American Fatherhood

Explores the surprising diversity of fathers and fatherhood throughout American history and society The nuclear family has been endlessly praised as the bedrock of American society, even though there has rarely been a time in history when a majority of Americans lived in such families. This book deconstructs the myth of the nuclear family by presenting the rich diversity of family lives in American history from the American Revolution to the twenty-first century. To tell this story, Jürgen Martschukat focuses on fathers and their relations to families and American society. Using biographical close-ups of twelve different characters, each embedded in historical context, American Fatherhood provides a much more realistic picture of how fatherhood has been performed within different kinds of families. Each protagonist covers a crucial period or event in American history, presents a different family constellation, and makes a different argument with regard to how American society is governed through the family.

Delivers a strong narrative on the American family as structured around the father., This work, substantial in quantity and quality, as well as in ideas and methods, is interdisciplinary history at its very best.

Jürgen Martschukat is Professor of North American History at Erfurt University in Germany. This book was originally published in 2013 in German by Campus Verlag and won the OAH’s Willi Paul Adams Prize for the best book on American history published in a foreign language. Petra Goedde is Director of Temple University’s Center for the Humanities (CHAT) and Associate Professor of History at Temple University. She is the author of GIs and Germans: Culture, Gender, and Foreign Relations, 1945-1949 (Yale 2003), co-editor of The Human Rights Revolution: An International History (Oxford 2012), and co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of the Cold War (Oxford, 2013).