Mary Jo Maynes - Böcker

This book addresses the question of what world history looks like when the family is at the center of the story. People have always lived in families, but what that means has varied dramatically over time and across cultures. The family is not a "natural" phenomenon--it has a history. And family life is not limited to the realm of the private or the strictly personal; the family is a force of history. Gender and generational differences affect how individual family members relate to each other and how the family operates in changing historical times. For example, youth rebellion against repressive elders fed into choices about conversion to Christianity in colonial Kenya in the early twentieth century and also into the May Fourth rebellion against traditional rule in China in 1919.These are the sorts of examples that drive the narrative of The Family: A World History. Maynes and Waltner begin their story more than 10,000 years ago with various projects of domestication around the globe - different ways of inventing human settlement and explaining and attempting to control the natural world. The authors then examine how family systems and family practices help to account for the historical fate of different world regions in the era of growing world trade, colonization, and religious warfare and conversions between 1450 and 1750. They make connections between economic, political, and cultural modernity and the transformation of family and gender relationships between 1750 and 1920. Finally, they demonstrate that the struggle over family relations was central to fascist and colonial regimes, Cold War era ideological and economic confrontations, and post-World-War II antagonisms between 'developed' and 'underdeveloped' nations, and, more recently, between the global North and the global South. The narrative concludes with such contemporary realities as transcontinental family life, state programs of genocide, and innovative reproductive technologies. Taking a long and broad view of the family as a force of history brings to light processes of human development and patterns of social life that are missed by narrower investigations. This book on the family is thus also engaged in a larger conversation about what it means to be human, and how a very expansive temporal and geographic frame of history brings new insights into the human past and present. Maynes and Waltner draw on a wide range of historical sources including legal codes, census records, memoirs, art, and oral history.

This book addresses the question of what world history looks like when the family is at the center of the story. People have always lived in families, but what that means has varied dramatically over time and across cultures. The family is not a "natural" phenomenon--it has a history. And family life is not limited to the realm of the private or the strictly personal; the family is a force of history. Gender and generational differences affect how individual family members relate to each other and how the family operates in changing historical times. For example, youth rebellion against repressive elders fed into choices about conversion to Christianity in colonial Kenya in the early twentieth century and also into the May Fourth rebellion against traditional rule in China in 1919.These are the sorts of examples that drive the narrative of The Family: A World History. Maynes and Waltner begin their story more than 10,000 years ago with various projects of domestication around the globe - different ways of inventing human settlement and explaining and attempting to control the natural world. The authors then examine how family systems and family practices help to account for the historical fate of different world regions in the era of growing world trade, colonization, and religious warfare and conversions between 1450 and 1750. They make connections between economic, political, and cultural modernity and the transformation of family and gender relationships between 1750 and 1920. Finally, they demonstrate that the struggle over family relations was central to fascist and colonial regimes, Cold War era ideological and economic confrontations, and post-World-War II antagonisms between 'developed' and 'underdeveloped' nations, and, more recently, between the global North and the global South. The narrative concludes with such contemporary realities as transcontinental family life, state programs of genocide, and innovative reproductive technologies. Taking a long and broad view of the family as a force of history brings to light processes of human development and patterns of social life that are missed by narrower investigations. This book on the family is thus also engaged in a larger conversation about what it means to be human, and how a very expansive temporal and geographic frame of history brings new insights into the human past and present. Maynes and Waltner draw on a wide range of historical sources including legal codes, census records, memoirs, art, and oral history.

Secret Gardens, Satanic Mills offers a comparative history of European girlhood from 1750 to 1960, with a focus on Britain, France, and Germany. It covers diverse issues in the lives of girls, from sexuality and leisure to social roles in the family and the economy. A corrective to historians' traditionally male orientation toward youth, the volume brings girls to the center of European history, emphasizing their importance in European economics and culture. It also identifies cultural and temporal differences within the European experience, particularly with regard to the spaces girls occupied. While the contributors appreciate the importance of systemic and institutional factors in shaping young girls' lives, they are also sensitive to the ways in which girls have been able to resist dominance and create their own destinies.The contributors are Kathleen Alaimo, Christina Benninghaus, Pamela Cox, Clare Crowston, Anna Davin, Andreas Gestrich, Céline Grasser, Irene Hardach-Pinke, Elizabeth Bright Jones, Clair Langhamer, Mary Jo Maynes, Carol E. Morgan, Tammy M. Proctor, Rebecca Rogers, Karin Schmidlechner, Deborah Simonton, Birgitte Søland, and Mary Lynn Stewart.

Through twenty engaging essays exploring cultures ranging from ancient Judaic civilization to contemporary Brazil, Gender, Kinship and Power places important contemporary issues related to kinship--such as parental responsibility and female-headed households--in their proper comparative and historical framework.

