Table of Contents

OAH Magazine of History
Volume 15, No 4
Summer 2001

Copyright ©
Organization of American Historians

Teaching Family History: An Annotated Bibliography

Steven Mintz

A. Overviews and Interpretations

Carl N. Degler, At Odds: Women and the Family in America from the Revolution to the Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980). Demonstrates that the “traditional” family—the emotionally-intense, child-centered unit consisting of a male breadwinner, a full-time mother, and their children—is a product of the pre-Civil War era.

John Demos, Past, Present, and Personal: The Family and the Life Course in American History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). Provocative interpretive essays on such topics as the history of adolescence, child abuse, fatherhood, and old age.

Steven Mintz and Susan Kellogg, Domestic Revolutions: A Social History of American Family Life (New York: The Free Press, 1988). Argues that the only constants in the history of American family life have been diversity and change.

B. Handbooks and Research Guides

Joseph M. Hawes and Elizabeth I. Nybakken, eds., American Families: A Research Guide and Historical Handbook (New York: Greenwood Press, 1991). Examines the history of the family as a scholarly discipline; methodologies for the study of family history; the family in successive historical eras; and the special topics of women and the family, African American families, Native American families, and immigrant and working-class families.

Joseph M. Hawes and N. Ray Hiner, eds., American Childhood: A Research Guide and Historical Handbook (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985). Analyzes aspects of childhood experience from the colonial era to the late twentieth century.

C. Demography

Robert V. Wells, Uncle Sam’s Family: Issues in and Perspectives on American Demographic History (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985). An introduction to American demographic history, which discusses such topics as the “demographic transition” and migration.

D. Domestic Environment

Karin Calvert, Children in the House: The Material Culture of Early Childhood, 1600-1900 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1994). Examines material artifacts to reconstruct the way that children were perceived and treated.

Clifford Edward Clark, The American Family Home, 1800-1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986). Analyzes changes in architectural style, decor, and furnishings.

E. Historical Eras

1. Colonial Family Life

Barry Levy, Quakers and the American Family: British Settlement in the Delaware Valley (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). Examines Quaker families in the Delaware Valley from 1650 to 1765 and argues that the Quaker emphasis on family privacy and child nurture set the pattern for American family ideology.

Jan Lewis, Pursuits of Happiness: Family and Values in Jefferson’s Virginia (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983). Illustrates how a shift in sensibility reshaped relations within the homes of eighteenth-century Virginia’s planter elite.

Edmund Morgan, The Puritan Family: Religion and Domestic Relations in Seventeenth-Century New England (New York: Harper and Row, 1966). The classic study of religion and domestic relationships in Puritan New England.

Daniel Blake Smith, Inside the Great House: Planter Family Life in Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake Society (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995). Traces the shift from a patriarchal and emotionally restrained family into a more intimate, child-centered family life in the colonial Chesapeake.

Helena M. Wall, Fierce Communion: Family and Community in Early America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995). Deliberately downplaying colonists’ regional and religious diversity, this book stresses the high degree of community interference in disputes involving child rearing, marriage, and slander.

2. Nineteenth-Century Families

Mary P. Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790-1865 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981). A case study that illustrates how dramatically family life changed during the early nineteenth century.

3. Twentieth-Century Families

Elliott West, Growing Up in Twentieth-Century America: A History and Reference Guide (New York: Greenwood Press, 1996). Examines children’s lives at home, play, work, and school, along with changes in children’s health and the legal treatment of childhood.

4. Contemporary Families

Mary Jo Bane, Here to Stay: American Families in the Twentieth Century (New York: Basic Books, 1976); Karen V. Hansen and Anita Ilta Garey, eds., Families in the U.S.: Kinship and Domestic Politics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998); and Judith Stacey, Brave New Families: Stories of Domestic Upheaval in Late Twentieth-Century America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). Vivid descriptions of the new kinds of familial relationships not defined by biology or traditional gender roles.

