This book inaugurates a major three-volume history of the family in Europe over the past five hundred years. In the series, eminent European and American social historians present a fresh reading of family life in Europe, explaining how families and family relations differed across Europe and how and why they changed over time.

The penultimate volume in this series explores the effect that industrialisation, new technology, the growth of cities, and the revolutions in transport and in communication had on the family between 1789 and 1913.

This opening volume of a three-part history of the family in Europe examines the material conditions of family life, housing, diet and domestic organisation, and the economic and social factors that influenced its development.

A Social History of Twentieth-Century Europe offers a systematic overview on major aspects of social life, including population, family and households, social inequalities and mobility, the welfare state, work, consumption and leisure, social cleavages in politics, urbanization as well as education, religion and culture. It also addresses major debates and diverging interpretations of historical and social research regarding the history of European societies in the past one hundred years. Organized in ten thematic chapters, this book takes an interdisciplinary approach, making use of the methods and results of not only history, but also sociology, demography, economics and political science. Béla Tomka presents both the diversity and the commonalities of European societies looking not just to Western European countries, but Eastern, Central and Southern European countries as well. A perfect introduction for all students of European history.

This book surveys the history of the German family in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The contributions deal with the influence of industrialisation on family life in town and country, with rural families and communities under the impact of social and economic change, and with the role and influence of the family in the lives of men and women in the newly-emerged working class. Research on the history of the family had so far, at the point of this book’s publication in 1981, concentrated on England and France; this book adds an important comparative dimension by extending the discussion into Central Europe and bringing fresh evidence and interpretation to bear on the wider debate about the effects of industrialisation on family structure and family life as a whole. The authors approach the subject from a variety of perspectives, including social anthropology, oral history, economic history and feminist studies. This book is ideal for students of history, particularly the history of Germany.

Named one of the best books of 2019 by The Economist and a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice. A National Jewish Book Award finalist. "A superb and touching book about the frailty of ties that hold together places and people." --The New York Times Book Review An award-winning historian shares the true story of a frayed and diasporic Sephardic Jewish family preserved in thousands of letters For centuries, the bustling port city of Salonica was home to the sprawling Levy family. As leading publishers and editors, they helped chronicle modernity as it was experienced by Sephardic Jews across the Ottoman Empire. The wars of the twentieth century, however, redrew the borders around them, in the process transforming the Levys from Ottomans to Greeks. Family members soon moved across boundaries and hemispheres, stretching the familial diaspora from Greece to Western Europe, Israel, Brazil, and India. In time, the Holocaust nearly eviscerated the clan, eradicating whole branches of the family tree. In Family Papers, the prizewinning Sephardic historian Sarah Abrevaya Stein uses the family’s correspondence to tell the story of their journey across the arc of a century and the breadth of the globe. They wrote to share grief and to reveal secrets, to propose marriage and to plan for divorce, to maintain connection. They wrote because they were family. And years after they frayed, Stein discovers, what remains solid is the fragile tissue that once held them together: neither blood nor belief, but papers. With meticulous research and care, Stein uses the Levys' letters to tell not only their history, but the history of Sephardic Jews in the twentieth century.

An exploration of the convulsive history of the 20th century's first five decades, seen through the lens of families and family life In this masterly twentieth-century history, Paul Ginsborg places the family at center stage, a novel perspective from which to examine key moments of revolution and dictatorship. His groundbreaking book spans 1900 to 1950 and encompasses five nation states in the throes of dramatic transition: Russia in revolutionary passage from Empire to Soviet Union; Turkey in transition from Ottoman Empire to modern Republic; Italy, from liberalism to fascism; Spain during the Second Republic and Civil War; and Germany from the failure of the Weimar Republic to the National Socialist state. Ginsborg explores the effects of political upheaval and radical social policies on family life and, in turn, the impact of families on revolutionary change itself. Families, he shows, do not simply experience the effects of political power, but are themselves actors in the historical process. The author brings human and personal elements to the fore with biographical details and individual family histories, along with a fascinating selection of family photographs and portraits. From WWI--an indelible backdrop and imprinting force on the first half of the twentieth century--to post-war dictatorial power and family engineering initiatives, to the conclusion of WWII, this book shines new light on the profound relations among revolution, dictatorship, and family.