Life Course in History

Abstract

This article will review the changing historical literature on the life course and life cycle from the 1960s to the present. It will begin with the impact of Philip Aries' Centuries of Childhood (first English language edition, 1965) on the historical study of childhood and then move to the work that has been on youth, middle age, and older age groups since that time. Because the most important developments in the field have occurred in Europe and North America, the piece will necessarily focus on the Western world, using non-western examples only for comparative purposes. The article will pay attention to the nuances of class, gender, and ethnicity that have been recently introduced into the literature. In addition to reviewing the literature, the article will provide a brief overview of current understandings of the life course from early modern to modern times. It will discuss the fludity of age and life course categories prior to the nineteenth century as background to understanding the tightening of these definitions under the impact of industrilization, nation-state formation, and the rise of positivism in the natural and social sciences. It will show how in the last twenty years these categories have come to be questioned, and how new understandings of the life course and aging are now emerging in the context of the demogrphic change, the restructuring teh nation-state, and teh emergence of new interpretative frameworks. The piece will conclude with a sense that historical studies of the life course and life cycle are moving in a humanistic direction, restoring a sense of contingency and agency that was apparent in the first generation of historical treatments of the subject without entirely displacing more positivist notions.