F. Primary Sources

Robert H. Bremner, ed., Children and Youth in America, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970-1974). A documentary history of children’s experience, child rearing, and public provision for children.

II. AMERICA’S MULTICULTURAL FAMILIES: A COMPARATIVE APPROACH

Since the seventeenth century, diversity has been a hallmark of American family life. Family size and structure, roles and functions, and emotional and power dynamics have varied not only according to historical era, but also along class, ethnic, regional, and religious lines. A multicultural approach to family history allows teachers to underscore the extraordinary richness and complexity of the American mosaic.

A. General Anthologies

Stephanie Coontz, et al., eds., American Families: A Multicultural Reader (New York: Routledge, 1999). Illustrates the wide variety of family forms, values, gender roles, and parenting practices that have prevailed in America across lines of race, ethnicity, class, geographical location, and historical period.

Susan J. Ferguson, Shifting the Center: Understanding Contemporary Families (Mountain View, CA: Mayfield Publishing, 1997). Seeks to move “alternative families” from the margins of our understanding by examining cohabitation, single-parent households, step-families, and gay and lesbian families.

Mark Hutter, ed., The Family Experience: A Reader in Cultural Diversity, 3d ed. (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 2000). Readings that examine historical trends and distinctive ethnic, gender, racial, and class variations in family patterns and dynamics.

Ronald L. Taylor, ed., Minority Families in the United States: A Multicultural Perspective, 2d ed.(Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1998). Essays on African American, Asian American, Hispanic, and Native American families.

B. African Americans

1. Anthologies

Jay David, ed., Growing Up Black: From Slave Days to the Present (New York: Avon, 1992). A collection of childhood experiences by such figures as Booker T. Washington, Malcolm X, Ralph Abernathy, and Maya Angelou.

2. Overviews and Interpretations

Donna L. Franklin, Ensuring Inequality: The Structural Transformation of the African-American Family (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). Traces the evolution of black family life from slavery to the present, highlighting the differences in black and white marriage and family patterns.

Herbert Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750-1925 (New York: Vintage Books, 1977). Challenges the traditional view that slavery devastated the African American family, and instead argues that most slave children grew up in two-parent households and most slave marriages remained intact unless disrupted by sale.

3. Families Under Slavery

Wilma King, Stolen Childhood: Slave Youth in Nineteenth- Century America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995). Examines slave children’s early entry into work, forms of play, religious experiences, the punishments they experienced, and their separation from families.

Ann Patton Malone, Sweet Chariot: Slave Family and Household Structure in Nineteenth-Century Louisiana (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992). A detailed analysis of household composition in rural Louisiana from 1810 and 1864; demonstrates that slave households were diverse and highly adaptable.

Brenda E. Stevenson, Life in Black and White: Family and Community in the Slave South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). A thorough examination of family life, gender roles, courtship, marriage, and parenting in Loudoun County, Virginia, from the 1730s through the 1850s; argues that the harsh realities of slavery made it difficult for slaves to maintain nuclear families.

4. African American Families Today

Alex Kotlowitz, There Are No Children Here: The Story of Two Boys Growing Up in the Other America (New York: Doubleday, 1991). The story of two boys struggling to survive in a Chicago public housing project.

C. Asian Americans

Maria Hong, ed., Growing Up Asian American (New York: Avon Books, 1993). A collection of stories, essays, and excerpts from memoirs that examine childhood and adolescence across generational, class, and ethnic lines from the late nineteenth century.

D. Immigrants

Selma Cantor Berrol, Growing Up American: Immigrant Children in America, Then and Now (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1995). Chronicles the experience of immigrant children from the eighteenth century to the present.

Elizabeth Ewen, Immigrant Women in the Land of Dollars: Life and Culture on the Lower East Side of New York (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1985). Explores changing courtship practices, attitudes toward birth control, and the impact of middle-class values and clothing styles on immigrant women.

