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One month after Ronald Reagan's resounding victory in the California Republican primaries, Russell Kirk, perhaps conservatism's leading ideologue, posed the question “New Direction in the U.S.: Right?” in the New York Times Magazine. The period between 1968 and 1972 saw the maturation of a number of independent conservative organizations whose roots stretched back to the early 1960s. Specifically discussed are the Americans for Constitutional Action (ACA), Free Society Association (FSA), American Conservative Union (ACU) and Young Americans for Freedom (YAF). Conservatives entered the 1970s well prepared to take charge of American politics, and even with Watergate they managed to make gains throughout a decade that could have represented a complete disaster.

This introductory chapter traces the rise of sexual autonomy among young American women. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, urbanization presented opportunities for many young women to pursue sexual relationships outside of heterosexual marriage. This further developed in the earlier half of the twentieth century when immigrant and working-class young women explored the amusements and commercial opportunities of city life, often on the arms of young men who paid for sex. Younger girls joined in despite scrutiny from the new juvenile courts. The rise of dating practices eroded parental and community control, and prostitution lost ground to taxi dancing, stripping, and erotic dancing. The period also saw the legalization of contraception and birth control which accelerated the separation of heterosexual sex from reproduction. In all of these ways, the sexual culture before World War II was already shifting and changing, opening up certain possibilities for sexual independence.

This chapter begins the exploration of some of the more unsettling aspects of contemporary emerging adult life by focusing on the question of morality, moral beliefs, and moral reasoning. What do emerging adults think about morality? How do they know what is moral? How do they make moral decisions? Where do they think moral rights and wrongs, goods and bads, even come from? What is the source or basis of morality? And how important is it to emerging adults to choose what is morally good? The chapter examines their answers to these and other questions, and then ponders what this all may tell us not only about contemporary emerging adults’ own moral imaginations but also about the larger culture and society that has formed them morally.

This chapter focuses on Thomas L. Kane's antislavery campaign. It explains that his antislavery ideals grew out of a commitment to Jacksonian Democracy and his ethnological investigations and that he linked antislavery to a broader political agenda advanced by a group of reforming Democrats known as Young Americans. It discusses his decision to join the fledgling Free Soil Movement and highlights his disillusionment with the Democratic Party.

The fundamental premise driving the virgin vote was that democracy is social. The key to getting young people involved in politics, regardless of brain chemistry or shopping habits, is to raise them in a culture that cares. And young people simply won’t vote if politics feels distant from their present selves and from their hopes for the future. The simplest lesson in increasing young Americans’ involvement in politics is to think long-term; one election cycle is not enough to build the interest, the aspiration, and the need to vote.

The story of Ted, a World War II sailor for the U.S. Navy, and his teenage bride, Dottie, opens the chapter, setting up the contrast with emerging adulthood today. Their early marriage, five children, and Ted’s living wage from work for the electric company represent an era long gone. Financial independence today requires dual incomes and years of preparation, pushing back marriage and parenthood nearly a decade. Despite these changes, the religious lives of American twentysomethings demonstrate stability more than change. Survey analysis of the project’s National Study of American Twentysomethings (2013) and the National Science Foundation’s General Social Survey (1972–2016) demonstrate a stable proportion of religious committed young adults—about 1 in 4, and a rise in religiously unaffiliated young adults —from the ranks of the semi-religious. Widespread prayer, participation in worship, favorable attitudes toward congregations, and frustration with angry “religious people” are among the chapter’s notable findings.

This chapter extends and revises Jacques Rancière’s reading of von Trier’s Dogville (2003) as a cinematic expression of the contemporary “ethical turn.” For Rancière, Dogville expresses how, within the post–September 11 power formation, programs of ethical commitment, which oscillate incoherently between universalist devotion to humanity and defensive/vengeful loyalty to the nation, overshadow collective projects of political contestation. Hence, through many narrative, visual, and aural elements, the film records and threatens to reinforce this hegemonic formation that merges humanitarianism with the military aggressions and control technologies of the national security state. Yet as the closing track (“Young Americans”) by David Bowie suggests, Dogville also evokes a counterhegemonic politics of style that Rancière neglects but still helps theorize. Such a politics involves reconfiguring distributions of the sensible, interrogating claims to authentic knowledge of justice, and subversively manipulating commodities.

Four young adults with thoughtful religious, spiritual, and secular views are profiled. Maria, a devout Catholic Latina who is a graduate student in speech pathology; Jeremy, an enthusiastic Mainline Protestant whose gay and biracial identity left him wary of religion; Lee, an Evangelical convert who switched from a Chinese to a multiracial congregation; and Abby, who rejected the White middle-class Evangelicalism of her childhood for atheism and then adopted an eclectic spirituality. Emerging adulthood is then described, as is the book’s qualitative and survey methodology and its focus on 91% of American twentysomethings who identify as Catholic, Mainline Protestant, Evangelical, or religiously unaffiliated (i.e., Nones). The book’s seven scholarly contributions are stated and the next six chapters are introduced.

Early years of Randy Shilts’s life in Aurora, Illinois are explored, struggles with physical abuse from an alcoholic mother, and frequently absent father. Information about the Shilts family and arrival of six sons over a 25-year period. Shilts’s early engagement of Young Americans for Freedom and conservative/libertarian ideas posited by his father. Examples of Shilts’s earliest writing for a student newspaper on the draft and the Vietnam War. Shilts’s relocation to Portland, Oregon and enrollment in community college where he “came out” as part of a class presentation. Shilts’s struggle with discrimination and scorn based on his sexuality and his first forays into the gay liberation movement.

The introduction situates the protagonists of the correspondence, Jean Boze and Henri de Sainte-Gême, within the nineteenth-century Atlantic world and presents the correspondence. It also contextualizes New Orleans in the young American Republic, introducing the main purpose of the book, which is--instead of a comprehensive history of early American New Orleans--to reproduce a very personal description of what Jean Boze, with his past, origins, education, and experience, saw unfold before his eyes. The introduction also sets the main dialectics of the book, that of continuity and change, and its ultimate purpose: to understand how, through rich and complex processes, New Orleans became the Creole capital of the United States.