’Forever Young’?

These essays have their origin in the 2010 EAAS Biennial Conference, held in Dublin. Using a variety of disciplines and approaches, they explore the many dimensions offered by the conference theme. The topics addressed here include: the interactions between youth and age; the idealization of youth in American culture juxtaposed with the increasing actuality of an ageing society; the relationship between war and youth; the cultural constructions of youth and age, and the changing nature of community in the US. Above all, these essays reflect on what it means to be American from the Colonial period to the present, and they examine the ways that Americanness has been construed and constructed from a wide range of cultural contexts and spaces, including Turkey, Mexico and China, as well as the United States itself. They can be seen as reflecting the diversity and the unity of the United States and the discourse of contemporary American Studies: complete in themselves but connecting with each other in an overall and ever-evolving exploration of what it means to be "Forever Young."