"Haber and Gratton lay to rest many conventional assumptions concerning the place of older persons in American history." -- Choice "Haber and Gratton's meaty little book does more than provide an intelligent synthesis of existing old-age history; its new interpretations, insights, and shifts of emphasis will provoke responses and help move historians' work away from the now threadbare original disputes in e field toward new questions and approaches." -- American Historical Review "Indeed, Haber and Gratton give us a refreshingly multidimensional history of the shift in old-age security from work, assets, or children to government annuities." -- Contemporary Sociology "... the history of old age has finally come of age. The authors successfully synthesize the best of the earlier social and cultural studies with new empirical evidence and recent findings of economic historians." -- Journal of Economic History "A truly 'revisionary' interpretation of the cultural and structural forces that shaped the elderly's lives from the colonial period to the present. Lucid and controversial, [it] is bound to be widely cited and hotly contested." -- W. Andrew Achenbaum This social history of the American elderly offers a provocative new view of aging in the United States. It revises traditional assumptions about the economic status of the old and challenges the long-held contention that industrialization destroyed family relationships.

Why did the United States lag behind Germany, Britain, and Sweden in adopting a national plan for the elderly? When the Social Security Act was finally enacted in 1935, why did it depend on a class-based double standard? Why is old age welfare in the United States still less comprehensive than its European counterparts? In this sophisticated analytical chronicle of one hundred years of American welfare history, Jill Quadagno explores the curious birth of old age assistance in the United States. Grounded in historical research and informed by social science theory, the study reveals how public assistance grew from colonial-era poor laws, locally financed and administered, into a massive federal bureaucracy.

To explore how mobile technology can be employed to enhance the lives of older adults, the Board on Behavioral, Cognitive, and Sensory Sciences of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine commissioned 6 papers, which were presented at a workshop held on December 11 and 12, 2019. These papers review research on mobile technologies and aging, and highlight promising avenues for further research.

Eighteen. Twenty-one. Sixty-five. In America today, we recognize these numbers as key transitions in our lives—precise moments when our rights and opportunities change—when we become eligible to cast a vote, buy a drink, or enroll in Medicare. This volume brings together scholars of childhood, adulthood, and old age to explore how and why particular ages have come to define the rights and obligations of American citizens. Since the founding of the nation, Americans have relied on chronological age to determine matters as diverse as who can marry, work, be enslaved, drive a car, or qualify for a pension. Contributors to this volume explore what meanings people in the past ascribed to specific ages and whether or not earlier Americans believed the same things about particular ages as we do. The means by which Americans imposed chronological boundaries upon the variable process of growing up and growing old offers a paradigmatic example of how people construct cultural meaning and social hierarchy from embodied experience. Further, chronological age always intersects with other socially constructed categories such as gender, race, and sexuality. Ranging from the seventeenth century to the present, taking up a variety of distinct subcultures—from frontier children and antebellum slaves to twentieth-century Latinas—Age in America makes a powerful case that age has always been a key index of citizenship.

As boomers move towards retirement the phenomenon of "population aging" has become a much-publicized issue. Independence and Economic Security in Old Age focuses on the economic and social implications of aging at the level of the individual and of society as a whole. The product of a three-year research program, the book contains chapters by recognized experts in the fields of economics and econometrics, sociology, social work, medicine, epidemiology, gerontology, and nursing.