Susan A. Glenn, Daughters of the Shtetl: Life and Labor in the Immigrant Generation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990). Considers the work lives of Jewish women from 1880 to World War I who left Eastern Europe to work in the needle trades.

Irving Howe, World of Our Fathers (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976). Considers the adjustment of Eastern European Jewish immigrants to life in the United States.

E. Latinas/os

1. Anthologies

Harold Augenbraum and Llan Stavans, eds., Growing Up Latino: Memoirs and Stories (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1993). Presents fictional and nonfictional accounts of coming of age by writers of Cuban, Mexican, Puerto Rican, and other Latin American ancestry.

Joy L. De Jesús, ed., Growing Up Puerto Rican: An Anthology (New York: Avon, 1997). Leading Puerto Rican writers portray the problems that beset the passage from childhood to adulthood.

Tiffany Ana López, ed., Growing Up Chicana/o (New York: Avon Books, 1995). Autobiographical essays and stories that examine the experiences of family life, discrimination, education, and rites of passage.

2. Histories

Robert Griswold del Castillo, La Familia: Chicano Families in the Urban Southwest, 1848 to the Present (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984).

F. Native Americans

Patricia Riley, ed., Growing Up Native American: An Anthology (New York: Avon, 1993). Short stories, novel excerpts, and autobiographical essays examine Native American childhood and adolescence from the nineteenth century to the 1990s, including life in boarding schools and foster care and the transition from native languages to English.

III. THE LIFE-CYCLE APPROACH

The objective of this approach is three-fold: to understand the differing ways that Americans have understood the life stages; to examine the changing experience of the stages of infancy, childhood, youth, early adulthood, middle age, and old age; and to explore the changing rituals of family life, such as courtship and marriage.

A. Overview and Interpretations

Howard Chudacoff, How Old Are You? Age Consciousness in American Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989). Examines the growing awareness of age and the way it has shaped entry into school, marriage, legal adulthood, and the workforce.

B. Infancy

Sylvia D. Hoffert, Private Matters: American Attitudes Toward Childbearing and Infant Nurture in the Urban North, 1800-1860 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989).

Richard Meckel, Save the Babies: American Public Health Reform and the Prevention of Infant Mortality, 1850-1929 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998). An examination of the discovery of infant mortality as a social problem in the 1850s through the limited federal funding for infancy and maternity programs in the 1920s.

C. Childhood

Priscilla Ferguson Clement, Growing Pains: Children in the Industrial Age, 1850-1890 (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1997). Emphasizes diversity in children’s experiences in family life, schooling, employment, and play, and the efforts of reformers and educators to improve children’s well-being and create more uniform patterns of childhood.

Gary Cross, Kids’ Stuff: Toys and the Changing World of American Childhood (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997). Traces the impact of commercialization on children’s toys and the nature of play.

Joseph M. Hawes, Children Between the Wars: American Childhood, 1920-1940 (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1997). Examines the rise of the peer group, the emergence of the child guidance movement and the U.S. Children’s Bureau, and the impact of the Great Depression.

David Macleod, The Age of the Child: Children in America, 1890-1920 (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1998). Emphasizes a tug of war between different conceptions of childhood, from the varied experiences of farm children and working-class urban youths to the progressive reformers’ ideal of a sheltered childhood.

Elliott West, Growing Up with the Country: Childhood on the Far Western Frontier (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989). Describes the varieties of childhood experience along the overland trails, in mining towns of the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Nevada, and on the farms of the Great Plains and Southwest from 1850 to 1900. Portrays children as a conservative force who encouraged parents to preserve premigration culture.

Elliott West and Paula Petrick, eds., Small Worlds: Children and Adolescents in America, 1850-1950 (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1992). Historical essays examine regional, class, gender, and ethnic diversity in childhood experience from 1850 to 1950.

