Yankee Family Paperback / softback
by James McGovern
Paperback / softback
Description
The voluminous records of the Pierce and Poor families weave a story that runs from the late eighteenth century until World War I.
The extent and qual-ity of their source materials, and their positions as representative middle-class to upper-middle-class New England families, make these subjects of Yankee Family particularly well suited for analyzing processes of continuity and change.
McGovern reviews the life-styles of the Pierce and,Poor families both on the frontier and in the Boston area, and focuses on the cross-generational changes in these styles. The study begins with John Pierce at Harvard in the 1790s and follows through to the first decade of the twen-tieth century.
The author shows how the "Yankee" mentality, an outgrowth of New England Puritanism, contributed to the family's rise to success, but con-cludes that by the early twentieth cen-tury the Yankee life-style was ending, a victim of social and economic changes in American society that were rendering it irrelevant. Until recently historical scholarship on the American family has been static.
Apart from long-standing predilections of historians for political history, there were also theoretical and meth-odological problems deterring schol-arship on the American family.
But McGovern's approach holds great promise; it is more sensitive than quan-tification studies to the impact of change on a wider range of human expe-riences because it is inevitably more personal.
While this type of family his-tory rewards students of social change, it also affords important insights on con-tinuity.
It reveals the existence of a family style which adapts to change with a special corpus of family wisdom, al-ways finding a way to exercise its "known" amidst constant flux — thus mitigating some of the effects of change.
Information
-
Out of stock
- Format:Paperback / softback
- Pages:225 pages
- Publisher:Taylor & Francis Inc
- Publication Date:30/01/1978
- Category:
- ISBN:9780878556748
Other Formats
- EPUB from £38.69
- PDF from £38.69
- Hardback from £130.00
Information
-
Out of stock
- Format:Paperback / softback
- Pages:225 pages
- Publisher:Taylor & Francis Inc
- Publication Date:30/01/1978
- Category:
- ISBN:9780878556748
