Boom Kids: Growing Up in the Calgary Suburbs/ 1950–1970 | James A. Onusco

Detalhe de capa de Boom Kids Growing Up in the Calgary Suburbs 1950–1970
Detalhe de capa de Boom Kids: Growing Up in the Calgary Suburbs/ 1950–1970

Since their conception, scholars have treated suburbs as a sociological petri dish, a delineated space in which to examine an evolving landscape and the social dynamics within its borders. Almost every field of history has a stake in the suburban narra-tive, producing diverse work interrogating gender and sexuality, evolutions in tran-sit, housing, and consumerism, the politics of city planning and local governance, impacts on health and the environment, and the intertwined notions of conformity, gatekeepers, and outsiders. The history of childhood has often travelled to the sub-urbs. This is most apparent in studies of North America’s postwar suburbs, when parents were increasingly outnumbered by their baby boom offspring and a child-hood focused on academics, safety, and character building was championed. James Onusko’s Boom Kids: Growing Up in the Calgary Suburbs, 1950–1970 contributes to this discourse by shifting the oft dominant central Canada-focus of both childhood and suburban history to the prairies. Onusko recounts the history of Calgary’s Banff Trail suburb from the vantage point of its youngest residents to demonstrate “both consciously and unconsciously [how] children and adolescents influenced suburbia, just as it shaped them” (2). Leia Mais