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to Do History: Families
Selected
Internet Resources on the Family
by
Steven Mintz
FAMILIES
BY TIME PERIOD
Colonial
America
- A Colonial
Family and Community
http://www.hfmgv.org/smartfun/colonial/intro/
Targeted at grade
school students, this site, created by the Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield
Village, examines the life of the Daggett family, which lived in Coventry
Connecticut during the mid-eighteenth century.
- Images
of the Colonial Family and Beyond
http://www.library.csi.cuny.edu/dept/history/lavender/colfam.html
Family portraits
and photographs help students visualize the changing nature of family life
over time and encourage them to think about shifts in families’ size and structure,
gender and family roles, and emotional and power dynamics. Prepared
by Professor Catherine Lavender of CUNY, this site provides students with
artistic representations of American family life dating from the mid-eighteenth
to the mid-nineteenth century, along with a series of discussion questions.
- Redefining
Family at Colonial Williamsburg
http://www.history.org/life/family/essay.htm
This site, produced
by the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, explores the lives of real colonial
Virginian families and how they approached life passages such as courtship
and marriage, birth, childhood, and death.
- “Religion,
Women, and the Family in Early America” by Christine Leigh Heyrman
http://www.nhc.rtp.nc.us:8080/tserve/eighteen/ekeyinfo/erelwom.htm
One of a series of essays designed to help high school teachers of American
history bring their students to a greater understanding of the role religion
has played in the development of the United States, placed online by the National
Humanities Center, this site examines the role of religion in shaping relations
between husbands and wives and parents and children in colonial America.
SHIFTING
FAMILY IDEALS
- The
New Child: British Art & the Origins of Modern Childhood, 1730-1830
http://www.uampfa.berkeley.edu/exhibits/newchild/
Based
on an exhibit held at the University of California – Berkeley and curated
by James Steward, this site uses a variety of paintings to illustrate how
many contemporary attitudes surrounding children emerged in Georgian England.
FAMILIES
IN THE EARLY REPUBLIC
- Do History:
Martha Ballard’s Diary Online
http://www.dohistory.org/
Based
on Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s Pulitzer prize-winning book A Midwife’s Tale,
this site, created by the Harvard Film, allows students to analyze midwife
Martha Ballard’s diary, a valuable source for understanding social history
of late eighteenth and early nineteenth century rural New England. The diary
sheds light on household economies, medical practices, and sexual mores.
- Mothers
in Uncle Tom's America
http://xroads.virginia.edu/~MA97/riedy/
This
site, created by Maureen E. Riedy at the University of Virginia, examines
how popular novels, essays, and poems treated mother-child relations during
the mid-nineteenth century.
FAMILIES
IN BONDAGE
WESTWARD
MIGRATION
- End
of the Oregon Trail
http://www.endoftheoregontrail.org/biomenu.html
This
site, created by the End of the Oregon Trail , contains diariess, photographs,
and biographical records documenting the pioneering experience, mainly along
the Oregon and California Trails, and including African American pioneers
and settlers in the Pacific Northwest.
- Roots
in the Sand
http://www.pbs.org/rootsinthesand/
This
companionate site to the PBS documentary contains archival and family photographs,
personal and public documents, and outtakes to offer a multi-generational
portrait of pioneering Punjabi-Mexican families who settled, a century ago,
in Southern California's Imperial Valley.
FAMILIES
IN INDUSTRIALIZING AMERICA
- Industrialization
– Interpersonal
http://www.oah.org/pubs/magazine/gilded/cantu7.htm
A
lesson plan and handouts created by Nina Mjagkij and D. Antonio Cantu and
featured in the Summer 1999 OAH Magazine of History, uses an 1884 study
by the Illinois Bureau of Labor Statistics to detail the economic status and
living environment of laboring families in Chicago, Illinois.
FAMILIES
IN THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY
- A Tenement
Story
http://www.tenement.org/story.html
This
site, created by the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, examines the lives of
immigrant families that lived at 97 Orchard Street in Manhattan.
FAMILIES
DURING THE GREAT DEPRESSION
- Hard
Times: Coping With During the Great Depression, 1929-1941
http://www.spa3.k12.sc.us/broome/ht.htm
A collaborative
project project, coordinated by Anne Pillow and Sheila Oliver of Broome High
School in Spartenburg, S.C., in which students interviewed individuals who
remember life during the Great Depression (1929-1941).
FAMILIES
DURING WORLD WAR II
- What
Did You do in the War, Grandma?
http://www.stg.brown.edu/projects/WWII_Women/tocCS.html
This site, which documents that disruptions that war brought to family
life on the homefront, contains oral histories of Rhode Island women during
World War II that were collected by students in the South Kingstown, R.I.,
Honors English Program, accompanied by essays by teachers and professional
historians.
- Family
Album Project: Masumi Hayashi Photography
http://www.csuohio.edu/art_photos/famalbum/famalbum.html
An online album of pictures documents the daily lives of Japanese-American
families in American and Canadian internment camps during World War II.
POSTWAR
FAMILIES
- Levittown:
Documents of an Ideal American Suburb
http://www.uic.edu/~pbhales/Levittown/
This
website, created by Peter Bacon Hales of the Art History Department at the
University of Illinois, Chicago, includes photographs and text documenting
the paradigmatic postwar American suburb, built in a Long Island potato field,
and its families.
JOURNALS
REFERENCE
SOURCES
Ethnic
Diversity in American Family Life
- Ethnic
Images in Toys & Games
http://www.balchinstitute.org/toys/toys.html
- Ethnic
Weddings in America
http://www.balchinstitute.org/wedding/Wedding.html
- Rites
of Passage in America
http://www.balchinstitute.org/rites/rites.htm
These
sites, based on exhibitions held in the Museum of the Balch Institute for
Ethnic Studies in Philadelphia, document ethnic diversity in play patterns,
marriage practices, and family rituals in American history.
- “Family”
by David Herlihy
http://www.theaha.org/info/AHA_History/dherlihy.htm
David Herlihy’s
presidential address at the American Historical Association’s 1990 annual
meeting examines the emergence of the family in the West as a unit sharply
differentiated from extended kin and community.
- Family
Discussions: Resources for Family Sociology
http://www.familydiscussions.com/
This site contains
detailed summaries of noteworthy works, organized by authors, titles, topics,
and keywords; an extensive bibliography of recent books on the family; and
statistical charts and commentary summarizing recent family trends.
- A Historical
Dictionary of Terms in Family History
http://oak.cats.ohiou.edu/~baxter/hist381/webpage.htm
An online glossary
of key concepts, terms, and individuals in the history of the family created
by students in an undergraduate history course of Douglas C. Baxter at Ohio
University.
- The
History of Education and Childhood
http://www.socsci.kun.nl/ped/whp/histeduc/
An extensive archive
of source materials on the history of education and the history of childhood.
- “In
Search Of A Golden Age” by Stephanie Coontz
http://www.context.org/ICLIB/IC21/Coontz.htm
Evergreen College
Professor Stephanie Coontz offers a succinct look at families throughout U.S.
history and argues against the idea that there was ever a “golden age”
of the family.
Lesson
Plans
These classroom-tested
lesson plans were created by teachers participating in seminars sponsored by
the Yale-New Haven Teachers’ Institute. These curriculum units, many of which
contain primary sources, illustrate how themes in the history of the family
can be brought into the classroom.
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