From his founding of The Journal of Social History to his groundbreaking work on the history of emotions, weight, and parenting, Peter N. Stearns has pushed the boundaries of social history to new levels, presenting new insights into how people have lived and thought through the ages. Having established the history of emotions as a major subfield of social history, Stearns and his collaborators are poised to do the same thing with the study of human behavior. This is their manifesto. American Behavioral History deals with specific uses of historical data and analysis to illuminate American behavior patterns, ranging from car buying rituals to sexuality, and from funeral practices to contemporary grandparenting. The anthology illustrates the advantages and parameters of analyzing the ways in which people behave, and adds significantly to our social understanding while developing innovative methods for historical teaching and research. At its core, the collection demonstrates how the study of the past can be directly used to understand current behaviors in the United States. Throughout, contributors discuss not only specific behavioral patterns but, importantly, how to consider and interpret them as vital historical sources. Contributors include Gary Cross, Paula Fass, Linda Rosenzweig, Susan Matt, Steven M. Gelber, Peter N. Stearns, Suzanne Smith, Mark M. Smith, Kevin White.

Stepfamilies are not a modern phenomenon, but despite this reality, the history of stepfamilies in America has yet to be fully explored. In the first book-length work on the topic, Lisa Wilson examines the stereotypes and actualities of colonial stepfamilies and reveals them to be important factors in early United States domestic history. Remarriage was a necessity in this era, when war and disease took a heavy toll, all too often leading to domestic stress, and cultural views of stepfamilies during this time placed great strain on stepmothers and stepfathers. Both were seen either as unfit substitutes or as potentially unstable influences, and nowhere were these concerns stronger than in white middle-class families, for whom stepparents presented a paradox. Wilson shares the stories of real stepfamilies in early New England, investigating the relationship between prejudice and lived experience, and, in the end, offers a new way of looking at family units throughout history and the cultural stereotypes that still affect stepfamilies today.

These essays examine how religious beliefs and practices have shaped political thought and behaviour (and vice versa), and how in certain periods religious and political thought has coincided or moved in opposition, and how minority perspectives have challenged majority views.

The essays in this collection analyze the successes and failures of the social sciences over the last few decades as well as on their future. The focus of the book is on generic problems, difficulties, and dilemmas in the social sciences that the contributors are uniquely qualified to articulate. Each of them has been intimately involved in the development of one or another discipline in the last thirty years or so; each has made significant contributions to that development in many ways; each has a personal perspective on accomplishments and failures, promises and needs, continuities to be cultivated and opportunities to be seized. ." . . anyone concerned with the state of social science disciplines should find these essays of interest." - Journal of Politics

Challenging traditional approaches to the study of American political history, the essays in this book establish the significance of the institutional framework of the electoral system and argue the importance of its interaction with political conditions.

The Handbook of Legislative Research, a comprehensive summary of the results of research on nineteenth and twentieth-century legislatures, is itself a landmark in the evolution of legislative studies. Gathered here are surveys by leading scholars in the field, each providing inventory of an important subfield, an extensive bibliography, and a systematic assessment of what has been accomplished and what directions future research must take.

This book explores the puzzling phenomenon of new veiling practices among lower middle class women in Cairo, Egypt. Although these women are part of a modernizing middle class, they also voluntarily adopt a traditional symbol of female subordination. How can this paradox be explained? An explanation emerges which reconceptualizes what appears to be reactionary behavior as a new style of political struggle--as accommodating protest. These women, most of them clerical workers in the large government bureaucracy, are ambivalent about working outside the home, considering it a change which brings new burdens as well as some important benefits. At the same time they realize that leaving home and family is creating an intolerable situation of the erosion of their social status and the loss of their traditional identity. The new veiling expresses women's protest against this. MacLeod argues that the symbolism of the new veiling emerges from this tense subcultural dilemma, involving elements of both resistance and acquiescence.

A perennial choice for courses on antebellum America, Jacksonian America continues to be a popular classroom text with scholars of the period, even among those who bridle at Pessen's iconoclastic views of Old Hickory and his "inegalitarian society."

This collection of essays covers most of the important topics in the field of family history, assesses the state of the art, and stresses the themes that will continue to generate interest in the future. Originally published in 1988. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Over the past three decades, the study of religion and politics has gone from being ignored by the scholarly 7ommunity to being a major focus of research. Yet, because this important research is not easily accessible to nonspecialists, much of the analysis of religion's role in the political arena that we read in the media is greatly oversimplified. This Handbook seeks to bridge that gap by examining the considerable research that has been conducted to this point and assessing what has been learned, what remains unsettled due to conflicting research findings, and what important questions remain largely unaddressed by current research endeavors. The Handbook is unique to the field of religion and American politics and should be of wide interest to scholars, students, journalists, and others interested in the American political scene.