ADOLESCENCE IN AMERICA

Even period of history within which an adolescent lives. For example, in modern American society, adolescents experience important changes in their school setting, typically involving moving from elementary school to either junior high school or middle school; and in late adolescence, there is a transition from high school to the worlds of work, university, or child-rearing. In short, one must consider the context of adolescents in order to understand them adequately.The hopes, challenges, fears, and successes of adolescence have been romanticized or dramatized in novels, short stories,and news articles. It is commonplace to survey a newsstand and to find a magazine article describing the “stormy years” of adolescence, the new crazes or fads of youth, or the “explosion” of problems with teenagers (e.g., involving crime or sexuality). However, until the past thirty to thirty- five years, when medical, biological,and social scientists began to study intensively the adolescent period, there was relatively little sound scientific information available to verify or refute the literary characterizations of adolescence.Today, however, such information does exist. It affords several generalizations
about the character of adolescent development.

The Earliest Greece

The large island of Crete, south of Greece, was home to the Minoans(who did not speak Greek), the first Aegean kingdom. By about 2000 B.C.E. Minoans were building elaborate
palaces that had running water and drainage in most rooms. They had a highly developed society
with a complex religion. The Minoan culture eventually overlapped with the more aggressive
Mycenaeans—named by historians for the city of Mycenae on southern Greece’s Peloponnese Peninsula. Historians consider the Mycenaeans to be the first ancient Greeks, connected to the future.Greek civilization by language and religion. The Mycenaean era lasted roughly from 1600 to 1200 B.C.E., and it gave the Greeks the glorious legends of King Agamemnon and Achilles fighting at Troy, and of Odysseus traveling home from the Trojan War. The Mycenaeans, it is believed, absorbed the Minoan kingdom, and Crete later became part of the Greek Empire.

How the Greeks lived

THE TERM “ANCIENT GREEKS” CAN REFER TO MANY CULTURES
and times in world history. The ancient Greeks include the warriors who fought in the Trojan War in the 1200s B.C.E. and whose mythical stories, retold by Homer, are considered the foundation of Western literature. They also are the sophisticated (from the Greek word sophos, which means “wisdom”)Athenians of what is known as Classical Greece, who gave us democracy in the 400s B.C.E. and whose architecture and literature remain an important part of our culture. And they are the Mediterranean peoples who, in the two centuries before Rome began its rule of the Western and near Eastern world in the 140s B.C.E., made ground-breaking contributions to science and mathematics.The history of the ancient Greeks spanned many centuries, from about 1600 B.C.E. to 146 B.C.E. As their world was unfolding, their Mediterranean neighbors included Egypt, whose civilization had already been around 2,000 years. To the east, in modern-day Turkey, the Hittites made up another powerful kingdom that jostled with Egypt for control over Syria, which lay between them. The nearby Phoenicians first developed an alphabet and advanced the art of shipbuilding. Trade and exchanges of culture and technology flourished among these Mediterranean kingdoms, which also came to include the early Greeks.Greece was never a unified country in antiquity. Rather, it was a collection of perhaps as many as 1,500 often fiercely independent city-states (a city that functions as a separate nation). The people of those citystates shared a culture and a language, even though they were scattered throughout the modern-day Greek mainland in southeastern Europe and around the Mediterranean and Black Seas (including today’s Turkey).