The Age of Youth tackles the complicated relationship between youth, national security, and education from World War I to World War II. It reveals how the United States created a time-specific political and social category of youth that relied on the expectation that military-age men should devote themselves to the future of their country. Analyzing policies from the Reserve Officers' Training Corps, the New Deal, wartime military training programs, and those governing the post-World War II occupation of Japan, Masako Hattori demonstrates that the priorities of national security conditioned young people's access to education in the US in the first half of the twentieth century, in both wartime and peacetime, and explores how the evolving link between youth, education, and national security shaped and reshaped the cultural concept of “youth” in American society.

‘Masako Hattori blends the histories of youth, education, and national security to tell a bigger story about the varied and profound impacts of world wars on American society. She even takes us to postwar Japan, offering a fascinating and original comparative of how young people on opposing sides of the war experienced its end. Most of all, this study invites us to ponder anew an uncomfortable but resilient belief in American culture: that war abroad can foster social reform at home.'

Laura McEnaney - author of Postwar: Waging Peace in Chicago

‘Masako Hattori offers an original and provocative socio-political look at the rise of a national security state during the long World War I era. She convincingly upends assumptions about youth and education by redefining them in the context of national security concerns. A brilliant look at diplomacy and its domestic roots.'

Tom Zeiler - University of Colorado Boulder