ABSTRACT
This chapter appears as "The History of the Family and the Complexity of Social Change". Recent historical research on the family has revised some widely held myths about family life in the past as well as generalizations about the impact of the grand processes of social change on the family and society. Particularly in the United States, it has shared with the latter a commitment to reconstructing the life patterns of ordinary people, to viewing them as actors as well as subjects in the process of change. Out of such concerns has come research that explores previously neglected dimensions of human experience such as growing up, courting, getting married, bearing and rearing children, living in families, becoming old, and dying, from the perspective of those involved. Contemporary historians of the family have sought to reintroduce human experience into historical research and to emphasize the complexity of historical change.
