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Teaching Family History: An
Annotated Bibliography
The Changing
Family: A Chronological Approach
Over time, virtually every aspect
of American family life has undergone far-reaching transformations.
The family's roles and functions, organizational structure, demographic
characteristics, emotional dynamics, and childrearing practices
have changed profoundly over the past three centuries. So, too,
has the American home, its design, furnishings, and technology.
A chronological approach to family history underscores the ways
that shifts in social values, health, and the nature of the economy
have transformed the most intimate aspects of American life.
Overviews and Interpretations
Carl N. Degler, At Odds:
Women and the Family in America from the Revolution to the Present
(New York: Oxford University, 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, 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: Free Press, 1988). Argues that the only
constants in the history of American family life have been diversity
and change.
Handbooks and Research Guides
Joseph M. Hawes and Elizabeth
I. Nybakken, Eds., American Families: A Research Guide and
Historical Handbook (New York: Greenwood, 1991). Examines
the history of the family as a scholarly discipline, the methodologies
for the study of family history, the family in successive historical
era, 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 (New York: Greenwood, 1985). Analyzes aspects of
childhood experience from the colonial era to the late twentieth
century.
Demographics
Robert V. Wells, Uncle Sam's
Family (Albany: SUNY, 1985). An introduction to American
demographic history, which discusses such topics as the "demographic
transition" and migration.
Domestic Environment
Karen Calvert, Children in
the House: The Material Culture of Early Childhood, 1600-1900
(Boston: Northeastern: 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, 1986). Analyzes changes in architectural
style and interior space, decor, and furnishings.
Historical Eras
Colonial Family Life
Barry Levy, Quakers and the
American Family (New York: Oxford University, 1992). This
study of Quaker families in the Delaware Valley from 1650 to
1765 argues that the Quaker emphasis on family privacy and child
nurture set the pattern for American family ideology.
Jan Lewis, Pursuits of Happiness.
Illustrates how a shift in sensibility reshaped relations within
the homes of eighteenth century Virginia's planter elite.
Edmund Morgan, The Puritan
Family (New York: Harper & Row, 1990). The classic study
of religion and domestic relationships in Puritan New England.
Daniel Blake Smith, Inside
the Great House (Ithaca: Cornell University, 1995). Traces
the shift from a patriarchal, authority, 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, 1995). Deliberating downplaying colonists' regional
and religious diversity, this book stresses the high degree
of community interference in disputes involving childrearing,
marriage, and slander.
Nineteenth-Century Families
Mary P. Ryan, Cradle of the
Middle Class (Cambridge University Press, 1980). A case
study that illustrates how dramatically family life changed
during the early nineteenth century.
Twentieth-Century Families
Elliott West, Growing Up
in Twentieth-Century America: A History and Reference Guide
(New York: Greenwood, 1996). Examines children's lives at home,
at play, at work, and at school, along with changes in children's
health and the legal treatment of childhood.
Contemporary Families
Judith Stacey, Brave New
Families: Stories of Domestic Upheaval in Late Twentieth-Century
America (Berkeley: University of California, 1998). Vivid
descriptions of the new kinds of familial relationships not
defined by biology or traditional gender roles.
Primary Sources
Robert H. Bremner, Ed., Children
and Youth in America (Cambridge: Harvard University, 1970-1974).
A documentary history of children's experience, childrearing,
and public provision for children.
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America's Multicultural
Families: A Comparative Approach
Since the seventeenth century,
a 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.
Anthologies
Stephanie Coontz, Ed., American
Families: A Multicultural Reader (New York: Routledge, 1998).
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.
African American
Anthologies
Jay David and Bill Adler, Eds.,
Growing Up Black (New York: Avon, 1992). A collection
of childhood experiences by such figures as Booker T. Washington,
Malcolm X, Ralph Abernathy, and Maya Angelou.
Overviews and Interpretations
Donna L. Franklin, Ensuring
Inequality: The Structural Transformation of the African-American
Family (New York: Oxford University, 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, Black Family
in Slavery and Freedom, 1750-1925 (New York: Random House,
1977). Challenging the traditional view that slavery devastated
the African American family, the book argues that most slave
children grew up in two-parent households and that most slave
marriages remained intact unless disrupted by sale.
Families Under Slavery
Wilma King, Stolen Childhood:
Slave Youth in 19th Century America (Bloomington: Indiana
University, 1995). Examines slave children's early entry into
work; forms of play; religious experiences; and 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, 1996).
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, 1997). A thorough examination of family life,
gender roles, courtship, marriage, and parenting in Loudoun
County, Virginia, from the 1730s through the 1850s, which argues
that the harsh realities of slavery made it difficult for slaves
to maintain nuclear families.
African American Families Today
Alex Kotlowitz, There Are
No Children Here (Doubleday, 1991). The story of two boys
struggling to survive in a Chicago public housing project.
Asian Americans
Anthologies
Maria Hong, Ed., Growing
Up Asian American: An Anthology (New York: Avon Books, 1994).
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.
Immigrants
Selma Cantor Berrol, Growing
Up American: Immigrant Children in America Then and Now
(New York: Twayne, 1995). Chronicles the experience of immigrant
children from the eighteenth century to the present.
Latinas/os
Anthologies
Harold Augenbraum and Alan Stavins,
Eds., Growing Up Latino: Memoirs and Stories (New York:
Houghton, Mifflin, 1993). Presents fictional and non-fictional
accounts of coming of age by writers of Cuban, Mexican, Puerto
Rican, and other Latin American ancestry.
Joy L. De Jesus, Ed., Growing
Up Puerto Rican: An Anthology (New York: Avon, 1998). Leading
Puerto Rican writers portray the problems that beset the passage
from childhood to adulthood.
Tiffany Ana Lopez, Ed., Growing
Up Chicana/o (New York: Avon, 1994). Autobiographical essays
and stories that examine the experiences of family life, discrimination,
education, and rites of passage.
Histories
Robert Griswold Del Castillo,
La Familia: Chicano Families in the Urban Southwest, 1848
to the Present (South Bend: University of Notre Dame, 1984).
Native American
Anthologies
Patricia Riley, Ed., Growing
Up Native American: An Anthology (New York: Avon, 1994).
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.
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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.
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 work force.
Infancy
Richard Meckel, Save the
Babies: American Public Health Reform and the Prevention of
Infant Mortality, 1850-1929 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan,
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.
Childhood
Priscilla Ferguson Clement,
Growing Pains: Children in the Industrial Age, 1850-1890
(New York: Macmillan, 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, Kid's Stuff: Toys
and the Changing Worlds of American Childhood (Cambridge:
Harvard University, 1997). Traces the impact of commercialization
on children's toys and the nature of play.
David Macleod, The Age of
the Child: Children in America, 1890-1920 (New York: Macmillan,
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.
Joseph M. Hawes, Children
Between the Wars: American Childhood, 1920-1940 (New York:
Macmillan, 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 Great Depression.
Elliott West, Growing Up
with the Country: Childhood on the Far Western Frontier (Albuquerque:
University of New Mexico, 1989). Describes the varieties of
childhood experience along the overland trails, in mining towns
of the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Nevada, and the farms
of the Great Plains and Southwest from 1850 to 1900. Portrays
children as a conservative force who encouraged parents to preserve
pre-migration culture.
Elliott West and Paula Petrick,
Eds., Small Worlds: Children and Adolescents in America (Lawrence:
University of Kansas, 1992). Historical essays examine regional,
class, gender, and ethnic diversity in childhood experience
from 1850 to 1950.
Viviana Zelizer, Pricing
the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children (Princeton:
Princeton University, 1994).
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 (Chronicle Books, 1997). 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 thirties.
William Graebner, Coming
of Age in Buffalo (Philadelphia: Temple University, 1990).
This study of growing up during the 1950s emphasizes 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.
