Volume 22, Number 18 · November 13, 1975

The Family and History

By Christopher Lasch

BOOKS DISCUSSED IN THIS ARTICLE

The American Family in Social-Historical Perspective
edited by Michael Gordon

St. Martin's Press, 421 pp., $5.95 (paper)

The World We Have Lost
by Peter Laslett

Scribner's, 325 pp., $3.50 (paper)

World Revolution and Family Patterns
by William J. Goode

Free Press, 444 pp., $3.95 (paper)

Household and Family in Past Time
edited by Peter Laslett, edited by Richard Wall

Cambridge University Press, 623 pp., $9.95 (paper)

The Family in History: Interdisciplinary Essays
edited by Theodore K. Rabb, edited by Robert I. Rotberg

Harper & Row, 240 pp., $3.95 (paper)

Journal of Marriage and the Family
special issue on the history of the family

Vol. 35, no. 3 pp.

The Wish To Be Free: Society, Psyche, and Value Change
by Fred Weinstein, by Gerald M. Platt

University of California Press, 330 pp., $3.85 (paper)

The Making of the Modern Family
by Edward Shorter

Basic Books, 260 pp., $15.00

The history of the family, once the province of amateurs and antiquarians, has become an academic industry. The prolonged 'crisis' of the modern family, the feminist revival, the growing prestige of the social sciences and the hope that historians can share it have all contributed to the current fascination with the subject. But there is a more important consideration—the possibility that the history of the family provides the missing link between cultural and intellectual history on the one hand and politico-economic history on the other; between the study of culture and the study of social structure, production, and power.



Review, 5700 words

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