During the Second World War, an unprecedented number of families were torn apart. As the Nazi empire crumbled, millions roamed the continent in search of their loved ones. The Lost Children tells the story of these families, and of the struggle to determine their fate. We see how the reconstruction of families quickly became synonymous with the survival of European civilization itself. Even as Allied officials and humanitarian organizations proclaimed a new era of individualist and internationalist values, Tara Zahra demonstrates that they defined the “best interests” of children in nationalist terms. Sovereign nations and families were seen as the key to the psychological rehabilitation of traumatized individuals and the peace and stability of Europe. Based on original research in German, French, Czech, Polish, and American archives, The Lost Children is a heartbreaking and mesmerizing story. It brings together the histories of eastern and western Europe, and traces the efforts of everyone—from Jewish Holocaust survivors to German refugees, from Communist officials to American social workers—to rebuild the lives of displaced children. It reveals that many seemingly timeless ideals of the family were actually conceived in the concentration camps, orphanages, and refugee camps of the Second World War, and shows how the process of reconstruction shaped Cold War ideologies and ideas about childhood and national identity. This riveting tale of families destroyed by war reverberates in the lost children of today’s wars and in the compelling issues of international adoption, human rights and humanitarianism, and refugee policies.

Product Description: David Warren Sabean was a pioneer in the historical-anthropological study of kinship, community, and selfhood in early modern and modern Europe. His career has helped shape the discipline of history through his supervision of dozens of graduate students and his influence on countless other scholars...read more

Book by Mitterauer, Michael, Sieder, Reinhard

Product Description: This collection asks new questions about the household, examining the kinds of positive and negative emotional scope available to household members drawn together by shared economic, social and biological needs rather than by blood ties.

Product Description: The innovative and provocative essays in Framing the Family, are not primarily concerned with recovering the historical past, but rather seek to explore the complex relationship between history and cultural production in relation to the medieval and early modern family...read more

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Katherine Lynch discusses the role of the family in society from the late Middle Ages to the industrial period. She argues that in western Europe an ongoing, and recognizably western pattern of relationships among individuals, their families, and communities emerged in the late medieval period. Tracing the pattern through the nineteenth century, this study explores the family's function as an organization on the boundary between public and private life, rather than as part of a "private sphere", and how this phenomenon has been influenced by political, religious and demographic factors. (view table of contents)

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Product Description: Rescuing the premodern family from the grim picture many historians have given us of life in early Europe, Ancestors offers a major reassessment of a crucial aspect of European history--and tells a story of age-old domesticity inextricably linked, and surprisingly similar, to our own...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: This is a concise, yet wide-ranging, history of the family in Europe from antiquity to the present day. (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Until his untimely death in 1991, David Herlihy, Professor of History at Brown University, was one of the most prolific and best-known American historians of the European Middle Ages. Author of books on the history of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Italy, Herlihy published, in 1978, his best-known work in collaboration with Christine Klapisch-Zuber, Les Toscans et leurs familles (Translated into English in 1985, and Italian in 1988)...read more

Product Description: Offers a valuable synthesis of the exciting monographs on social history that have appeared during the last twenty years. [Spierenburg's] contribution is particularly welcome since he comes to his generalizations from a background of archival research rather than solely a theoretical framework...read more

Product Description: The History of the Family concerns the changing interactions between family and social, political and religious structures over the last thousand years of European history. The family is usually described in terms of patterns of kinship, inheritance, and relations between sexes and generations...read more

Analyzes the place of the father in the raising of children and examines the relationship between husbands and wives during the Reformation

Traces the history of family life during the Middle Ages and examines medieval marriages, childhood, motherhood, and fatherhood

Product Description: Book by Mitterauer, Michael, Sieder, Reinhard

Product Description: In recent years a growing number of scholars have used the family as a prism through which to view historical change. The ways in which people cope with their world have always been reflected in familial decisions. Thus, a focus on the family has allowed historians the clearest view of the dynamic relationship between the people of the past and the evolution of society and the economy...read more

Product Description: Around 300 A.D. European patterns of marriage and kinship were turned on their head. What had previously been the norm - marriage to close kin - became the new taboo. The same applied to adoption, the obligation of a man to marry his brother's widow and a number of other central practices...read more