Philip J. Greven, Jr., The
Protestant Temperament (Chicago: University of Chicago,
1990). Identifies three distinct patterns of childrearing, rooted
in three religious sensibilities, that pervade the period from
the early seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries.
Harvey Graff, Conflicting
Paths: Growing Up in America (Cambridge: Harvard University,
1995). Demonstrates that there were multiple paths to growing
up, shaped by class, gender, region, and time period.
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.
David Nasaw, Children of
the City: At Work and At Play (New York: Oxford University,
1986). How urban working-class children shaped the conditions
of their lives.
Grace Palladino, Teenagers:
An American History (Basic Books, 1996). Argues that the
teenager is a social invention of the Great Depression and World
War II.
Young Adulthood
Beth Bailey, From Front Porch
to Back Seat: Courtship in Twentieth-Century America (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University, 1989). Traces shifting patterns of
middle-class courtship from the 1920s to the 1960s, with a special
focus on the distribution of power between women and men.
Marlis Buchmann, The Script
of Life in Modern Society: Entry into Adulthood in a Changing
World (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1989). Comparing
the experience of white high school graduates of 1960 and 1980,
the book argues that the transition to adulthood has become
more extended and individualized.
Paula Fass, The Damned and
the Beautiful: American Youth in the 1920s (New York: Oxford
University, 1978). 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, 1989). Traces the rise
and decline of dating, loosening constraints on sexuality, and
the shifting meaning assigned to parenthood.
Ellen K. Rothman, Hands and
Hearts: A History of Courtship in America (New York: Basic
Books, 1984). Based on extensive documentary evidence, this
volume argues that couples played a greater role in nineteenth
century courtship and that sexuality was more freely expressed
a greater role than previously thought.
Old Age
David Hackett Fischer, Growing
Old in America (New York: Oxford University, 1978). Argues
that economic circumstances and religious ideology contributed
to a veneration of age in the American colonies, contrasting
to the later adulation of youth.
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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.
Women Rima D. Apple and Janet
Golden, Eds., Mothers & Motherhood (Columbus: Ohio
State University, 1997). A collection of essays examining the
social, cultural, demographic, medical, and political factors
that have shaped the definition and experience of motherhood.
Joan J. Brumberg, The Body
Project: An Intimate History of American Girls (New York:
Vintage, 1998). Shows how popular culture and the mass media
have exploited girls' sensitivity to their changing bodies and
their appearance.
Elizabeth Ewen, Immigrant
Women in the Land of Dollars (New York: Monthly Review,
1990). Examines women's lives and culture on Manhattan's Lower
East Side from 1890 to 1925, and looks at how they responded
to the pressures of Americanization.
Miriam Formanek-Brunell, Made
to Play House (New Haven: Yale University, 1993). An examination
of the creation, marketing, and use of dolls from 1830 to 1930.
Joan Jensen, Loosening the
Bonds: Mid-Atlantic Farm Women (New Haven: Yale University,
1986). Examines the lives of rural women, primarily in the Philadelphia
hinterland.
Susan Grey Osterud, Bonds
of Community (Ithaca: Cornell University, 1991). Focuses
on the nineteenth-century Naticoke Valley in New York, and examines
the 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, 1986). This study shows how
the rise of mixed-sex commercialized leisure activities eroded
Victorian gender norms.
Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Good
Wives: Image and Reality in the Lies 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: Random House, 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.
Men
Robert Griswold, Fatherhood
in America: A History (New York: Basic Books, 1993). Traces
the shift from the Victorian patriarch to the modern American
daddy; the rise and decline of the male breadwinner ideal; and
shows how the experience of fatherhood has been shaped by class,
ethnicity, economic forces, and cultural values.
E. Anthony Rotundo, American
Manhood (New York: Basic Books, 1993). The history of boyhood
and male adolescent and young adult experience.
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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 childrearing practices. By using the family as a lens, it
is possible to uncover the human meaning of the critical events
of American history.
The Civil War
James Alan Marten, The Children's
Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1998).
