an impact on it. (20) Instead of treating the family as a fixed unit, family studies currently attend to life courses and accompanying changes in the meaning of family. Research on childhood may similarly reveal a crucial flexibility in global relationships.

Global history can also gain from the distinctive, if somewhat disjointed, historical literature on youth, particular youth movements and youth culture. Some of this work focuses on the political importance of having a population a high proportion of which is young, as in the French Revolution, the Russian revolution, and Germany in the 1930s. (21) A larger body of work treats political movements centered on youth, from Mazzini's Young Italy and other nationalist organizations to the protests that swept societies from Japan to Czechoslovakia in 1968. (22) These interests rise toward theories of history in the literature on generations. Between the first and second world wars, Karl Mannheim and Jose Ortega y Gasset published influential claims for the importance of generational attitudes, (23) and recurrent formulations explore generational conflict as an explanatory concept. (24) Of course, not every generational conflict is transformative, and defining a generation can raise intractable difficulties. The idea that a whole generation thinks or acts in a characteristic way has proven illusory, (25) and it will be no easier to determine whether age cohorts in different countries are more similar to each other than to their older or younger compatriots. Even so, there is something here for global historians. It makes a difference whether the young are viewed with condescension or envy and whether a society considers generations to constitute cyclically repeated stages of life or sequentially distinctive stances toward the world. Even with varying national emphases (romanticism and nationalism in Germany, Christian uplift and scouting in Great Britain, students in France and the United States), themes run through this literature that are particularly suggestive for global history. If the young readily embrace new (globally circulated) ideas and bring youthful energy to public action and political mobilization, if they are eager to replace the established social order represented by their parents, then their contact with global influences merits special attention. (26)

Initially, writing on generations focused on the role of ideas, on generations as carriers of the spirit of an age or creators of new intellectual movements and styles. Current writing is less likely to make the connection with high culture in order to describe an entire era and more inclined to treat youth culture as a distinctive factor, somewhat isolated in its own society yet global, subversive, and influential. (27) Whether or not youth cultures travel more easily than culture generally, carry more or less influence, and have distinctive meanings are important issues for the global history of childhood.

Thus the study of children and childhood even in a single place and time can draw (as many admirable studies do) on a variety of disciplines, theories, and broad topics that relate childhood experience and global history. Childhood, after all, describes a condition universal to human kind, one buffeted and altered by waves of diffusion, prodded and constrained by webs of connection, both product and agent of cultural encounters.

ENDNOTES

1. The emphasis, however, is usually on economics and then politics, as in Colin Hay and David Marsh, Demystifying Globalization (New York, 2000). But see Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis, 1996) and A.G. Hopkins, ed. Globalization in World History (London, 2002).

2. Bruce Mazlish has been a leader in new global history beginning with Bruce Mazlish and Ralph Buultjens, eds., Conceptualizing Global History (Boulder, 1993), and note the tolerant diversity of approach among these essays. See also Mazlish, "Comparing Global to World History," The Journal of Interdisciplinary History. 28:3 (1998), 385-95 and http://www.newglobalhistory.com/.

3. Philippe Aries, Centuries of Childhood (New York, 1965) is of course the classic work. For a more recent and more sociological view, Alison James and Alan Prout, eds., Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood (London, 1997).

4. Women's studies in particular has much to offer research on globalization and childhood; yet even works that address closely related themes tend not to reach beyond women's lives to treat globalization and childhood, see Paloma de Villota, ed., Globalizacion a Que Precio: El Imparto en la Mujeres del Norte y del Sur (Barcelona, 2001).

5. Peter van der Veer, ed., Conversion to Modernities: The Globalization of Christianity. (London, 1996); Raymond Grew, "Seeking the Cultural Context of Fundamentalisms," in Martin Marty and R. Scott Appleby, eds., Religion, Ethnicity, and Self-Identity: Nations in Transition (Hanover, N.H., 1997), 19-34.

6. There is a vast and stimulating anthropological and historical literature on the impact of Christian missionaries; J.S. Cummins, ed., Christianity and Missions, 1450-1800 (Aldershot, Great Britain, 1997) suggests something of its range even for the early modern period.

7. David Archard, Children, Rights, and Childhood (London, 1993); Jo Boyden Children: Rights and Responsibilities (London, 1985); Philip Alston, Stephen Parker, John Seymour, eds., Children, Rights, and the Law (Oxford, 1982); Stuart C. Aiken, "Global Crises of Childhood: rights, justice, and the unchildlike child," Area 33:2 (June, 2001), 119-27, emphasizes the disruptive effects of the spread of capitalist markets on "the global child." As an example of global claims, see UNICEF's publication, Gerson Lansdown, A Model for Action: The Children's Rights Development Unit: Promoting the Convention on the Rights of the Child in the United Kingdom (Florence, 1996).

8. Pierrette Hondagnen-Sotel and Ernestine Avila, "I'm Here, But I'm There: The Meanings of Latina Transnational Motherhood," Gender and Society 2:5 (October, 1997), 548-71; Kimberly J. Mortgan and Kathrin Zippel, "Paid to Care: The Origins and Effects of Care Leave Policies in Western Europe," Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State, and Society 10:1 (Spring 2003), 49-85; Rhacel Salazar Parrenas, The Global Servants: Migrant Filipina Domestic Workers in Rome and Los Angeles (Stanford, 2000); Sanling Wong, "Diverted Mothering: Representations of Caregivers of Color in the Age of Multiculturalism," in E. Glenn, G. Chang, and L. Forcey, eds., Mothering: Ideology, Experience, and Agency (London, 1997); Julia Wrigley, Other People's Children: An Intimate Account of the Dilemmas Facing Middle Class Parents and the Women They Hire to Raise Their Children (New York, 1995).

9. Sharon Stephens, Children and the Politics of Culture (Princeton, 1995).

10. I use webs of connection in a more formal and limited sense than the broader metaphor effectively employed in one of the most important of recent works, J.R. McNeill and William H. McNeill, The Human Web: A Bird's-Eye View of World History (New York, 2003).

11. Hugh Cunningham and Pier Paolo Viazzo, eds., Child Labour in Historical Perspective, 1800-1985 (Florence, 1996) is an introductory overview, appropriately sponsored by UNICEF; and from the International Labour Office, Combatting Child Labour (Geneva, 1988). Olga Nieuwenhuys, Children's Lifeworlds: Gender, Welfare and Labour in the Developing World (London, 1994).

12. Jean-Pierre Warnier, La mondialisation de la culture (Paris, 2003); Jonathan Friedman, Cultural Identity and Global Process (London, 1994); Stuart Hall, David Held, and Tony McGrew, Modernity and Its Futures (Cambridge, Eng., 1992); Anthony D King, ed., Culture, Globalization and the World-System: Contemporary Conditions for the Representation of Identity (Minneapolis, 1997).

13. See Reuven Kahane in collaboration with Tamar Rapoport, The Origins of Postmodern Youth: Informal Youth Movements in a Comparative Perspective (New York, 1997).

14. Ann Laura Stoler, Children on the Imperial Divide: Sentiments and Citizenship in Colonial Southeast Asia (Ann Arbor, 1995) is an important example.

15. Sharon Stephens, ed., Children and the Politics of Culture (Princeton, 1995).

16. For an example, see Doreen Massey, "The Spatial Consciousness of Youth Cultures," in Tracey Skelton and Gil Valentine, eds., Cool Places: Geographies of Youth Cultures (London, 1998), 121-29.

17. Comparing youth in New York City and the Sudan, Cindi Katz, "Disintegrating Developments: Global Economic Restructuring and the Eroding of Ecologies of Youth," in Skelton and Valentine, eds., Cool Places, 130-44, finds that in both places the effect of international capitalism and globalized cultural production has been that people no longer learn when children the things they will need to know as adults.

18. Although many have made this point, it is still too easily overlooked. Among the earliest and most influential formulations have been by Roland Robertson in many works; among them, Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture (London, 1992), where he speaks of the "universalism of particularism and the particularization of universalism," 102. See also Kevin R. Cox, ed., Spaces of Globalization: Reasserting the Power of the Local (New York, 1997); and Christophe Demaziere, ed., Du local au global: Les initiatives locales pour le developpement economique en Europe et en Amerique (Paris, 1996).

