Does the Family Have a History?

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 “new” social history. The closest he came was “demography and kinship.” In 1980, by which time social history was definitely mature, and according to some critics, even in decline, the proceedings of a conference on history in the 1980s included a 37-page essay by Stone (1981b; see also Stone, 1981a, 1978) on family history. Several bellwethers of the change may be noted in passing. One year after the 1968 conference for which Hobsbawm's comments were originally prepared, the Cambridge Group for the History of Population held a meeting whose subject—the comparative history of household and family—went beyond strictly demographic history. In 1972, a family history newsletter was launched by Professor Tamara Hareven, in cooperation with the Newberry Library in Chicago; a special issue of the Journal of Interdisciplinary History on “The History of the Family” appeared in 1971; a special issue of Annales: Economies, Societes et Civilisations devoted to “Famille et Societé” was published in 1972. By the time the Journal of Family History, edited by Hareven, began publication in 1976, two more special issues on family history of the Journal of Interdisciplinary History were required reading for those calling themselves social historians.

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