Adolescence
Recognition of the life stage between childhood and adulthood as a subject of modern scientific inquiry began in the early twentieth century with the publication of Antonio Marro's La Puberta (1898) and G. Stanley Hall's highly influential compendium Adolescence (1904). Although Hall's book represented an initial effort to describe adolescence, it nevertheless resonated with themes already familiar among scholars and the public. In Europe, romantic conceptions of a sexually charged, troubled youth (e.g., in Rousseau's Émile) circulated among the socially concerned. In America, an established tradition of cautionary literature emphasized the impressionable nature of young people and their vulnerability to sin (e.g., in the essays and sermons of Cotton Mather). Hall incorporated many of these ideas into a Darwinian framework to conjure an "adolescence" recognizable to his readers (Ross 1972). Although the work is viewed as a curious and difficult amalgam today, it nevertheless emphasized themes that continue to shape the study of youth.
Hall viewed adolescence through the lens of Ernst Haeckel's biogenetic principle, which holds that the human life span recapitulates the phases of human biological and social evolution (Gould 1977). Hall maintained that late childhood corresponds to a period of peaceful savagery in the distant past, whereas adolescence represents a "neo-atavistic" period of migration into a challenging environment, which prompted physical, social, and psychological conflict and growth.
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