family history

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• SOURCE: Marketplace
  6/14/2023
  

  Blair L.M. Kelley Tells Black Working Class History Through Family

  When the historian set out to write the history of working-class African Americans, her own family's stories proved the best place to begin. 

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• 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. 

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• 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. 

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• 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. 

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• 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.”

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• 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. 

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• 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. 

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• 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. 

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• 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. 

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• 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. 

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• 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."

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• 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.

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• 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."

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• 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. 

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• 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. 

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• 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. 

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• 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."

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• 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." 

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• 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. 

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• 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.