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Page count: 210

St. Louis's public high schools may have been built to contain and control youth, but the students had other ideas. Many scholars have attempted to locate the beginning of the modern era and some have even suggested that high school students played an important role. By looking at documents relating to St. Louis's public high schools such as high school newspapers, yearbooks, scrapbooks and girl graduate books, memoirs of alumni, and school board reports one can see that high school students formed their own communities and explored many modern ideas. High school newspapers became a forum for youth to explore issues such as smoking, provocative dancing, and the use of make-up which plague "modern" youth. This paper traces the emergence of an independent peer-centered youth culture which revolved around the turn of the century high school