Paul Ginsborg. Family Politics

In Family Politics: Domestic Life, Devastation and Survival, 1900–1950, Paul Ginsborg observes that families are “perennially off-stage” in studies of the tumultuous twentieth century (xiii). He aims to insert family history “into a wider and deeper general history” by examining families in five states in the throes of violent revolution, dictatorship, war, and reconstruction (xiii). The cases are well chosen as they cover a broad geographic and ideological spectrum, united mostly by their common extremism: revolutionary Russia and the Soviet Union, the nationalist revolution in Turkey, republican and nationalist Spain, fascist Italy, and Nazi Germany. Ginsborg succeeds in telling a story that is fascinating in its details and significant in its broader dimensions. He captures family life as it was lived and experienced, interweaving individual stories into the history of family policies and cultural representations of the families. The narrative moves gracefully from the childhood experiences and marital conflicts of well-known political leaders, to rich social histories of families of workers and peasants, to representations of families in art and theater, to legal and political debates surrounding changes in family law.

Art · Democracy · Dictatorship · Economic history · Family life · Family values · Genealogy · Ideology · Literature · Narrative · Nationalism · Nazism · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · Gender Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies