Past, Present, and Personal

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Sarah B. Pomeroy

With this volume Sarah Pomeroy provides the first comprehensive study of the Greek family. Knowledge of the family and kin groups is fundamental to understanding the development of the political and legal framework of the polis, a community of oikoi ('families' or 'households') rather than of individual citizens. Pomeroy offers a highly original and authoritative account of the Greek family as a productive and reproductive social unit in Athens and elsewhere during the classical and Hellenistic periods, taking account of a mass of literary, inscriptional, archaeological, anthropological, and art-historical evidence.

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Suzanne Dixon

Unfaithful spouses, divorce and remarriage, rebellious children, aging parents--today's headlines are filled with issues said to be responsible for a "breakdown" of the traditional family. But are any of these problems truly new? What can we learn from the ways in which societies dealt with them in the past? Suzanne Dixon sets the current debate about the family against a broader context in The Roman Family, the first book to bring together what historians, anthropologists, and philologists have learned about the family in ancient Rome. Dixon begins by reviewing the controversies regarding the family in general and the Roman family in particular. After considering the problems of evidence, she explores what the Roman concept of "family" really meant and how Roman families functioned. Turning to the legal status of the Roman family, she shows how previous studies, which relied exclusively on legal evidence, fell short of describing the reality of Roman life. (Many relations not recognized by law--the slave family, for instance, or the marriage of imperial soldiers--were tolerated socially and eventually gained some legal recognition.) Other topics include love and other aspects of the institution of marriage, the role of the children in the family, how families adjusted to new members, and how they dealt with aging and death.

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Dominique Marshall

A l'heure où l'Etat laisse tomber son filet d'obligations sociales, cet ouvrage dévoile ici un large pan de l'évolution des politiques sociales au Québec. On passe d'abord en revue les premières lois en faveur des familles, puis on soupèse l'influence des familles les plus pauvres sur la création des institutions publiques, d'éducation et de bien-être.

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Katie Thomas

This is the story of one of the families that got separated, and then reunited, as a result of the flooding caused by one of the most powerful hurricanes in recorded history, a storm which flooded 80% of the city of New Orleans on August 29, 2005 : Hurricane Katrina.