This collection of essays covers most of the important topics in the field of family history, assesses the state of the art, and stresses the themes that will continue to generate interest in the future. Originally published in 1988. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
This updated edition of the classic book Black Families at the Crossroads, offers a comprehensive examination of the diverse and complex issues surrounding Black families. Leanor Boulin Johnson and Robert Staples combine more than sixty years of writing and research on Black families to offer insights into the pre-slavery development of the Black middle class, internal processes that affect all class strata among Black American families, the impact of race on modern Black immigrant families, the interaction of external forces and internal norms at each stage of the Black family life cycle, and public policies that provide challenges and promising prospects for the continuing resilience of the Black family as an American institution. This thoroughly revised edition features new research, including empirical studies and theoretical applications, and a review of significant social polices and economic changes in the past decade and their impact on Black families.
Every society throughout history has defined what counts as work and what doesn’t. And more often than not, those lines of demarcation are inextricable from considerations of gender. What Is Work? offers a multi-disciplinary approach to understanding labor within the highly gendered realm of household economies. Drawing from scholarship on gender history, economic sociology, family history, civil law, and feminist economics, these essays explore the changing and often contested boundaries between what was and is considered work in different Euro-American contexts over several centuries, with an eye to the ambiguities and biases that have shaped mainstream conceptions of work across all social sectors.
Crossroads of Family Businesses in China: Succession and Transformation studies the intergenerational succession in family-owned businesses, specifically in the Chinese mainland. With the succession of family businesses over time, transformation is required as it needs to correspond to the world's development to successfully sustain the company. There is a multitude of factors that play their roles accordingly to perform a prosperous accession.Hence, this book highlights common issues such as the challenges for both succession and transformation of the company, the interest of the second generation, introducing the second generation to the business before fully passing on, family culture and morale, the distinction between wealth inheritance and business succession, the unorthodox tradition of mother-to-daughter succession and opening management to professionals. These topics are substantiated by case studies of Chinese family businesses, such as Neoglory Group, Midea, Red Collar, Fotile and even more. The book offers theories, practices and models for strategic transformations during succession.Readers will be able to enjoy insights into a critical evaluation of the intersection between succession and transformation. They will also discover how the different methods of succession utilized by real-life Chinese family-owned businesses affect the businesses' performance. This book will be their first step in constructing a thought on this topic, while indulging in an incredible learning experience.
A “wide-ranging, vivid” narrative history of one of the most coveted and complex regions of the world: the Caribbean (The Observer). Ever since Christopher Columbus stepped off the Santa Maria and announced that he had arrived in the Orient, the Caribbean has been a stage for projected fantasies and competition between world powers. In Empire’s Crossroads, British American historian Carrie Gibson offers a panoramic view of the region from the northern rim of South America up to Cuba and its rich, important history. After that fateful landing in 1492, the British, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Danish, and even the Swedes, Scots, and Germans sought their fortunes in the islands for the next two centuries. These fraught years gave way to a booming age of sugar, horrendous slavery, and extravagant wealth, as well as the Haitian Revolution and the long struggles for independence that ushered in the modern era. Gibson tells not only of imperial expansion—European and American—but also of life as it is lived in the islands, from before Columbus through the tumultuous twentieth century. Told “in fluid, colorful prose peppered with telling anecdotes,” Empire’s Crossroads provides an essential account of five centuries of history (Foreign Affairs). “Judicious, readable and extremely well-informed . . . Too many people know the Caribbean only as a tourist destination; [Gibson] takes us, instead, into its fascinating, complex and often tragic past. No vacation there will ever feel quite the same again.” —Adam Hochschild, author of To End All Wars and King Leopold’s Ghost
By 1870 the sugar plantations of the Recôncavo region in Bahia, Brazil, held at least seventy thousand slaves, making it one of the largest and most enduring slave societies in the Americas. In this new translation of Crossroads of Freedom—which won the 2011 Clarence H. Haring Prize for the Most Outstanding Book on Latin American History—Walter Fraga charts these slaves' daily lives and recounts their struggle to make a future for themselves following slavery's abolition in 1888. Through painstaking archival research, he illuminates the hopes, difficulties, opportunities, and setbacks of ex-slaves and plantation owners alike as they adjusted to their postabolition environment. Breaking new ground in Brazilian historiography, Fraga does not see an abrupt shift with slavery's abolition; rather, he describes a period of continuous change in which the strategies, customs, and identities that slaves built under slavery allowed them to navigate their newfound freedom. Fraga's analysis of how Recôncavo's residents came to define freedom and slavery more accurately describes this seminal period in Brazilian history, while clarifying how slavery and freedom are understood in the present.
