Teenage: The Creation of Youth Culture by Jon Savage, Viking, 2007

Until recently, there was no category of humans called 'adolescents'. People were either children or adults. Sometime during the Victorian era, this changed. Savage chronicles the development of the idea of 'teenagers' and how society saw them.

It's not as fun a story as one might think. A lot of the teens (which Savage uses to mean sometime around 12 to the mid-20s) that he talks about were poor children who ran in gangs. They had no good future to look forward to, thievery was what they did best, and they were a problem to society. These were not 'Happy Days' kids, they were 'Lord of the Flies'. They didn't run in gangs because they thought it was fun, they did it because their parents were working in factories and there was no one to look after them. While this underclass of young people probably existed in a lot of countries, its main homes were America and England.

Over in Germany, some of the teens of the educated classes were taking a romantic view of nature. Hiking and camping out, they sought to strengthen their bodies and return to a state of innocence, free from the stain of the industrialized world. While their aims were applaudable, this view of German youth being ideal people would come around and bite Germany- and the world- in the rear decades later.