IN the past few years the British Social Science Research Council has been spending at
least� 100,000 per year on family and demographic history, very roughly the same amount�…

In recent years, the family has emerged as a major subject of historica inquiry.'Numerous
books and articles have appeared describing, among other things, the composition, kinship�…

In September 1969, there was a meeting at Cambridge on the obscure and rather difficult
subject of the size and structure of household and family in past time. Organized by the�…

Whence and whither family history? In his bibliographic and programmatic essay,
Hobsbawm (1971) did not mention family history as a subfield of what was then the relatively�…

Abstract In his book Historical Sociology Philip Abrams (1982) urged us to think about
Sociology and History as essentially the same enterprise and while there are some�…

The newly developing field of family history has contributed significantly to the revision of
prevailing theories about the development of the family in Western society. The fact that pre�…

A remarkable variety of academic treatments of family life are in broad agreement as to the
processes of development and change occurring within families in the nineteenth and early�…

Family structures and family law have been moving in the same direction all over the world
over the past two centuries. Although general agreement exists that these changes have�…

Historians should find it easier to make sense of data that have been seasoned by the
effects of time, and sociologists should find it easier to make sense of data over which they�…

Over the last two decades, a number of historians in France and the Anglo-Saxon world
have developed the genre of'family history'. 1 To some extent this has been an application to�…