Viviana A. Rotman Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). Chronicles the shifting cultural attitudes about the value of children as viewed in the areas of child labor, insurance for children, the legal valuation of children, and adoption.

D. Youth

Joe Austin and Michael Nevin Willard, eds., Generations of Youth: Youth Cultures and History in Twentieth-Century America (New York: New York University Press, 1998). Examines cultural expressions of youth, including hip-hop, fan clubs, dancing, low riding, and graffiti.

Michael Barson and Steven Heller, Teenage Confidential: An Illustrated History of the American Teen (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1998). Uses movie posters, comic books, advertising art, advice columns, and music paraphernalia to trace the evolution of the teenager from the “Kleen Teens” of the 1930s.

William Graebner, Coming of Age in Buffalo: Youth and Authority in the Postwar Era (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990). Examines the process of growing up during the 1950s, emphasizing the tension between the myth of youthful homogeneity and the multiplicity of youth cultures and the public and church-related efforts to socially engineer youthful experience.

Harvey J. Graff, Conflicting Paths: Growing Up in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995). Demonstrates that there were multiple paths to growing up, shaped by class, gender, region, and time period.

Philip J. Greven Jr., The Protestant Temperament: Patterns of Child-Rearing, Religious Experience and the Self in Early America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990). Identifies three distinct patterns of child rearing, rooted in three religious sensibilities, that pervade the period from the early seventeenth to the mid nineteenth centuries.

Joseph Kett, Rites of Passage: Adolescence in America, 1790 to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 1977). Traces the expansion of adult control over youthful experience.

John Modell, Into One’s Own: From Youth to Adulthood in the United States, 1920-1975 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). Draws on quantitative data to trace changes in adolescent experience, including the emergence and decline of dating and loosening constraints over adolescent sexuality.

David Nasaw, Children of the City: At Work and At Play (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). Examines how urban working-class children shaped the conditions of their lives.

Grace Palladino, Teenagers: An American History (New York: Basic Books, 1996). Argues that the teenager is a social invention of the Great Depression and World War II.

E. Young Adulthood

Marlis Buchmann, The Script of Life in Modern Society: Entry into Adulthood in a Changing World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). Compares the experience of white high school graduates of 1960 and 1980 and argues that the transition to adulthood has become more extended and individualized.

Paula S. Fass, The Damned and the Beautiful: American Youth in the 1920s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979). Examines the nature and extent of the rebellion of middle-class youth against Victorian traditions.

John Modell, Into One’s Own: From Youth to Adulthood in the United States, 1920-1975 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). Traces the rise and decline of dating, loosening constraints on sexuality, and the shifting meaning assigned to parenthood.

F. Old Age

W. Andrew Achenbaum, Old Age in the New Land (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978). Documents the shifting attitudes toward aging since the 1790s.

W. Andrew Achenbaum, Shades of Gray (Boston: Little Brown, 1983). Describes federal policies and the shifting cultural values toward aging since 1920.

David Hackett Fischer, Growing Old in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978). Argues that economic circumstances and religious ideology contributed to a veneration of age in the American colonies, contrasted to the later adulation of youth.

Carole Haber and Brian Gratton, Old Age and the Search for Security (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994). This volume pays close attention to the ethnic and gender diversity of the elderly, looking at the contrasting experiences of widows, African Americans, and the rural, small-town, and urban elderly in different eras of American history.

IV. WOMEN, MEN, AND THE FAMILY: A GENDERED APPROACH

The family is not a unitary institution. It consists of a variety of familial roles, each of which has undergone profound change over time. One way to organize a course, or a module within a class, is to focus on the evolving roles of father and husband, wife and mother, daughter and sister, and son and brother.

A. Women

Rima D. Apple and Janet Golden, eds., Mothers & Motherhood: Readings in American History (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1997). A collection of essays examining the social, cultural, demographic, medical, and political factors that have shaped the definition and experience of motherhood.

