ABSTRACT
The Constitution of the United States departs from a pattern found among other written constitutions in the Western world: it gives no attention to the institutions of marriage and family. The social history of the constitutional period has been dominated by the Whiggish, or liberal, interpretation, which gives emphasis to American exceptionalism, the American difference. In his 1960 book Education in the Forming of American Society, Bernard Bailyn offered the classic argument, saying that the New World environment, alive with prospects of abundance and expansion, promoted the rise of a unique individualism. A new kind of social history has emerged over the last twenty-five years that challenges this view of the revolutionary and constitutional periods and gives a very different understanding of the place of the family in this critical phase of the nation's past. Since 1840s, American social history could be written as the steady dismantling of this home-centered economy and the consequent decay of the foundations of liberty.
