An American Family Tale By: Scott Tenner An American Family Tale follows the life and loves of Dr. Scott Tenner as he navigates career shifts, several marriages, family dynamics, and finding and fighting for the true love of his life.

An American Family is about the Warner family of Philadelphia's Blockley Township. R. David Warner Sr., the author, is qualified to write this book because he and his father are the twelfth and thirteenth generation of a family which settled on the shores of the Schuylkill River five years before William Penn laid out the city. Before his death in 1992, the author's father wrote a series of letters containing the stories told to him as a child in the early twentieth century. He researched the public records of both the Historical Societies and the Quaker Meetinghouse to build upon the actual accounts of his family members. He spent the last twenty years of his life collecting this historical information. In the mid-nineteenth century, the author's great-grandfather began building on the names and facts about family members. The information he gathered was also used to write this book. Actual letters written from the foxholes of the civil war are typical of the documents used to complete this book. Our past can only be retrieved from what we remember and from the historical records that have been kept. Without memories and without records, we have no personal history!

This book is about the story of the Cole family and their parts—some big, some small—in making America the great nation it is today. The Cole family migrated from the British Isles, Northern Ireland and Ireland, in the 1600s. They settled in New England and later migrated westward. Early Coles fought in the Revolutionary War. Later ones fought in the Civil War. Ned M. Cole Jr. enlisted in the United States Air Force and retired as a colonel from the New York Air National Guard. His son joined the Illinois Army National Guard and, after a few years, was commissioned. His grandson, Jeffrey A. Reilly, was commissioned in the United States Marine Corps. Captain Jeff Reilly fought in Afghanistan. After leaving active duty but remaining in the Air National Guard, Ned went on to a successful business career. His family had lost their fortune in 1918, due to eminent domain action by the United States government. Ned became one of the principal owners of ABC Rail Corporation. He was able to restore some of the family’s lost fortune. Ned and his wife of nearly fifty-eight years, Carol, made their home in Melbourne, Florida.

An American Family: Four Centuries. Two Continents By: S. Frederick Starr This book recounts the history of an American family that was formed in the 1930s by the marriage of seeming opposites from the two sides of the ethnic divide that separated descendants of earlier Anglo-Saxon and German settlers from the millions of newcomers from Central Europe and Italy who arrived after 1900. Its immediate geographical focus is the American Midwest, the areas surrounding Cleveland and Cincinnati, Ohio. Its deeper geography extends to Maryland’s Eastern Shore, Lancastershire and Cumbria in northern England and Southampton on England’s south coast, to the Rhineland-Palatinate region of Germany, to St. Petersburg in Russia, and to Austria, Budapest and the distant eastern lands of Hungary. Religiously, it embraces Catholics, Jews. The Church of England, Quakers, Methodists, and Unitarians. And with respect to professions, it includes farmers, home-makers, preachers, artists, shop-keepers, photographers, lawyers, educators, housemaids, judges, scholars, and businessmen. Finally, this is a book about change. One of the families involved changed its religion three times and the other changed its name three times. Yet there are also continuities aplenty, and most notably in the qualities of seriousness, ambition, tenacity, and commitment to family that prevail throughout.

The American family has come a long way from the days of the idealized family portrayed in iconic television shows of the 1950s and 1960s. The four volumes of The Social History of the American Family explore the vital role of the family as the fundamental social unit across the span of American history. Experiences of family life shape so much of an individual’s development and identity, yet the patterns of family structure, family life, and family transition vary across time, space, and socioeconomic contexts. Both the definition of who or what counts as family and representations of the “ideal” family have changed over time to reflect changing mores, changing living standards and lifestyles, and increased levels of social heterogeneity. Available in both digital and print formats, this carefully balanced academic work chronicles the social, cultural, economic, and political aspects of American families from the colonial period to the present. Key themes include families and culture (including mass media), families and religion, families and the economy, families and social issues, families and social stratification and conflict, family structures (including marriage and divorce, gender roles, parenting and children, and mixed and non-modal family forms), and family law and policy. Features: Approximately 600 articles, richly illustrated with historical photographs and color photos in the digital edition, provide historical context for students. A collection of primary source documents demonstrate themes across time. The signed articles, with cross references and Further Readings, are accompanied by a Reader’s Guide, Chronology of American Families, Resource Guide, Glossary, and thorough index. The Social History of the American Family is an ideal reference for students and researchers who want to explore political and social debates about the importance of the family and its evolving constructions.