Joan Jacobs Brumberg, The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls (New York: Vintage Books, 1998). Shows how popular culture and the mass media have exploited girls’ sensitivity to their changing bodies and their appearance.

Miriam Formanek-Brunell, Made to Play House: Dolls and the Commercialization of American Girlhood, 1830-1930 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993). An examination of the creation, marketing, and use of dolls from 1830 to 1930.

Joan J. Jensen, Loosening the Bonds: Mid-Atlantic Farm Women, 1740-1850 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986). Examines the lives of rural women, primarily in the Philadelphia hinterland.

Susan Grey Osterud, Bonds of Community: The Lives of Women in Nineteenth-Century New York (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991). Focuses on the nineteenth-century Naticoke Valley in New York and examines kinship networks, work patterns, courtship, childbirth, and community activities.

Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986). Shows how the rise of mixed-sex commercial leisure activities eroded Victorian gender norms.

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England, 1650-1750 (New York: Random House, 1991). Illustrates the diversity and richness of late-seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century women’s domestic and public lives.

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812 (New York: Vintage Books, 1991). The diary of an eighteenth-century Maine midwife and healer; sheds light on sexual mores, medical practices, and household economies on the rural New England frontier.

B. Men

Barbara Ehrenreich, The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1983). Traces shifting male attitudes toward marital commitment.

Robert Griswold, Fatherhood in America: A History (New York: Basic Books, 1993). Illustrates the shift from the Victorian patriarch to the modern American daddy; the rise and decline of the male breadwinner ideal; and how the experience of fatherhood has been shaped by class, ethnicity, economic forces, and cultural values.

E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Basic Books, 1993). Offers the history of boyhood, male adolescence, and the young adult experience.

V. THE IMPACT OF MAJOR HISTORICAL EVENTS ON AMERICAN FAMILIES

The major events of American history—the Revolution, the Civil War, industrialization, immigration, and world war—have exerted a powerful influence on family life. A flourishing literature has explored the impact of some of these seminal events on familial and marital relations, gender roles, and child rearing practices. By using the family as a lens, it is possible to uncover the human meaning of the critical events of American history.

A. Westward Expansion

John Mack Faragher, Women and Men on the Overland Trail (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979). Dispels common stereotypes about male and female roles on the overland journey made by mid-nineteenth-century Midwestern farm families.

B. The Civil War

James Alan Marten, The Children’s Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998). Examines how the war shortened childhood, influenced children’s relations with their fathers, and altered children’s literature and schoolbooks.

Emmy E. Werner, Reluctant Witnesses: Children’s Voices from the Civil War (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998). Diaries, letters, and reminiscences reveal the impact of the war on children’s lives on the battlefield and homefront.

C. The Great Depression

John A. Clausen, American Lives: Looking Back at the Children of the Great Depression (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). A study of over three hundred men and women born in the 1920s in California’s Bay Area and their responses to the Great Depression, World War II, and the sexual revolution.

Glen H. Elder, Children of the Great Depression: Social Change in Life Experience (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998). Assesses the influence of the Great Depression on the life course of 167 Californians over two generations.

D. World War II

Beth Bailey and David Farber, The First Strange Place: The Alchemy of Race and Sex in World War II Hawaii (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994). Argues that wartime Hawaii prefigured many of complex social and cultural influences of the postwar world, especially shifts in gender roles.

Judy Barrett Litoff and David Smith, eds., Since You Went Away: World War II Letters from American Women on the Home Front (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995). A collection of letters organized around the themes of courtship, marriage, motherhood, work, and sacrifices.

William M. Tuttle, “Daddy’s Gone to War”: The Second World War in the Lives of American Children (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). Examines how children dealt with absent fathers, working mothers, and family mobility, as well as children’s games, entertainment, health, and welfare.

E. The 1950s

Wini Breines, Young, White, and Miserable: Growing Up Female in the Fifties (Boston: Beacon Books, 1992). Traces the roots of the women’s movement to women’s experiences in the 1950s.

Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap (New York: Basic Books, 1992). Exposes the falseness of many illusions about families in the past.

Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988). Argues that the postwar emphasis on domestic tranquility was a response to Cold War fears and tensions.

F. Family Life Since 1960

Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Really Are: Ending the War Over America’s Changing Families (New York: Basic Books, 1997). Argues that despite changes in structure, contemporary families are functioning more effectively than many people assume.

VI. THE FAMILY AND PUBLIC POLICY

In recent years, a burgeoning literature has examined the historical roots of contemporary social policy debates over adoption, teenage pregnancy, divorce, domestic violence, and social welfare policies. This body of scholarship helps students to understand that the problems that our society encounters are not unprecedented, but that they were often perceived and understood in very different ways. This scholarship also allows students to evaluate the effectiveness of a variety of approaches to social problems.

A. Adolescent Pregnancy

Kristin Luker, Dubious Conceptions: The Politics of Teenage Pregnancy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996). Corrects public misconceptions about teenage pregnancy, showing that 60 percent of all teenage mothers are eighteen or nineteen years old; that 57 percent of all unmarried mothers are white; and that poverty is the factor that is behind most teenage pregnancies.

Maris A. Vinovskis, An “Epidemic” of Adolescent Pregnancy?: Some Historical and Policy Considerations (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). Places contemporary policy debates over adolescent pregnancy in historical perspective and shows that teenage pregnancy peaked in the 1950s.

B. Adoption

E. Wayne Carp, Family Matters: Secrecy and Disclosure in the History of Adoption (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998). Traces the practice of and attitudes toward adoption from the colonial era to the present and reveals that confidentiality in adoption was a new innovation following World War II.

C. Children’s Rights

Joseph M. Hawes, The Children’s Rights Movement: A History of Advocacy and Protections (Collingdale, PA: Diane Publishing, 1999). A history of organized efforts to protect children, advocate their interests, and assert their rights.

D. Contraception

Janet Farrell Brodie, Abortion and Contraception in Nineteenth-Century America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997). Examines the changes in social values, contraceptives, and medical knowledge that produced a sharp drop in birth rates during the nineteenth century.

Linda Gordon, Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right: Birth Control in America, rev. ed. (New York: Penguin, 1990). Traces the movement among American women for the right to prevent or terminate pregnancies.

E. Delinquency

Regina G. Kunzel, Fallen Women, Problem Girls: Unmarried Women and the Professionalization of Social Work (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993). A history of out-of-wedlock pregnancy from 1890 to 1945 that examines the rise of maternity homes and the transition from evangelical female benevolence to the scientific language of professional social work.

Eric C. Schneider, In the Web of Class: Delinquents and Reformers in Boston, 1810s-1930s (New York: New York University Press, 1992). Traces public and private efforts to address juvenile delinquency through congregate institutions, placement with farm families, and the juvenile court system.

F. Divorce

Robert Griswold, Family and Divorce in California, 1850-1890: Victorian Illusions and Everyday Realities (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1982). This study, based on four hundred divorce cases, sheds light on the redefinition of male and female roles, sexuality, parenthood, and domestic violence.

Elaine Tyler May, Great Expectations: Marriage and Divorce in Post-Victorian America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). Analyzes a thousand divorce cases to explain why divorce rates rose twenty-fold between 1867 and 1929.

William L. O’Neill, Divorce in the Progressive Era (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967). Reconstructs the early-twentieth-century debate over marriage and divorce.

Roderick Phillips, Putting Asunder: A History of Divorce in Western Society (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988). A monumental history that traces shifts in religious and secular attitudes, the evolution of divorce laws, and changing responses to marital breakdown.

Glenda Riley, Divorce: An American Tradition (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997). Reveals the failure of restrictive laws to curb divorce and shows that the conflict between pro- and anti-divorce factions inhibited the development of processes to move spouses out of abusive, loveless, and unworkable marriages.

