This four-volume collection of primarily newly transcribed manuscript material brings together sources from both sides of the Atlantic and from a wide variety of regional archives. It is the first collection of its kind, allowing comparisons between the development of the family in England and America during a time of significant change. Volume 4: Managing Families, II In this final volume documents are focused on some of the more negative aspects of family life. Sections focus on authority, power and discontent; violence and conflict; and death and mourning. Topics include estate disputes, contested marriages, spousal abuse, deaths, wills and memorials.
This four-volume collection of primarily newly transcribed manuscript material brings together sources from both sides of the Atlantic and from a wide variety of regional archives. It is the first collection of its kind, allowing comparisons between the development of the family in England and America during a time of significant change. Volume 3: Managing Families, I The sources included here document the economics of running a household, the experience of being a sibling and information on family inheritance and genealogy. Specifics on home economics include information on food and cooking, washing laundry, insurance inventories and plantation accounts.
This four-volume collection of primarily newly transcribed manuscript material brings together sources from both sides of the Atlantic and from a wide variety of regional archives. It is the first collection of its kind, allowing comparisons between the development of the family in England and America during a time of significant change. Volume 2: Making Families This volume provides a comprehensive examination of the process of creating a family, as well as some of the issues surrounding family breakdown. Documents are divided into sections covering courtship, marriage, sex and reproduction, childhood and parenthood. Gender roles are clearly defined in the source material, with documents offering specific advice to men and women. This is Volume II.
This four-volume collection of primarily newly transcribed manuscript material brings together sources from both sides of the Atlantic and from a wide variety of regional archives. It is the first collection of its kind, allowing comparisons between the development of the family in England and America during a time of significant change. Volume 1: Many Families The eighteenth-century family group was a varied one. Documents attest to religious and racial diversity, as well as the hardships endured by the poor and working classes, such as widows, orphans and those born outside wedlock. Fictive families are also examined alongside more traditional family units bound by blood or law.
Being Single in Georgian England is the first book-length exploration of what family life looked like, and how it was experienced, when viewed from the perspective of unmarried and childless family members. Using a micro-historical approach, Amy Harris covers three generations of the famous musical and abolitionist Sharp family. The abundance of records the Sharps produced and preserved reveals how single family members influenced the household economy, marital decisions, childrearing practices, and conceptions about lineage and genealogy. The Sharps' exceptional closeness and good humor consistently shines through as their experiences reveal how eighteenth-century families navigated gender and age hierarchies, marital choices, and household governance. The importance of childhood relationships and the life-long nature of siblinghood stand out as central aspects of Sharp family life, no matter their marital status. Along the way, Being Single explores humor, music, religious practice and belief, death and mourning, infertility, disability, slavery, abolition, philanthropy, and family memory. The Sharps' experiences uncover how important lateral kin like siblings and cousins were to marital and household decisions. The analysis also reveals additional layers of Georgian family life, including: single sociability not centered on courtship; the importance of aunting and uncling on their own terms; the ways charitable acts and philanthropic endeavors could serve as outlets or partial replacements for parenthood; and how genealogical practices could be tied to values and identity instead of to biological descendants' possession of property. Ultimately, the Sharp siblings' remarkable lives and the single family members' efforts to preserve a record of those lives, show the enduring contribution of unmarried people to family relationships and household dynamics.
The study of past society in terms of what it consumes rather than what it produces is - relatively speaking - a new development. The focus on consumption changes the whole emphasis and structure of historical enquiry. While human beings usually work within a single trade or industry as producers, as, say, farmers or industrial workers, as consumers they are active in many different markets or networks. And while history written from a production viewpoint has, by chance or design, largely been centred on the work of men, consumption history helps to restore women o the mainstream. The history of consumption demands a wide range of skills. It calls upon the methods and techniques of many other disciplines, including archaeology, sociology, social and economic history, anthropology and art criticism. But it is not simply a melting-pot of techniques and skills, brought to bear on a past epoch. Its objectives amount to a new description of a past culture in its totality, as perceived through its patterns of consumption in goods and services. Consumption and the World of Goods is the first of three volumes to examine history from this perspective, and is a unique collaboration between twenty-six leading subject specialists from Europe and North America. The outcome is a new interpretation of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, one that shapes a new historical landscape based on the consumption of goods and services.
A Spiritual Home explores congregational life inside British and American Reformed churches between 1830 and 1915. At a time when scholars have become interested in the day-to-day experience of local congregations, this book reaches back into the nineteenth century, a critically formative period in Anglo-American religious life, to examine the historical roots of congregational life.Taking the perspective of the laity, Cashdollar ranges widely from worship and music to fund-raising and administration, from pastoral care to social work, from prayer meetings to strawberry festivals, from the sanctuary to the kitchen. Firmly rooted in broader currents of gender, class, notions of middle-class respectability, increasing expectations for personal privacy, and patterns of professionalization, he finds that there was a gradual shift in emphasis during these years from piety to fellowship. Based on records, publications, and memorabilia from about 150 congregations representing eight denominations, A Spiritual Home gives us a comprehensive, composite portrait of religious life in Victorian Britain and America.
