A Social History of the American Family From: Colonial Times to the Present. E-book. Formato PDF Arthur W. Calhoun   -  Forgotten Books, 2017  - 

In common with the best recent historical works, due place has been given to the Economic Interpretation, but with studied avoidance of fantastic exaggeration. The true claims of the dispassionate historical spirit have been held steadily in view. If it seem to the reader that undue attention has been given to patho logical abnormalities, he should bear in mind that the American history with which most readers are familiar has been written by litterateurs or historians with little perspective save that which inheres in loyalty to the established order, in the attenuated atmosphere of the middle class, or in the desire to glorify the past, it may be of New England with its ancestral worthies, or of some other section in the romantic days. Those trained in the literature of such shallow schools naturally find it hard to put aside prepossessions and to refrain from confounding the disclosures of science with the product of the muck-raker.

A Social History of the American Family: From Colonial Times to the Present; From Independence Through the Civil War. E-book. Formato PDF Arthur W. Calhoun   -  Forgotten Books, 2017  - 

Benjamin Franklin before the Revolution drew an impressive contrast between the old settled countries where all berths were full and the new world where the abundance and cheapness of land and the relative ease of subsistence banished forebodings and led to readi ness for early marriage; so that marriages in America are more general, and more generally early than in Europe. And if it is reckoned there, that there is but one marriage per annum among one hundred persons, perhaps we may here reckon two. At the time Of In dependence marriage was the regular thing; sports and recreations turned largely on the mimic choice Of a partner; the unmated player was the butt Of ridicule. Thus did merrymaking re?ect the status of the min cing spinster or the crusty old bachelor.