NEW JOURNAL ROUNDTABLE | Chronological Age: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis | The American Historical Review

AHR ROUNDTABLE

CHRONOLOGICAL AGE: A USEFUL CATEGORY OF HISTORICAL ANALYSIS

Introduction 

“Many historians regard chronological age as a simple fact that can be used to frame other topics worthier of study. Thus, biographers use age to define the passage of life, social historians use age to track populations, and cultural and political historians rely on birth cohorts to define generational shifts. But what if age itself has a history that we need to explain? What if the ages recorded in archival documents are not transparent facts, but rather the traces of a historical process through which people take up artificial categories and impose them upon individual lives or use them to build social structures?”

Corinne T. Field, Nicholas L. Syrett

The American Historical Review, Volume 125, Issue 2, April 2020, Pages 371–384

Old Age in European Cultures: A Significant Presence from Antiquity to the Present 

Pat Thane

The American Historical Review, Volume 125, Issue 2, April 2020, Pages 385–395

Meticulous Imprecision: Calculating Age in Colonial Spanish American Law 

Bianca Premo

The American Historical Review, Volume 125, Issue 2, April 2020, Pages 396–406

Power, Knowledge, and the Epistemic Contract on Age: The Case of Colonial India 

Ishita Pande

The American Historical Review, Volume 125, Issue 2, April 2020, Pages 407–417

A Feminist Methodology of Age-Grading and History in Africa 

Corrie Decker

The American Historical Review, Volume 125, Issue 2, April 2020, Pages 418–426

A Man at Twenty, Aged at Twenty-Five: The Conscription Exam Age in Japan 

Sayaka Chatani

The American Historical Review, Volume 125, Issue 2, April 2020, Pages 427–437

Age and the Construction of Gendered and Raced Citizenship in the United States 

Corinne T. Field, Nicholas L. Syrett

The American Historical Review, Volume 125, Issue 2, April 2020, Pages 438–450

The Moral Hierarchies of Age Standards: The UN Debates a Common Minimum Marriage Age, 1951–1962 

Ashwini Tambe

The American Historical Review, Volume 125, Issue 2, April 2020, Pages 451–459