family history 
-
SOURCE: Washington Post
4/27/2023
Authors Call for a Rethink of Birth and Motherhood
Peggy O'Donnell Heffington makes an assertive argument that the United States has a long history of official involvement in motherhood, from making reproduction near-compulsory for white women on one side of the color line to eugenics and sterilization on the other.
-
SOURCE: The New Yorker
4/10/2023
Jeanne Manford's Support for her Gay Son was Revolutionary
At the time Manford began publicly supporting her own gay son and organizing a group for other parents of gay children, 49 states had laws criminalizing gay sex; the scope and bravery of her activism is difficult to appreciate today.
-
SOURCE: The Atlantic
3/24/2023
How did Work Invade Our Idea of Marriage?
Why would people understand marriage through the frame of work and expect to be happy? Historian Kristin Celello explains the alternatives.
-
SOURCE: WTVR
2/4/2023
New Resources Help Virginians Fill in Hidden Family Histories Including Enslaved Ancestors
“Researchers and librarians would say things like, 'That history just doesn’t exist.' Or, 'We just don’t have those records,'" Lydia Neuroth with the Library of Virginia explained. "But we are realizing we do. We just haven’t done a good job sharing it.”
-
SOURCE: Austin American-Statesman
1/6/2023
Anthropologist on Gathering Family History: Ask Your Elders the Right Questions
University of Texas professor Elizabeth Keating was shocked by how few of her students could discuss their own family's history, and created a guide to investigating.
-
SOURCE: The Atlantic
1/10/2023
A Family Therapist Looks to Historians for Insight on the Changing Forms of Family Estrangement
Stephanie Coonts and Steven Mintz say that the shift in family bonds from obligation and resources to personal growth and happiness have exacerbated tensions and increased the level of estrangement in multigenerational families.
-
SOURCE: Washington Post
12/5/2022
A Stranger's Gift: Family Photos from Before the Holocaust
Software engineer Daniel Patt has developed an artificial intelligence program that can expedite the searching of photos from repositories like Yad Vashem and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, and has provided strangers with the gift of a connection to their relatives.
-
SOURCE: Slate
11/21/2022
The Clinton-Era Law that Still Devastates Black Families
by Dorothy E. Roberts
The Adoption and Safe Families Act mandated state intervention to protect children from neglect, but did nothing to ensure an economic and social safety net to mitigate hardship. The result, spurred by anti-Black tropes, was an acceleration of family breakup by state agencies.
-
SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
11/18/2022
Our Adoption Policies have Harmed Children
by Mical Raz
Changes adopted under the Clinton administration elevated the adoption of children from foster care as a policy goal, which had the effect of marginalizing biological parents from the process, sometimes contrary to children's best interests.
-
SOURCE: Nursing Clio
10/11/2022
Empathy in the Archive: Care and Disdain for Wet Nursing Mothers
by Anna K. Danziger Halperin
"Just like today, women’s decisions in the past about how to feed their babies were shaped by personal preference, to be sure, but the possibilities available are bounded by technological innovations, shifting medical advice, and social, cultural, and economic pressures and practices."
-
10/9/2022
Have We Chosen to Forget our Abolitionist Ancestors, Too?
by James D. Richardson
The author wonders whether his great-great grandfather's commitment to justice before and after emancipation became socially inconvenient and morally demanding to later generations in white America.
-
SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
10/18/2021
Among Other COVID Changes? The Role of Grandparents
by Sarah Stoller
"Just as they were in the 19th century, grandparents are now commonly expected to help, despite their own need for various kinds of support and assistance."
-
SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
9/28/2021
The Golden Age of "Traditional Marriage" Never Was
by Lauren Gutterman
Despite conservative mythologizing, married Americans in the postwar era frequently sought and secured space to explore same-sex attractions and relationships. These histories show that regardless of who controls the Supreme Court, conservatives will be unable to force a narrow model of family life on the public.
-
SOURCE: NBC News
9/17/2021
New Digital Access to Freedmen's Bureau Records Boon to Black Genealogists
Ancestry.com has made 3.5 million records of the Freedmen's Bureau available to researchers, making family history and genealogy research much more accessible to African Americans and scholars of Black history.
-
SOURCE: The Nation
8/23/2021
Web of Connections: Emma Rothschild's Microhistories of France
by David A. Bell
Historian David Bell reviews an effort to relate three centuries of French history through the lives of the descendants of one undistinguished eighteenth century Frenchwoman.
-
SOURCE: The Atlantic
8/11/2021
The Persistent Joy of Black Women
by Leah Wright-Rigueur
For Black women, claiming joy in motherhood is a rebellion against the historical subjection of "Black mothers’ private lives... to public surveillance, scrutiny, and judgment."
-
SOURCE: New York Times
6/5/2021
A Supreme Court Case Poses a Threat to L.G.B.T.Q. Foster Kids
by Stephen Vider and David S. Byers
State and local social service agencies for decades have been actively working to protect the safety and dignity of queer youth in the foster care system. A Supreme Court case threatens that progress in the name of "religious freedom."
-
SOURCE: The New Yorker
2/28/2021
The Untold Story of Queer Foster Families
by Michael Waters
Before the legal recognition of same-sex adoptive parents, social workers around the country made decisions to place gay and lesbian teens with gay and lesbian foster parents as a humane and protective act.
-
SOURCE: Made By History at The Washington Post
8/6/2020
Richard Nixon Bears Responsibility for the Pandemic’s Child-Care Crisis
by Anna K. Danziger Halperin
Today’s child-care crisis may have been fueled by the outbreak, but it is not new. It has been simmering below the surface for decades and can be traced back to President Richard M. Nixon’s 1971 veto of federally funded universal child care.
-
SOURCE: Washington Post
5/29/2020
Women’s Household Labor Is Essential. Why Isn’t It Valued?
by Alexandra Finley
Covid-19 has exposed enduring inequality in domestic divisions of labor.
News
- The Debt Ceiling Law is now a Tool of Partisan Political Power; Abolish It
- Amitai Etzioni, Theorist of Communitarianism, Dies at 94
- Kagan, Sotomayor Join SCOTUS Cons in Sticking it to Unions
- New Evidence: Rehnquist Pretty Much OK with Plessy v. Ferguson
- Ohio Unions Link Academic Freedom and the Freedom to Strike
- First Round of Obama Administration Oral Histories Focus on Political Fault Lines and Policy Tradeoffs
- The Tulsa Race Massacre was an Attack on Black People; Rebuilding Policies were an Attack on Black Wealth
- British Universities are Researching Ties to Slavery. Conservative Alumni Say "Enough"
- Martha Hodes Reconstructs Her Memory of a 1970 Hijacking
- Jeremi Suri: Texas Higher Ed Conflict "Doesn't Have to Be This Way"