ABSTRACT
Cultural Prototypes. In America there are cultural differences between regions and groups which have not been entirely obliterated by the processes of modern social change. We may therefore think of the American family as springing from several somewhat different prototypes existing among the several culture groups which settled the country from 1600 to 1850. These types became somewhat mixed, but regardless of mixture all have been subjected to the influence of frontier conditions, and all have gone through the whole sequence of changes from handicraft economy through the Industrial Revolution to the most modern suburbanism and individualism.