G. Domestic Violence

Linda Gordon, Heroes of Their Own Lives: The Politics and History of Family Violence: Boston, 1880-1960 (New York: Penguin Books, 1989). Uses the records of three Boston social agencies to show how the problems of spouse beating, physical abuse, and incest have been interpreted and dealt with in different ways at various times between 1880 and 1960.

Elizabeth Pleck, Domestic Tyranny: The Making of Social Policy Against Family Violence from Colonial Times to the Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). Examines public policy responses to marital rape, wife beating, childhood punishment, and other forms of domestic abuse in Puritan New England, the late nineteenth century, and the post-World War II era, arguing that an emphasis on preserving family privacy has impeded effective social policy.

H. Families and Public Policy

W. Norton Grubb and Marvin Lazerson, Broken Promises: How Americans Fail Their Children (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). Analyzes the development of public policies toward children since the early nineteenth century.

I. Family Law

Peter W. Bardaglio, Reconstructing the Household: Families, Sex, and the Law in the Nineteenth-Century South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998). Examines how southern law treated miscegenation, rape, incest, child custody, and adoption.

Michael Grossberg, Governing the Hearth: Law and the Family in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988). A comprehensive account of how courts treated marriage, adoption, illegitimacy, and other facets of family law.

Martha Minow, ed., Family Matters: Readings on Family Lives and the Law (New York: New Press, 1993; Distributed by W. W. Norton). Provides a basis for studying such questions as, What is a family? Who should count as a family member, and with what consequences for obligations and benefits? Topics include interracial adoption, new reproductive technologies, and gay and lesbian relationships.

J. Illegitimacy

Rickie Solinger, Wake Up Little Susie: Single Pregnancy and Race before Roe v. Wade (New York: Routledge, 1992). Analyzes private perceptions of and public policies toward out-of-wedlock pregnancies in the postwar era, arguing that there were contrasting responses to premarital pregnancies depending on the mother’s race.

K. Infertility

Elaine Tyler May, Barren in the Promised Land: Childless Americans and the Pursuit of Happiness (New York: Basic Books, 1995). Examines changing attitudes toward childlessness, compulsory sterilization, and adoption.

L. Orphanages and Foster Care

Kenneth Cmiel, A Home of Another Kind: One Chicago Orphanage and the Tangle of Child Welfare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). Reveals the shifting functions of a Chicago orphanage—as a foster home for working-class families in distress in the nineteenth century, as a group home for emotionally disturbed children during the 1950s, and as a residential center for severely maladjusted children during the 1960s.

Timothy A. Hacsi, Second Home: Orphan Asylums and Poor Families in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997). Examines the rise and decline of orphanages run by churches, ethnic communities, charitable organizations, fraternal societies, and local and state governments.

Peter C. Holloran, Boston’s Wayward Children: Social Services for Homeless Children, 1830-1930 (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press; Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1989). A history of social services for impoverished and delinquent children in Boston from the 1830s to the Great Depression.

Nurith Zmora, Orphanages Reconsidered: Child Care Institutions in Progressive Era Baltimore (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994). Argues that Baltimore’s orphanages provided adequate food, hygiene, and medical care; offered vocational training; and encouraged orphans to maintain close ties with relatives.

M. Poor Families

Carol Stack, All Our Kin (New York: Basic Books, 1997). Rejects the argument that poor families are unstable and disorganized and examines the way that extended and fictive kin help impoverished mothers cope with poverty.

N. Sexuality

Beth L. Bailey, Sex in the Heartland (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999). Challenges the notion that the sexual revolution began among a bohemian subculture and examines how the economic and social dislocations of World War II, the expansion of the mass media, and government policies toward sexually transmitted diseases and the birth control pill contributed to the sexual revolution.

John D’Emilio and Estelle Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America (New York: Harper and Row, 1988). A survey of American sexual attitudes and behavior from the colonial era to the present.

