John R. Gillis

John R. Gillis

John Randall Gillis (born January 13, 1939 in Plainfield , New Jersey ) is an American historian .

Life

Gillis received his BA from Amherst College in 1960 and his PhD from Stanford University in 1965 . He has been working in the social history field since the late 1960s and gained international renown in 1974 with his groundbreaking publication Youth and History, Tradition and Change . The German translation was published in 1980 under the title History of Youth. Tradition and change in the relationship between age groups and generations in Europe from the second half of the 18th century to the present . Gillis was the first to steer our gaze in a direction that is now generally recognized as at least partially correct; his central thesis is: youth make their own story . In contrast to the traditional research opinion, which always understood the history of youth as the history of the societies that contain them, his view is very modern and is underpinned , for example, by more recent findings regarding (self) socialization through the media.

Works

• Islands of the Mind: How the Human Imagination Created the Atlantic World (2004)
• The Prussian Bureaucracy in Crisis, 1840-60 (Stanford, 1971)
• Youth and History: Tradition and Change in European Age Relations, 1750-Present (Academic, 1975)
  • German edition: history of youth. Tradition and change in the relationship between age groups and generations in Europe from the second half of the 18th century to the present, Weinheim / Basel 1980
• Development of European Society, 1770-1870 (Houghton Mifflin, 1977)
• For Better, For Worse: British Marriages, 1600 to the present (Oxford, 1985)
• A World of Their Own Making: Myth, Ritual, and the Quest for Family Values ​​(Basic, 1996)

Web links

• Literature by and about John R. Gillis in the catalog of the German National Library
• Personal page at Rutgers History Department ( September 1, 2006 memento in the Internet Archive )