This review examines one of the most fundamental issues of family history, the nature of
domestic groups in which people lived in the past. The focus is further limited to 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�…

This survey of the literature on the history of the family in Western Europe examines recent
research along three lines: studies of particular social classes; demographic history and�…

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�…

This historical anthropology of the family represents a new departure in family studies. Over
the past ten years or so, the social scientific sociological analysis of the family has�…

The historical study of the family has recently experienced a shift from the classification of
household structure at individual points in time to analysis from a developmental�…

This essay examines the recent historical research on the family with the objective of
identifying useful lessons for students of the contemporary family. The following themes in�…

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�…

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�…

The first section of this Chapter discusses definitions of the family. The definition should be
universally applicable across all cultures, account for the variety of types of families, and for�…