Yankee Family - Softcover

McGovern, James

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0878556745 ISBN 13: 9780878556748

Publisher: Routledge, 1978

Synopsis

The voluminous records of the Pierce and Poor families weave a story that runs from the late eighteenth century until World War I. The extent and qual­ity of their source materials, and their positions as representative middle-class to upper-middle-class New England families, make these subjects of Yankee Family particularly well suited for analyzing processes of continuity and change. McGovern reviews the life­styles of the Pierce and,Poor families both on the frontier and in the Boston area, and focuses on the cross-generational changes in these styles.

The study begins with John Pierce at Harvard in the 1790s and follows through to the first decade of the twen­tieth century. The author shows how the "Yankee" mentality, an outgrowth of New England Puritanism, contributed to the family's rise to success, but con­cludes that by the early twentieth cen­tury the Yankee life-style was ending, a victim of social and economic changes in American society that were rendering it irrelevant.

Until recently historical scholarship on the American family has been static. Apart from long-standing predilections of historians for political history, there were also theoretical and meth­odological problems deterring schol­arship on the American family. But McGovern's approach holds great promise; it is more sensitive than quan­tification studies to the impact of change on a wider range of human expe­riences because it is inevitably more personal. While this type of family his­tory rewards students of social change, it also affords important insights on con­tinuity. It reveals the existence of a family style which adapts to change with a special corpus of family wisdom, al­ways finding a way to exercise its "known" amidst constant flux — thus mitigating some of the effects of change.

About this edition

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 1978
• ISBN 10: 0878556745
• ISBN 13: 9780878556748
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 225