Looks at two centuries of American family life and shatters myths and misconceptions about the past

Reexamines the 1950's, discusses the connections between politics and family life, and explains why the baby boom generation rejected their parents' values

Product Description: What was it like growing up in the Great Depression, and how did America's youngest citizens contribute to the history of that fateful decade? In The Greatest Generation Grows Up, Kriste Lindenmeyer shows that the experiences of depression-era children help us understand the course of the 1930s as well as the history of American childhood...read more

Presents an overview and analysis of the social changes that have occurred in family life in the last one hundred years, discussing such issues as new attitudes toward marriage and divorce, the development of new gender roles, the transformation of work,and the rise of alternative families.

Product Description: Through nostalgic idealizations of motherhood, family, and the home, influential leaders in early twentieth-century America constructed and legitimated a range of reforms that promoted human reproduction. Their pronatalism emerged from a modernist conviction that reproduction and population could be regulated...read more

Visions of Belonging explores how beloved and still-remembered family stories―A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, I Remember Mama, Gentleman's Agreement, Death of a Salesman, Marty, and A Raisin in the Sun―entered the popular imagination and shaped collective dreams in the postwar years and into the 1950s. These stories helped define widely shared conceptions of who counted as representative Americans and who could be recognized as belonging. The book listens in as white and black authors and directors, readers and viewers reveal divergent, emotionally textured, and politically charged social visions. Their diverse perspectives provide a point of entry into an extraordinary time when the possibilities for social transformation seemed boundless. But changes were also fiercely contested, especially as the war's culture of unity receded in the resurgence of cold war anticommunism, and demands for racial equality were met with intensifying white resistance. Judith E. Smith traces the cultural trajectory of these family stories, as they circulated widely in bestselling paperbacks, hit movies, and popular drama on stage, radio, and television. Visions of Belonging provides unusually close access to a vibrant conversation among white and black Americans about the boundaries between public life and family matters and the meanings of race and ethnicity. Would the new appearance of white working class ethnic characters expand Americans'understanding of democracy? Would these stories challenge the color line? How could these stories simultaneously show that black families belonged to the larger "family" of the nation while also representing the forms of danger and discriminations that excluded them from full citizenship? In the 1940s, war-driven challenges to racial and ethnic borderlines encouraged hesitant trespass against older notions of "normal." But by the end of the 1950s, the cold war cultural atmosphere discouraged probing of racial and social inequality and ultimately turned family stories into a comforting retreat from politics. The book crosses disciplinary boundaries, suggesting a novel method for cultural history by probing the social history of literary, dramatic, and cinematic texts. Smith's innovative use of archival research sets authorial intent next to audience reception to show how both contribute to shaping the contested meanings of American belonging.

Product Description: When Families Made Memories Together

Looks at the family of the 1950s and argues that this lifestyle was actually an exception rather than the rule for the typical family, and looks at how social conditions have effected family values

Product Description: psychology

Product Description: Originally presented as the author's thesis (Ph. D.--University of Notre Dame, 1982).

Product Description: Changes in women s roles & perceptions constitute one of the great watersheds in 20th-century American history. Exploring a large segment of time, the author blends statistics, anecdote, & interpretation to sketch a series of collective experiments by 20th-century women...read more