The Golden Years: How Americans Invented and Reinvented Old Age

Sponsored by the UVA Division of General, Geriatric, Palliative & Hospital Medicine

James Gregory Chappel, PhD
Gilhuly Family Associate Professor of History at Duke University
Senior Fellow Duke Aging Center

In Golden Years, historian James Chappel shows how old age first emerged as a distinct stage of life and how it evolved over the last century, shaped by politicians’ choices, activists’ demands, medical advancements, and cultural models from utopian novels to The Golden Girls. Only after World War II did government subsidies and employer pensions allow people to retire en masse. Just one generation later, this model crumbled. Older people streamed back into the workforce, and free-market policymakers pushed the burdens of aging back onto older Americans and their families. We now confront an old age mired in contradictions: ever longer lifespans and spiraling health-care costs, 401(k)s and economic precarity, unprecedented opportunity and often disastrous instability.

James Chappel is the Gilhuly Family Associate Professor of History at Duke University and a senior fellow at the Duke Aging Center. He attended Haverford College, where he received a BA in History, and Columbia University for a PhD in History. His prizewinning first book, Catholic Modern: The Challenge of Totalitarianism and the Remaking of the Church, was published in 2018. Golden Years: How Americans Invented and Reinvented Old Age will be published by Basic Books in November 2024. In addition to many academic venues, his writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Nation, and the New Republic.