San Antonio College Library

"The research conducted by family historians over the past three decades challenges, modifies, and ultimately enriches sociological understandings about American family life today. By looking closely at the historical record, the author is able to debunk certain myths, such as the belief that the "ideal" family (male breadwinner and female domestic manager) has been historically prevalent: that the "traditional" family has been disintegrating in recent...

"The "American Way," Allan Carlson's episodic history of the last century, shows how our nation's identity has been shaped by carefully constructed images of the American family and the American home. From the surprisingly radical measures put forth by Theodore Roosevelt to encourage stable, large families, to the unifying role of the image of the home in assimilating immigrants, to the "maternalist" activists who attempted to transform the New Deal...

This myth-shattering examination of two centuries of American family life banishes the misconceptions about the past that cloud current debate about "family values." "Leave It to Beaver" was not a documentary, Stephanie Coontz points out; neither the 1950s nor any other moment from our past presents workable models of how to conduct our personal lives today. Without minimizing the serious new problems in American families, Coontz warns that a consoling...

"This book is designed not only to tell the story of American women and the American family over the last two centuries, but to show as concretely and analytically as possible how the interaction has shaped the family and the life of women down to the present."--Preface.

"What is life like in contemporary American communes? How do families fit into communal life? What are communal families, and what impact do families have on how communes are run and how they develop? As the only contemporary exploration of communal families, this book investigates the assumptions that scholars, and others, have made regarding the status of the family within communes, and debunks current myths about communes and communal families....

Looks at the ways the American family has adapted to change over the past three hundred years, and discusses the families of American Indians, slaves, and immigrants.

"Explores the origins of the visual portrait of domesticity that has dominated American culture since World War II."--Preface. This exploration comes from the author's examination of images published in Life magazine during its heyday, the forties and fifties.

"Fathers in the fifties tend to be portrayed as wise and genial pipe-smokers or distant, emotionless patriarchs. This common but limited stereotype obscures the remarkable diversity of their experiences and those of their children. To uncover the real story of fatherhood during this transformative era, Ralph LaRossa takes the long view--from the attack on Pearl Harbor up to the election of John F. Kennedy--revealing the myriad ways that World War...