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Recently considerable interest has developed about the degree to which anthropological approaches to kinship can be used for the study of the long-term development of European history. From the late middle ages to the dawn of the twentieth century, kinship - rather than declining, as is often assumed - was twice reconfigured in dramatic ways and became increasingly significant as a force in historical change, with remarkable similarities across European society. Applying interdisciplinary approaches from social and cultural history and literature and focusing on sibling relationships, this volume takes up the challenge of examining the systemic and structural development of kinship over the long term by looking at the close inner-familial dynamics of ruling families (the Hohenzollerns), cultural leaders (the Mendelssohns), business and professional classes, and political figures (the Gladstones)in France, Italy, Germany, and England. It offers insight into the current issues in kinship studies and draws from a wide range of personal documents: letters, autobiographies, testaments, memoirs, as well as genealogies and works of art.

Christopher H. Johnson is Professor Emeritus of History and member of the Academy of Scholars at Wayne State University. He has held fellowships from the Leverhulme and the Guggenheim Foundations as well as the Social Science Research Council and the National Endowment for the Humanities. His publications include Utopian Communism in France: Cabet and the Icarians, 1839-1851 (Cornell, 1974) (nominated for a National Book Award in 1975); Maurice Sugar: Law, Labor, and the Left in Detroit, 1912-1950 (Wayne State, 1989), and The Life and Death of Industrial Languedoc, 1700-1920: The Politics of De-Industrialization (Oxford, 1995).

David Warren Sabean is Henry J. Bruman Professor of German History at the University of California at Los Angeles. He has taught at the University of East Anglia, University of Pittsburgh, and Cornell, and has been a fellow at the Max Planck Institute for History in Göttingen, the Maison des Science de l'Homme, the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, the American Academy in Berlin, and the National Humanities Center. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His publications include: Power in the Blood: Popular Culture and Village Discourse in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge, 1984); Property, Production, and Family in Neckarhausen, 1700-1870 (Cambridge, 1990); Kinship in Neckarhausen, 1700-1870 (Cambridge, 1998). He is co-editor with Simon Teuscher and Jon Mathieu of Kinship in Europe: Approaches to Long-Term Development (1300-1900) (Berghahn Books, 2007).