Family Sociology

Conventional wisdom holds that same-sex marriage is a purely modern innovation, a concept born of an overtly modern lifestyle that was unheard of in 19th-century America. But as Rachel Hope Cleves demonstrates in this eye-opening book, same-sex marriage is hardly new. Born in 1777, Charity Bryant was raised in Massachusetts. A brilliant and strong-willed woman with a clear attraction for her own sex, Charity found herself banished from her family home at age 20.

The kinds of families we see today are different than they were even a decade ago, some fantastically so, as paths to parenthood have been rejiggered by technology, activism, and law. In Modern Families, Joshua Gamson brings us extraordinary family creation tales - his own included - that illuminate this changing world of contemporary kinship. We meet a child with two mothers, made with one mother's egg and the sperm of a man none of them has ever met and carried by the other mother.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, and the American Book Award, the best-selling Common Ground is much more than the story of the busing crisis in Boston as told through the experiences of three families. As Studs Terkel remarked, it's "gripping, indelible...a truth about all large American cities."

In Brothers on Three, we follow Phil and Will, along with their teammates, coaches, and families, as they balance the pressures of adolescence, shoulder the dreams of their community, and chart their own individual courses for the future. Brothers on Three is not simply a story about high school basketball, about state championships and a winning team. It is a book about community, and it is about boys on the cusp of adulthood, finding their way through the intersecting worlds they inhabit and forging their own paths to personhood.

In Love the One You’re With, Lee Ellis will inspire you to look at your relationship in a new way. She will show you how you can get the spark back in your marriage - and in your life. Lee shares her years of experience in working with clients, using real examples of people who completely turned their lives around using her simple techniques.

Home Fires is the powerful saga of the Gordon family--real people, names unchanged. Spanning nearly five decades, from the end of World War II to the early 1990s, their story has the scope, depth, wealth of incident, and emotional intensity of a great novel, and an abundance of humor, scandal, warmth, and trauma--the recognizable components of family life. This is also a masterful chronicle of the turbulent postwar era, illuminating the interplay between private life and profound cultural changes.

Every year, tens of thousands of children write to Highlights magazine, sharing their hopes and dreams, worries and concerns, as if they were writing to a trusted friend. From the beginning, the editors at Highlights have answered every child individually. Longtime editor in chief Christine French Cully has curated a collection of this remarkable correspondence (letters, emails, and poems) in Dear Highlights - revealing an intimate and inspiring 75-year conversation between America’s children and its leading children’s magazine.

John Lynch was a promising athlete, but at age 11 was struck by a crippling illness. He was diagnosed with juvenile arthritis (JA), a disease that affects 300,000 children, making them unable to live full-functioning, pain-free lives. John continued to seek new treatments, but not until age 53 was he given the “miracle drug” that enabled him to sustain a 30-year legal practice. During that time, he dedicated his life to helping others who suffered from JA and became a much-honored advocate for easing their distress.

Are you tired of dating men who string you along, disappear, or won't commit? Is He the One? explains why women often fall for the wrong guys and how to quickly recognize who they are. Dating today is anything but easy, especially as a single woman over 40. Wouldn't it be great if you could tell within three dates if a man was going to waste your time or had potential as a romantic partner? Well, now you can! Author and dating coach Ronnie Ann Ryan radically simplifies understanding what men do and say.

After World War II ended in 1945, the Soviet Union and the United States began a decades-long confrontation that would become known as the Cold War. American foreign policy focused on "containment" - preventing the communist USSR from gaining more ground - and many people looked at the geographical and political implications of this policy. Others, meanwhile, explored American domestic life in that same period. But historian Elaine Tyler May became the first person to bring these seemingly unrelated areas together.

After his wife’s death, retired cop Walter "Pops" Washington has made a home for his ex-felon son in his sprawling, rent-controlled, Riverside Drive apartment. Will a long-simmering feud with the NYPD cause him to lose his home and the family he’s built there?

