Old Age in the Wake of the American Revolution

FAIN: FEL-288796-23

Rebecca Brannon
James Madison University (Harrisonburg, VA 22807-0001)

Writing a book on old age in the early American republic. 

Humanists are beginning to turn their attention to age as a vital category of analysis at the same time journalists breathlessly call out the coming ‘grey tsunami.’ Our rapidly aging globe is facing a demographic transition that cries out for historicization. The Founding Fathers provide a route to a wide reading audience in order to explore and defang myths about the past being either a Golden Age for the elderly or a vale of tears soon departed. Early Americans never embraced old age and became increasingly frightened of it as Enlightenment ideals permeated eighteenth-century society. My research explores the ways in which the American Revolution and Enlightenment ideals cemented a new emphasis on youth as the true source of creativity and democratic virtue, devaluing old age and aged people as never before. It traces the roots of our contemporary cultural orientation towards youth as a source of vitality to the world of the American Revolution.