There has been an increasing recognition of the fluidity and ambiguity of ethnic identities within the context of global mobility. With that in mind, how have films constructed the identity of ethnic Chinese in the United States? This book addresses this issue through three sub-questions. First, why is the family narrative so characteristic of films about Chinese Americans in transnational Chinese cinema? In other words, how and why are images of Chinese or Chinese Americans in transnational Chinese cinema different from those in Hollywood movies? Second, how does transnational Chinese cinema define and negotiate the aesthetic conventions of melodrama commonly used to depict Chinese American families? In terms of establishing melodrama as an evolving mode of, how does Chinese American cinema historically connect with both Hollywood and Chinese cinema? Third, what have the narrative treatments of Chinese American families in transnational Chinese cinema contributed to the ongoing representation of Chinese culture and construction of ethnic Chinese identities in Western societies? This book traverses fields such as cultural studies, Chinese studies, media studies, American studies, and film studies, and engages with a select corpus of films from the 1990s to the 2000s, directed by Chinese American, Taiwanese and Hong Kong filmmakers and produced in the USA, Taiwan, Hong Kong and mainland China, to analyze the role the American Chinese family plays in their work. With sensitivity towards transnational bonds and historical processes, a negotiation process of three sets of conflicting forces has subsequently emerged: the traditional and the modern, the national and the transnational, and Chinese American identity crisis in favor of a Chinese identity or a true American identity. Contrasting cultural beliefs undoubtedly create cross-cultural and generational conflicts within the family, yet also open the way to negotiation and compromise. This research on the cinematic depiction of Chinese Americans reveals the historically significant transnational connection among Chinese American, Chinese, and American cultures. On the one hand, ethnic Chinese are represented by boundaries that establish and define the Chinese American community against other communities, and yet, on the other hand, the representation of family life and structure of Chinese immigrants is multiple and fluid, as culture itself is unstable and uncertain. Therefore, a process of fixation and a process of fluidity seem to take place at the same time.

This four-volume work provides a detailed, multicultural survey of established as well as "new" American religions and investigates the fascinating interactions between religion and ethnicity, gender, politics, regionalism, ethics, and popular culture. This revised and expanded edition of Religion and American Cultures: Tradition, Diversity, and Popular Expression presents more than 140 essays that address contemporary spiritual practice and culture with a historical perspective. The entries cover virtually every religion in modern-day America as well as the role of religion in various aspects of U.S. culture. Readers will discover that Americans aren't largely Protestant, Catholic, or Jewish anymore, and that the number of popular religious identities is far greater than many would imagine. And although most Americans believe in a higher power, the fastest growing identity in the United States is the "nones"—those Americans who elect "none" when asked about their religious identity—thereby demonstrating how many individuals see their spirituality as something not easily defined or categorized. The first volume explores America's multicultural communities and their religious practices, covering the range of different religions among Anglo-Americans and Euro-Americans as well as spirituality among Latino, African American, Native American, and Asian American communities. The second volume focuses on cultural aspects of religions, addressing topics such as film, Generation X, public sacred spaces, sexuality, and new religious expressions. The new third volume expands the range of topics covered with in-depth essays on additional topics such as interfaith families, religion in prisons, belief in the paranormal, and religion after September 11, 2001. The fourth volume is devoted to complementary primary source documents.

A personal story of the origination of two family’s early Celtic, Norman, Welch origins through their Scot, Irish and English descendant’s migrations to Colonial America. A survival story of overcoming severe limitations while continuously seeking to protect and provide for their families through persistence, faith and pure grit. Migrating from the Appalachian Mountains’ Berkshire spurs of western Massachusetts and Pennsylvania south into the remote southern Appalachian Mountains of Tennessee and North Carolina, they would raise their large families. With little outside support, a distrust of centralized government and a fierce independence, they would sustain their families through farming, logging, coal mining and the sale of meat, vegetables, and occasionally home brewed “moon shine”.

The Queer Fantasies of the American Family Sitcom examines the evasive depictions of sexuality in domestic and family-friendly sitcoms. Tison Pugh charts the history of increasing sexual depiction in this genre while also unpacking how sitcoms use sexuality as a source of power, as a kind of camouflage, and as a foundation for family building. The book examines how queerness, at first latent, became a vibrant yet continually conflicted part of the family-sitcom tradition. Taking into account elements such as the casting of child actors, the use of and experimentation with plot traditions, the contradictory interpretive valences of comedy, and the subtle subversions of moral standards by writers and directors, Pugh points out how innocence and sexuality conflict on television. As older sitcoms often sit on a pedestal of nostalgia as representative of the Golden Age of the American Family, television history reveals a deeper, queerer vision of family bonds.

This edited book draws from work that focuses on the act of telling family stories, as well as their content and structure. The process of telling family stories is linked to central aspects of development, including language acquisition, affect regulation, and family interaction patterns. This book extends across traditional developmental psychology, personality theory, and family studies. Drawing broadly on the epigenetic framework for individual development articulated by Erik Erikson, as well as on conceptions of the family life cycle, the editors bring together contemporary examples of psychological research on family stories and their implications for development and change at different points in the life course. The book is divided into sections that focus on family stories at different points in the life cycle, from early childhood and the beginnings of narrative skill, through adolescence, young adulthood, midlife, and then mature adulthood and its intergenerational meaning. During each of these periods of the life cycle, research focusing on individual development within an Eriksonian framework of ego strengths and virtues is highlighted. The dynamic role of family stories is also featured here, with work exploring the links between family process, intergenerational attachment, and storytelling. Sociocultural theories that emphasize how such development is situated in the wider cultural context are also featured in several chapters. This broad lifespan developmental focus serves to integrate the exciting diversity of this work and foster further questions and research in the emerging field of family narrative. The book is intended primarily for researchers and advanced-level students in the fields of developmental and personality psychology, as well as those in family studies and in gerontology. It may also be of interest to those in the helping professions who are concerned with family therapy and family issues, and may--due to its content and illustrative material--have appeal to a wider market of the lay public. The chapters are written in a readily accessible style and the analyses are presented in a fairly non-technical way. Because family stories are charted across the lifespan, it would be a suitable companion book to a more traditional lifespan textbook in certain courses.