In Telling Stories, Mary Jo Maynes, Jennifer L. Pierce, and Barbara Laslett argue that personal narratives-autobiographies, oral histories, life history interviews, and memoirs-are an important research tool for understanding the relationship between people and their societies. Gathering examples from throughout the world and from premodern as well as contemporary cultures, they draw from labor history and class analysis, feminist sociology, race relations, and anthropology to demonstrate the value of personal narratives for scholars and students alike.Telling Stories explores why and how personal narratives should be used as evidence, and the methods and pitfalls of their use. The authors stress the importance of recognizing that stories that people tell about their lives are never simply individual. Rather, they are told in historically specific times and settings and call on rules, models, and social experiences that govern how story elements link together in the process of self-narration. Stories show how individuals' motivations, emotions, and imaginations have been shaped by their cumulative life experiences. In turn, Telling Stories demonstrates how the knowledge produced by personal narrative analysis is not simply contained in the stories told; the understanding that takes place between narrator and analyst and between analyst and audience enriches the results immeasurably."This decade has witnessed the publication of several anthologies that focus on how to design and conduct oral history projects; introduce and illustrate new applications of oral history to geographical, historical, and social research; and discuss the application of new technologies to oral history methodology.... In this new, important corollary to these works, the authors emphasize the research opportunities available through analysis of personal narratives: 'Read carefully, these sources provide unique insights into the connections between individual life trajectories and collective forces and institutions beyond the individual.' Telling Stories belongs in every oral history collection. Summing Up: Essential."― Choice

In Telling Stories, Mary Jo Maynes, Jennifer L. Pierce, and Barbara Laslett argue that personal narratives-autobiographies, oral histories, life history interviews, and memoirs-are an important research tool for understanding the relationship between people and their societies. Gathering examples from throughout the world and from premodern as well as contemporary cultures, they draw from labor history and class analysis, feminist sociology, race relations, and anthropology to demonstrate the value of personal narratives for scholars and students alike.Telling Stories explores why and how personal narratives should be used as evidence, and the methods and pitfalls of their use. The authors stress the importance of recognizing that stories that people tell about their lives are never simply individual. Rather, they are told in historically specific times and settings and call on rules, models, and social experiences that govern how story elements link together in the process of self-narration. Stories show how individuals' motivations, emotions, and imaginations have been shaped by their cumulative life experiences. In turn, Telling Stories demonstrates how the knowledge produced by personal narrative analysis is not simply contained in the stories told; the understanding that takes place between narrator and analyst and between analyst and audience enriches the results immeasurably."This decade has witnessed the publication of several anthologies that focus on how to design and conduct oral history projects; introduce and illustrate new applications of oral history to geographical, historical, and social research; and discuss the application of new technologies to oral history methodology.... In this new, important corollary to these works, the authors emphasize the research opportunities available through analysis of personal narratives: 'Read carefully, these sources provide unique insights into the connections between individual life trajectories and collective forces and institutions beyond the individual.' Telling Stories belongs in every oral history collection. Summing Up: Essential."― Choice

Taking the Hard Road is an engaging history of growing up in working-class families in France and Germany during the Industrial Revolution. Based on a reading of ninety autobiographical accounts of childhood and adolescence, the book explores the far-reaching historical transformations associated with the emergence of modern industrial capitalism. According to Mary Jo Maynes, the aspects of private life revealed in these accounts played an important role in historical development by actively shaping the authors' social, political, and class identities. The stories told in these memoirs revolve around details of everyday life: schooling, parent-child relations, adolescent sexuality, early experiences in the workforce, and religious observances. Maynes uses demographics, family history, and literary analysis to place these details within the context of historical change. She also draws comparisons between French and German texts, men's and women's accounts, and narratives of social mobility and political militancy.

Mary Jo Maynes looks to school reform in early modern Europe to show the relevance of early ideas about schooling for understanding contemporary society. She presents the competing perspectives on issues such as the identity and motivations of school reformers, the broad societal changes that made educational reform seem imperative toward the end of the eighteenth century all over the West, the connections between educational change and economic development, the role of schools in the evolution of class relations, the impact of reform on family strategies in the context of early industrialization. The work concludes by assessing historical data on the social impact of school reform and addressing the social meaning of schooling in the past and in the present.

Gender History Across Epistemologies offers broad range of innovative approaches to gender history. The essays reveal how historians of gender are crossing boundaries - disciplinary, methodological, and national - to explore new opportunities for viewing gender as a category of historical analysis. Essays present epistemological and theoretical debates central in gender history over the past two decadesContributions within this volume to the work on gender history are approached from a wide range of disciplinary locations and approachesThe volume demonstrates that recent approaches to gender history suggest surprising crossovers and even the discovery of common grounds

This volume, the first of its kind in English, brings together scholars from different disciplines who address the history of women in Austria, as well as their place in contemporary Austrian society, from a variety of theoretical and methodological perspectives, thus shedding new light on contemporary Austria and in the context of its rich and complicated history.

This volume, the first of its kind in English, brings together scholars from different disciplines who address the history of women in Austria, as well as their place in contemporary Austrian society, from a variety of theoretical and methodological perspectives, thus shedding new light on contemporary Austria and in the context of its rich and complicated history.