Examines how the war shortened childhood, influenced children's
relations with their fathers, and altered children's literature
and schoolbooks.
Emmy E. Werner, Children's
Voices from the Civil War (Perseus, 1999). Diaries, letters,
and reminiscences reveal the impact of the war on children's
lives on the battlefield and home front.
The Family and the Great Depression
Glen H. Elder, Children of
the Great Depression (Westview, 1998). Assesses the influence
of the Depression on the life course of 167 Californians over
two generations.
The Family and World War II
Beth Bailey and David Farber,
The First Strange Place: Race and Sex in World War II Hawaii
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 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). This collection of letters is organized around
the themes of courtship, marriage, motherhood, work, and sacrifices.
William Tuttle, "Daddy's
Gone to War": The Second World War in the Lives of American
Children (New York: Oxford University, 1995). Examines how
children dealt with absent fathers, working mothers, and family
mobility, as well as children's games, entertainment, health,
and welfare.
The Family During the 1950s
Wini Breines, Youth, White,
and Miserable: Growing Up in the Fifties (Boston: Beacon,
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, 1993). Exposes the falseness of many
illusions about families in the past.
Elaine Tyler May, Homeward
Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (Basic Books,
1988). Argues that the postwar emphasis on domestic tranquility
was a response to Cold War fears and tensions.
Family Life Since 1960
Stephanie Coontz, The Way
We Really Are: Ending the War Over America's Changing Families
(New York: Basic Books, 1998). Argues that despite changes in
structure, contemporary families are functioning more effectively
than many people assume.
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.
Adolescent Pregnancy
Maris A. Vinovskis, An "Epidemic"
of Adolescent Pregnancy? (New York: Oxford University, 1988).
Places contemporary policy debates over adolescent pregnancy
in historical perspective and shows that teenage pregnancy peaked
in the 1950s.
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.
Children's Rights
Joseph Hawes, The Children's
Rights Movement (Diane Pub. Co., 1999). A history of organized
efforts to protect children and advocate their interests and
assert their rights.
Contraception
Janet Farrell Brodie, Abortion
and Contraception in Nineteenth-Century America (Ithaca:
Cornell University, 1997). Examines the changes in social values,
contraceptives, and medical knowledge that produced a sharp
drop in birth rates during the nineteenth century.
Delinquency
Regina G. Kunzel, Fallen
Women, Problem Girls (New Haven: Yale University, 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.
Divorce
Robert Griswold, Family and
Divorce in California, 1850-1890 (Albany: SUNY, 1983). This
study, based on 400 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, 1983). Analyzes a thousand divorce cases
to explain why divorce rates rose 20-fold between 1867 and 1929.
Roderick Phillips, Putting
Asunder: A History of Divorce in Western Society (Cambridge:
Cambridge University, ??). 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, 1997).
This history 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.
Domestic Violence
Linda Gordon, Heroes of their
Own Lives: The Politics and History of Family Violence (New
York: Viking Penguin, 1989). Uses the records of three Boston
social agencies to show how the problems of spouse beating,
physical abuse and neglect, and incest have been interpreted
and dealt with in different ways at various times between 1880
and 1960.
Elizabeth Pleck,
Families and Public Policy
W. Norton Grubb and Marvin Lazerson,
Broken Promises: How Americans Fail Their Children (Chicago:
University of Chicago, 1988). Analyzes the development of public
policies toward children since the early nineteenth century.
Family Law
Peter W. Bardaglio, Reconstructing
the Household: Families, Sex, and the Law in the Nineteenth-Century
South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1998).
Examines how southern law treated miscegenation, rape, incest,
child custody, and adoption.
Michael Grossberg, Governing
the Hearth (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1988).
A comprehensive account of how courts treated marriage, adoption,
illegitimacy, and other facets of family law.
Infertility
Elaine Tyler May, Barren
in the Promised Land (New York: Basic Books, 1996). Examines
changing attitudes toward childlessness, compulsory sterilization,
and adoption.
