Age Norms and Intercultural Interaction in Colonial North America

This interdisciplinary study examines how age norms shaped the experiences of Europeans, Native Americans, and African Americans in colonial North America, exploring how diverse population groups conceptualized the human life course and how they adhered to culturally specific sets of beliefs about the young and old. Utilizing evidence drawn from a variety of secondary and primary sources, the authors also show that, as various cultural groups interacted in colonial North America, their views of specific age cohorts evolved and clashed in important ways. Although age is a category of analysis often overlooked by scholars, this book demonstrates that it was pivotal for everyone who lived in early North America, including the various Native American tribes that inhabited the eastern part of the continent. It also addresses the different ways that European colonists experienced the human life course in three geopolitical regions: New England, the Middle Colonies, and the South. It further explains how age norms played a significant role in both the development of racialized slavery in North America and in relationships between Europeans and Native Americans. This study reveals that even within the uneven power dynamic often present during colonial encounters, African American and Native American attitudes and practices related to human aging proved resilient and influential.Overall, by examining how early Americans viewed and treated children, youths, and older adults, this book is one of the first to systematically explore the deep historical roots of age norms in territories that would eventually become a part of the United States. Many of the beliefs about human aging that emerged during the colonial period continue to shape approaches to childrearing, education, health care, and numerous other issues. Furthermore, this study—in addition to providing unique and valuable historical information—offers readers alternative ways of understanding and approaching the human life course, making it relevant to both policymakers and scholars working in a variety of fields.

This interdisciplinary exploration of age norms on the British North American mainland proposes that the insights of today's field of human development can inform social histories of Colonial American regional populations and their intersections with other groups. A short introductory chapter sketches some possible applications to the period before European contact in very general terms, followed by larger chapters examining first southern, then New England, and finally mid-Atlantic settlements. A long chapter describes how age grouping affected social interactions among the regional groups. Interactions among colonists and Indians are described as collision, and slavery receives a separate treatment at the end of the book. The final and most useful chapter suggests directions for further research that hold promise, should future studies employ the methodological rigor expected of both historical and human development studies and, in particular, of the use of quantitative analyses rather than generalizations from the specific example to the universal. The evolution of an American doctrine of legal minority might well be informed by the further study suggested here… Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students/faculty., Drawing on a diverse array of sources, including laws, personal papers, runaway slave advertisements, newspapers, and government documents, Eden and Eden are among the few scholars to simultaneously tackle the way that age worked for the young and the old, instead of sequestering one group away from the other. In uniting the youthful and the aged, Age Norms provides a rich account of how age mattered in colonial America.... Eden and Eden have provided scholars with a useful synthesis of the varied meanings of age stages along the eastern seaboard of colonial North America, demonstrating in particular that different cultural beliefs about childhood, youth, and old age were key to how whites, Africans, and Indians understood each other and engaged in the colonial contest of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Future studies shall look to Age Norms as a guide when they seek to establish just how pervasive chronological age was to varied groups of early Americans., The Edens are to be commended for giving us a comprehensive and interdisciplinary view of a complex history of age norms over thirteen colonies, three major culture groups, and two centuries., Jason Eden and Naomi Eden expand the intellectual domain of age studies in their important, revisionist study of the varieties of (old) age in colonial North America. Not only do they compare the age-based status of tribal elders to conditions among the young and middle-aged in Native American communities, but they also explore the ways that age norms affected perspectives and relations across racial, ethnic, and gender lines., This is a timely and compelling book on an unfairly neglected subject—the importance of age as a category of analysis. This insightful and novel work combines both extremes of the life course: old age and youth. Jason Eden and Naomi Eden’s work epitomizes the benefits of interdisciplinary collaboration in awakening important new historical insights. This wide-sweeping consideration of the intersection of biological realities with cultural preoccupations about youth and old age across racial and power differences shows us the complicated early America we too often forget.

Jason Eden is professor of history at St. Cloud State University. Naomi Eden holds dual master’s degrees from St. Cloud State University in gerontology and marriage and family therapy.