Долгие годы после окончания войны большинство немцев, разлученных ею с близкими, мечтали о воссоединении семей и нормальной жизни. Но частная жизнь за дверями домов не стала тем островком спокойствия, которого так жаждали эти люди. Происшед шее оставило глубокий след на повседневной жизни семей. Отцы и мужья после войны и плена стали другими. Их дети росли и воспитывались в атмосфере молчания, намеков и строгости. В конце концов конфликт поколений обернулся уличными беспорядками. Флориан Хубер описывает послевоенную семейную драму с точки зрения и от имени этих людей.

Can I be honest with you? A wife and husband face a defining moment in their relationship in this emotional, sweet, and surprising confessional about love, monogamy, and the secrets we share. When Kristi Coulter’s husband proposed, she didn’t admit her fears. When they exchanged vows, she didn’t reveal that she was terrified that marriage would ruin her life. During fifteen years of genuinely happy marriage, she never said a word about another man in her life. Then she comes clean - about all of it - and discovers a new world.

David Goodhart asks whether this transformation has been an unalloyed good. Increased opportunities for women, greater freedom and autonomy, and a more equal domestic sphere have brought considerable benefits. However, argues Goodhart, there have been losses as well as gains: liberal trends have produced negative consequences in family breakdown, children's mental health, and the undervaluing of care. Falling birthrates also present major demographic and social challenges.

In una società in cui si sono dissolte le strutture tradizionali della parentela e della famiglia, uomini e donne si trovano costretti a darsi individualmente le regole della loro vita: ciascuno è il giudice delle proprie trasgressioni, il prete che assolve i propri peccati e il terapeuta che indaga e cura le ferite del proprio passato. La lotta per conciliare famiglia e carriera, amore e matrimonio, e per una "nuova" genitorialità ha oggi sostituito la lotta "di classe".

In the past thirty years, polygamy has become a flashpoint of conflict as Western governments attempt to regulate certain cultural and religious practices that challenge seemingly central principles of family and justice. In Forbidden Intimacies, Melanie Heath comparatively investigates the regulation of polygamy in the United States, Canada, France, and Mayotte.

Dr. Susan Mossman Riva was adopted in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1963. In 1995, she sought the help of the Nebraska Children's Home to find her birthmother, leading to the discover of her birth family in 1996. Miraculously, her search and reunion coincided with her biologicals sister's search. The awe and joy of homecoming brought her to the realization that synchronicity acts as a guidepost, repairing relational brokenness. The divine timing of their reunion happened months before their biological, maternal grandmother died.

Little Jeff Pearce grew up in a postwar Liverpool slum. His father lived the life of an affluent gentleman whilst his mother was forced to steal bread to feed her starving children. Life was tough, and from the moment Jeff could walk he learned to go door to door, begging rags from the rich, which he sold down the markets. Leaving school at the age of 14, he embarked on an extraordinary journey and found himself, before the age of 30, a millionaire. Then, after a cruel twist of fate left him penniless, he, his wife and his children were forced out of their beautiful home.

Entre padre e hijos ha permitido que millones de padres alrededor del mundo fortalezcan las relaciones con sus hijos. Escrito por el célebre psicólogo Dr. Haim Ginott, este libro revolucionario brinda consejos y enseñanzas para educar a los hijos de forma cariñosa y disciplinada a la vez.

In this memoir of identity and discovery, Vanessa A. Bee explores the way we define "home" and "belonging"—from her birth in Yaounde, Cameroon, to her adoption, to experiencing housing insecurity in Europe and her eventual immigration to the US. After her parents' divorce, Vanessa traveled with her mother to Lyon and later to London, eventually settling in Reno, Nevada, as a teenager, right around the financial crisis and the collapse of the housing market. At 20, still a practicing evangelical Christian and newly married, Vanessa applied to and was accepted by Harvard Law School.