Orphanages and Foster Care
Kenneth Cmiel, A Home of
Another Kind: One Chicago Orphanage and the Tangle of Child
Welfare (Chicago: University of Chicago, 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, 1997). Examines the rise and decline of
orphanages run by churches, ethnic communities, charitable organizations,
fraternal societies, and local and state governments.
Peter Halloran, Boston's
Wayward Children: Social Services for Homeless Children, 1830-1930
(Cranbury, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University, 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, 1994). Argues that Baltimore's
orphanages provided adequate food, hygiene, medical care, offered
vocational training, and encouraged orphans to maintain close
ties with relatives.
Sexuality
John D'Emilio and Estelle Freedman,
Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America (Harper
& Row, 1988). A survey of American sexual attitudes and
behavior from the colonial era to the present.
Beth L. Bailey, Sex in the
Heartland (Cambridge: Harvard University, 1999). Challenging
the notion that the sexual revolution began among a bohemian
subculture, this book examines how the economic and social dislocations
of World War II, the expansion of the mass media, and government
policies toward sexual transmitted diseases and the birth control
pill contributed to the sexual revolution.
Roger Thompson, Sex in Middlesex:
Popular Mores in a Massachusetts County (Amherst: University
of Massachusetts, 1986). This 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.
Single Parenthood
Linda Gordon, Pitied But
Not Entitled.
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to Top
Writing One's
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. 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,
fertility and mortality rates mirror broader social and demographic
transformations.
National Archives and Records
Administration Genealogy Page
http://www.nara.gov/geneaology/genindex.html
Provides genealogical research
guides, genealogical data, and links to additional genealogical
resources on the World Wide Web.
Online Resources
Model Syllabi
Peter Bardaglio, Goucher College
New Frontier: Coming of Age in Cold War America
http://www.goucher.edu/history/pbardagl/FRO100
Harvey Graff, University of
Texas at San Antonio
Growing Up in America: Past, Present, and Future
http://www.csbs.utsa.edu/users/hgraff/index.html
John Kasson, University of North
Carolina
Introduction to American Studies: American Identities
http://www.georgetown.edu/crossroads/syllabi/kasson.html
David Macleod, Central Michigan
University
Growing Up in America
http://www.h-net.msu.edu/~child/syllabi/Macleod.htm
James Marten, Marquette University
"Childhood in America"
http://academic.mu.edu/hist/martenj/198/
Miriam Reumann, Brown University
Home Front Culture During World War II
http://www.georgetown.edu/crossroads/syllabi/reumann.html
Alex Urbiel, Ramapo College
Childhood and Youth in 20th Century America
http://orion.ramapo.edu/~aurbiel/ahst_211
Primary Sources
WPA life histories
Slave Families
1930s and 1940s Nursery Schools
http://newdeal.feri.org/library/6_24.htm
William A. Alcott, The Young
Man's Guide (1836)
http://www.nimbus.org/ElectronicTexts/YgMnsGde.1836.html
American Sunday School Books
http://www.lib.msu.edu/digital/ssb/
Carlisle Indian Industrial School
http://home.epix.net/~landis/main.html
Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in
the Life of a Slave Girl
http://www.xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/JACOBS/hjhome.htm
New England Primer
http://www.infinet.com/~jayj/primer.htm
Nineteenth-Century American
Children and What They Read: Some of Their Magazines
http://members.tripod.com/~merrycoz/MAGS.HTM
Northern Great Plains: Fred
Hultstrand and F.A. Pazandak Collections
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/award97/nddfahtml/hult_home.html
Photographs of Lewis Hines
http://www.historyplace.com/unitedstates/childlabor/index.html
Slavery
http://vi.uh.edu/pages/mintz/primary.htm
WPA Life Histories
http://lcweb2.loc.gov/wpaintro/wpahome.html
Secondary Sources
Kenneth Cmiel, "A Nineteenth-Century
Asylum," A Home of Another Kind (Chicago: University of
Chicago, 1995)
http://www.gsm.uci.edu/~mckenzie/rethink/mck97-ch15a.htm
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