Roger Thompson, Sex in Middlesex: Popular Mores in a Massachusetts County, 1649-1699 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986). An examination of adolescent sexual behavior, courtship, and marital relations based on seventeenth-century county court records; argues that patriarchal control was less restrictive than previously thought and that a distinctive youth had emerged by the late seventeenth century.

O. Single Parenthood

Linda Gordon, Pitied But Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare, 1890-1935 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995). Explains why programs to aid children and single parents came to be viewed negatively.

VII. FAMILY RITUALS

Family-based and family-centered holiday celebrations and life cycle events such as weddings and funerals are central to the meaning of family life. Far from being timeless and unchanging, these rituals have a little-known history of their own which students are sure to find fascinating.

A. Childbirth

Judith Walzer Leavitt, Brought to Bed: Childbearing in America, 1750 to 1950 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). Traces the transformation of childbearing from a home-based event controlled by women to an event that takes place in the hospital presided over by a physician.

B. Courtship

Beth L. Bailey, From Front Porch to Back Seat: Courtship in Twentieth-Century America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988). Chronicles the emergence of dating as a teenage ritual from the 1920s to the 1960s, with special focus on the changing distribution of power between women and men.

Karen Lystra, Searching the Heart: Women, Men, and Romantic Love in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). Based on love letters written by a hundred men and women from the 1830s to the turn of the century. Reveals sexual explicitness, a shift away from patriarchal values, and faith in a companionate marital ideal in courtship relationships.

Ellen Rothman, Hands and Hearts: A History of Courtship in America (New York: Basic Books, 1984). Demonstrates that couples played a greater role in nineteenth-century courtship and that sexuality was more freely expressed than previously thought.

C. Domestic Celebrations

John Gillis, A World of Their Own Making: Myth, Ritual, and the Quest for Family Values (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997). Demonstrates how modern the celebration of birthdays, “white” weddings, Christmas, and other domestic rituals are.

Elizabeth Pleck, Celebrating the Family: Ethnicity, Consumer Culture, and Family Rituals (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000). Examines the changing ways Americans celebrate holidays such as Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving, Chinese New Year, and Passover, as well as the life cycle rituals of birth, coming of age, marriage, and death.

D. Weddings

Cathy Luchetti, “I Do!”: Courtship, Love, and Marriage on the American Frontier (New York: Crown Trade Paperbacks, 1996). A compendium of information drawn from photographs, diaries, and journals from the years 1715-1915.

VIII. WRITING ONE’S OWN FAMILY HISTORY: A GENEALOGICAL APPROACH

While some students feel uneasy about discussing their family history publicly, many other students enjoy the process of reconstructing their familial roots. Genealogy offers an effective way for students to put a face on the past. A genealogical approach not only allows students to undertake research about a subject they passionately care about, it also allows them to see how shifts in their family’s naming patterns, marriage patterns, and fertility and mortality rates mirror broader social and demographic transformations. Genealogical databases available on the Internet make it easy to connect to families in the past.

Immigration History Research Center: <http://www1.umn.edu/ihrc/family.htm>; and National Archives and Records Administration Genealogy Page: <http://www.nara.gov/genealogy/genindex.html>. These web sites offer a useful starting point, providing links to genealogy-related databases and step-by-step guides to genealogical research.

My History is America’s History: <http://www.myhistory.org/>. To encourage students to record their families’ histories and understand how these stories embody broader themes in the history of the United States, the National Endowment for the Humanities has launched an initiative entitled “My History is America’s History.” The web site explains how students can interview relatives, conduct genealogical research, and preserve family photographs, letters, and videotapes. It also offers classroom projects in family history for students, such as how to create a family history museum.

Steven Mintz is the senior associate dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences and John and Rebecca Moores Professor of History at the University of Houston. His books include Domestic Revolutions: A Social History of American Family Life (1988), coauthored with Susan Kellogg