Following the 9/11 attacks, approximately four million Americans have turned eighteen each year and more than fifty million children have been born. These members of the millennial and post-millennial generation have come of age in a moment marked by increased anxiety about terrorism, two protracted wars, and policies that have raised questions about the United States's role abroad and at home. Young people have not been shielded from the attacks or from the wars and policy debates that followed. Instead, they have been active participants—as potential military recruits and organizers for social justice amid anti-immigration policies, as students in schools learning about the attacks or readers of young adult literature about wars. 

The War of My Generation is the first essay collection to focus specifically on how the terrorist attacks and their aftermath have shaped these new generations of Americans. Drawing from a variety of disciplines, including anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, and literary studies, the essays cover a wide range of topics, from graphic war images in the classroom to computer games designed to promote military recruitment to emails from parents in the combat zone. The collection considers what cultural factors and products have shaped young people's experience of the 9/11 attacks, the wars that have followed, and their experiences as emerging citizen-subjects in that moment. Revealing how young people understand the War on Terror—and how adults understand the way young people think—The War of My Generation offers groundbreaking research on catastrophic events still fresh in our minds. 

 

DAVID KIERAN is assistant professor of history at Washington & Jefferson College, in Washington, Pennsylvania. He is the author of Forever Vietnam: How a Divisive War Changed American Public Memory. 

"This collection of essays has created a robust discussion of many aspects of how young people may or may not connect with various actions that are part of the war on terror … The War of My Generation engages the reader in the difficult topics related to the relationship of the military and the personal decision of youth."

"A compelling study of what it means to grow up in the shadow of 9/11--the War on Terror truly is the war of their generation."

"[A] welcome collection of essays … The War of My Generation evinces the historian William Appleman Williams's pithy observation that in the United States empire is, and has long been, 'a way of life.'"

"The War of My Generation is, in some ways, a classic American studies volume, combining a range of disciplinary methods, cultural resources, and popular voices to paint a complex picture of US life at a particular historical moment. Readers with an interdisciplinary bent, who are trained to hunt for diversity where there seems uniformity, will find The War of My Generation compelling."

"This carefully edited volume encourages thought about the impact of war, from 9/11 to involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, on youth in the US through 11 elegant and lucid essays that variously use ethnographic methods and literary and cultural analyses, together with practical reflections on pedagogical method ... Highly recommended."

"The array of approaches and resources in this well-conceived and original volume will make it the 'go to' book on how the war on terror has shaped a generation."