One of the prevailing myths about the American family is that there once existed a harmonious family with three generations living together, and that this "ideal" family broke down under the impact of urbanization and industralization. The essays in this volume challenge this myth and provide dramatic revisions of simplistic notions about change in the American family. Based on detailed research in a variety of sources, including extensive oral history interviews of ordinary people, these essays examine major changes in family life, dispel myths about the past, and offer new directions in research and interpretation. The essays cover a wide spectrum of issues and topics, ranging from the organization of the family and household, to the networks available to children as they grow up, to the role of the family in the process of industralization, to the division of labor in the family along gender lines, and to the relations between the generations in the later years of life. While discussing family relations in the past and revising prevailing notions of social change, these interdisciplinary essays also provide important perspectives on the present.
Family history is one of the most widely practiced forms of public history around the globe, especially in settler migrant nations like Australia and Canada. It empowers millions of researchers, linking the past to the present in powerful ways, transforming individuals' understandings of themselves and the world. This book examines the practice, meanings and impact of undertaking family history research for individuals and society more broadly. In this ground-breaking new book, Tanya Evans shows how family history fosters inter-generational and cross-cultural, religious and ethnic knowledge, how it shapes historical empathy and consciousness and combats social exclusion, producing active citizens. Evans draws on her extensive research on family history, including survey data, oral history interviews and focus groups undertaken with family historians in Australia, England and Canada collected since 2016. Family History, Historical Consciousness and Citizenship reveals that family historians collect and analyse varied historical sources, including oral testimony, archival documents, pictures and objects of material culture. This book reveals how people are thinking historically outside academia, what historical skills they are using to produce historical knowledge, what knowledge is being produced and what impact that can have on them, their communities and scholars. The result is a necessary revival of the current perceptions of family history.
By revealing the investment of eighteenth-century British prose fiction in contemporary debates about domestic ideology, this book addresses the multiple ways in which traditional notions of the family were estranged, reconstituted as novel concepts, and then finally presented as national social norms. It focuses on works by Aphra Behn, Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, Eliza Haywood, Horace Walpole, Laurence Sterne, and Mary Wollstonecraft, addressing a number of narratives that historians of the novel have overlooked while linking such better-known works as Robinson Crusoe and Pamela to their often neglected sequels. Challenging competing critical claims that the household either experienced a revolution in form or that it remained essentially unchanged, the author argues that eighteenth-century writers employed a set of complementary strategies to refashion the symbolic and affective power of bourgeois domesticity. Whether these writers regarded the household as a supplement to such other social institutions as the Church or the monarchy, or as a structure resisting these institutions, they affirmed the family's central role in managing civil behavior. At a time, however, when the middle class was beginning to scrutinize itself as a distinct social entity, its most popular form of literature reveals that many felt alienated from the most intimate and yet explosive of social experiences--family life. Prose fiction sought to channel these disturbingly fluid domestic feelings, yet was in itself haunted by the specter of unregulated affect. Recovering the period's own disparate perceptions of household relations, the book explains how eighteenth-century British prose fiction, which incorporates elements from conduct books, political treatises, and demographic material, used the family as an instrumental concept in a struggle to resolve larger cultural tensions at the same time it replicated many of the rifts within contemporary family ideology.
