Generations and Change: Genealogical Perspectives in Social History
| By author: | Crandall |
Product Code:
H158
ISBN:
9780865541689
Product Format:
Hardback
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Price:
$35.00
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Even as its practitioners have incorporated new standards of professionalism and methodological sophistication, genealogical research is riding the crest of a revival of interest in the recovery of family and ethnic “roots.” At the same time social historians have sought to study and revise our understanding of the past “from the bottom up,” emphasizing the historical description and analysis of family development. No longer the “silent partner” in studies of individuals, groups, and institutions, the family has been recognized as a significant variable in the evolution of society.
Yet the mountain of data accumulated by social historians and the rich new deposits of material on primary human linkages uncovered by genealogists remain unsynthesized. Social historians have not yet explained the meaning of their discoveries, and that failure is compounded by suspicion of results produced by researchers who do not appear to share certain methodological and philosophical assumptions. Yet if social historians explore patterns of daily life in the milieu of community, workplace, and family, and if genealogists reveal lines of descent that enmesh the individual in a web of kinship, family, and communal association, then each discipline has something to contribute to the other.
This first effort to produce such a conversation brings together historians, genealogists, archivists, and anthropologists to explore the uses of genealogical research in understanding the past.