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Children of the Great Depression: Social Change in Life Experience (25th Anniversary Edition), by Glen H. Elder, Jr. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999. 444 pp. $25.00 paper. ISBN: 0 8133-3342-3.
Lives unfold under the influence of human agency as well as the constraints and opportunities determined by historical events, links to other people, and the alignment of historical events and the life stage at which individuals experience them. Glen Elder has spent his career examining data and refining life course theory with this basic framework as his anchor. The 1974 publication of Children of the Great Depression was an early and praised application of a life course perspective. Now a twenty-fifth anniversary edition has been published, with a strong new chapter.
The anniversary edition presents the original 10 chapters and end materials unchanged. In these pages, Elder traces the lives of 167 people born in Oakland, California, in 1920-21. The Depression-era experiences of these subjects and their parents are followed through archival data from the Oakland Growth Study, conducted at the University of California. These children of the Depression are followed further through World War II, the postwar 1940s and '50s, and into the early '60s.
Most of the analyses are driven by each family's status as either...