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Although the history of the family was long ignored by serious scholars, research has flourished in recent decades, and this new field of study has told us much more than we knew even thirty years ago. In the process, many myths about what life was like two or three centuries ago have been debunked ...

Although the history of the family was long ignored by serious scholars, research has flourished in recent decades, and this new field of study has told us much more than we knew even thirty years ago. In the process, many myths about what life was like two or three centuries ago have been debunked. For example, contrary to popular belief, we now know that most women in the preindustrial West did not marry before they were twenty-five. Most households consisted of no more than four or five people, usually including unrelated young people working as servants. And perhaps most surprising of all, multi-generational households were not very common. This timely synthesis of a vast and complex literature makes accessible to general readers the story of the family in the preindustrial Western world. Pulling together much fascinating information, Beatrice Gottlieb presents every aspect of a rich subject with clarity and fairness. Her generously illustrated book deals with the households of the wealthy and the poor, courtship and marriage, the care and training of children, and the bonds (and strains) of kinship. The matter of inheritance receives special attention, as it played a substantial role in a world permeated by rank and status, and its importance gave the family a peculiar social and economic significance. The book also deals with ideas about the family and the values it embodied. As Gottlieb says, "What you and I usually mean when we say 'family' is something that comes to us from the nineteenth century, not from time immemorial." She makes the point that the so-called traditional world before the Industrial Revolution was awash in traditions that collided with each other. Marriage, for example, appeared to many as natural and inevitable, to others as burdensome and repellant. And while both medical and religious authorities always strongly advised mothers to nurse their children, upper-class women almost never did, instead using lower-class wet nurses. The famous people and events of history make brief walk-on appearances in this book: Henry VIII's divorce, Louis XIV's mistresses, Benjamin Franklin's apprenticeship to his brother, Mary Wollstonecraft's death in childbirth. But the author's emphasis is on the more ordinary people, whose everyday lives strike a responsive chord in all of us. This remarkable, eminently readable work brings to vivid life the wives and husbands, servants and masters, children and parents of a not too distant past.

Technology, perhaps the most salient feature of our time, affects everything from jobs to international law yet ranks among the most unpredictable facets of human life. Here Robert McC. Adams, renowned anthropologist and Secretary Emeritus of the Smithsonian Institution, builds a new approach to ...

Technology, perhaps the most salient feature of our time, affects everything from jobs to international law yet ranks among the most unpredictable facets of human life. Here Robert McC. Adams, renowned anthropologist and Secretary Emeritus of the Smithsonian Institution, builds a new approach to understanding the circumstances that drive technological change, stressing its episodic, irregular nature. The result is nothing less than a sweeping history of technological transformation from ancient times until now. Rare in antiquity, the bursts of innovations that mark the advance of technology have gradually accelerated and now have become an almost continuous feature of our culture. Repeatedly shifting in direction, this path has been shaped by a host of interacting social, cultural, and scientific forces rather than any deterministic logic. Thus future technological developments, Adams maintains, are predictable only over the very short term.Adams's account highlights Britain and the United States from early modern times onward. Locating the roots of the Industrial Revolution in British economic and social institutions, he goes on to consider the new forms of enterprise in which it was embodied and its loss of momentum in the later nineteenth century. He then turns to the early United States, whose path toward industrialization initially involved considerable "technology transfer" from Britain. Propelled by the advent of mass production, world industrial leadership passed to the United States around the end of the nineteenth century. Government-supported research and development, guided partly by military interests, helped secure this leadership.Today, as Adams shows, we find ourselves in a profoundly changed era. The United States has led the way to a strikingly new multinational pattern of opportunity and risk, where technological primacy can no longer be credited to any single nation. This recent trend places even more responsibility on the state to establish policies that will keep markets open for its companies and make its industries more competitive. Adams concludes with an argument for active government support of science and technology research that should be read by anyone interested in America's ability to compete globally.