Teenagers
These teenage girls and boys are being restrained by police outside an Elvis Presley concert in Florida in 1956. Elvis, who was instrumental in popularizing rock ’n’ roll music among white middle-class teenagers in the mid-1950s, was one example of a broader phenomenon: the creation of the “teenager” as a distinct demographic, cultural category and, perhaps most significantly, consumer group. Beginning in the 1950s, middle-class teenagers had money to spend, and advertisers and other entrepreneurs — such as the music executives who marketed Elvis or the Hollywood executives who invented the “teen film” — sought ways to win their allegiance and their dollars. Photo by Charles Trainor/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images.