19. Now a decade old, Childhood: A Global Journal of Child Research publishes a great deal of research open to a global historical framework.

20. These points are made by Tamara K. Hareven in her useful summary of the present state of family history, "The Impact of the History of the Family and the Life Course on the Sociology of the Family," in Fredrik Engelstad and Ragnvald Kallenber, eds, Social Time and Social Change: Perspectives on Sociology and History (Oslo, 1999), 130-54.

21. A classic presentation is Herbert Moller, "Youth as a Force in the Modern World," Comparative Studies in Society and History 10:3 (April, 1967), 237-60.

22. La jeunesse et ses mouvements: Influence sur l'evolution des societes aux xixe et xxe siecles (Paris, 1992), published by the Commission Internationale d'Histoire des Mouvements Sociaux et des Structures Sociales, has brief reports on two dozen countries. George Paloczi-Horwath, Youth Up in Arms: A Political and Social World Survey (London, 1971) and Friedrich Heer, Revolutions of Our Time: Challenge of Youth (London, 1974) are more popular surveys.

23. Karl Mannheim, "The Problem of Generations" in Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge (first German edition, 1928); Jose Ortega y Gasset, The Theme of our Time (first Spanish edition 1938), which begins with "The Idea of Generations" and expands the theme through subsequent chapters.

24. Antony Esler, ed., The Youth Revolution: The Conflict of Generations in Modern History (New York, 1974 and Generational Studies: A Basic Bibliography (mimeograph, 1979). The Journal of Social Issues in 1974, vol. 22, devoted two numbers to the question of generations; Daedalus had a special issue, 107:4, in 1978; as did XXe Siecle, no. 22, in 1989. Alan B. Spitzer, "The Historical Problem of Generations," American Historical Review 78: 2 (December, 1973), 1353-85 finds the concept valuable while acknowledging all its difficulties. Julian Marias, Generations: a Historical Method (Tuscaloosa, 1970) took up the ideas of Ortega.

25. Vincent Drouin, Enquete sur les generations et la politique, 1958-1995 (Paris, 1995) emphasizes the cleavage between those born before and after World War II, but in Italy the response to globalization appears not to be generational, Enrico Maria Tacchi, "Professionisti milanesi e globalizzazione: relazioni internazionali, tecnologie e atteggiamenti culturali," in Vincenzo Cesareo, ed, Globalizzaione e contesti locali: una recerca sulla realta italiana (Milan, 2000), 323-70. Notable, too however, is the remarkable shift in attitudes toward family among successive generations of Asian migrants to Hawaii, Shin Pyo Kang, The East Asian Culture and Its Transformation in the West (Seoul, 1978), 81-109.

26. Consider the potential implications of youth on the movements of resistance discussed in Jackie Smith and Hank Johnston, eds., Globalization and Resistance: Transnational Dimensions of Social Movements. (Lanham, Maryland, 2002).

27. Some recent examples: Vered Amit-Talal and Helena Wulff, eds., Youth Cultures: A Cross Cultural Perspective London, 1995); Johan Fornas and Goren Bolin, eds., Youth Culture in Late Modernity (London, 1995); Anne-Marie Sohn, Age tendre et tete de bois: histoire des jeunes des annees 1960 (Paris, 2001); Kaspar Maase, BRAVO Amerika: Erkundungen zur Jugenkulture der Bundesrepublik in den funfziger Jahren (Hamberg, 1992); Uta G. Poiger, Jazz, Rock, and Rebels: Cold War Politics and American Culture in a Divided Germany (Berkeley, 2000); Roberto Cartocci, Diventare grandi in tempi di cinismo: identita nazionale tra i giovani italiani (Bologna, 2002); David J. Jackson, Entertainment and Politics: The Influence of Pop Culture on Youth and Political Socialization (New York, 2004).

By Raymond Grew

University of Michigan 

University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Department of History

Ann Arbor, MI 48109