Here are 100 books that American Child Bride fans have personally recommended if you like
American Child Bride.
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I am an unusual scientist in the sense that I have doctorates in both biology and anthropology, so I am very interested in the dichotomy between what our bodies truly want (biology) and how we are supposed to behave, or tell others to behave, in our cultural settings (cultural anthropology). Amazingly, studies show that we spend more time and attention in our lives living for others for what they think of us, than doing what we truly want, and that we often regret that, when we are close to dying. These books make us reconsider that way of living, so we can change this before it is too late.
The book is, to my knowledge, the only one that fully covers the evolution of marriage in the West, including historical details and interesting biological and anthropological data; it changes the way we are indoctrinated to think by showing that sex, love, and marriage were for most of the time completely separate things, while we now try as much to force the three items to be always together.
The most surprising part for people who have not been familiar with the history of these topics is how recent and geographically localized it is the expectation that love, sex, and marriage should be together.
Just when the clamor over "traditional" marriage couldn’t get any louder, along comes this groundbreaking book to ask, "What tradition?" In Marriage, a History, historian and marriage expert Stephanie Coontz takes readers from the marital intrigues of ancient Babylon to the torments of Victorian lovers to demonstrate how recent the idea of marrying for love is—and how absurd it would have seemed to most of our ancestors. It was when marriage moved into the emotional sphere in the nineteenth century, she argues, that it suffered as an institution just as it began to thrive as a personal relationship. This enlightening…
Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!
On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…
As a family law professor, I spend a lot of time thinking about marriage. Although it is an extremely personal decision, the legal, social, and even political ramifications can be tremendous. Marriage is not just an individual choice. Each year, I teach my family law students that there are three parties to every marriage, the two spouses, and the state. The books on this list reveal how the state has influenced marital decision-making and also, how individual marital decisions have influenced the state. These books show that marriage can protect and benefit spouses, but that it can also harm them through the promotion and acceptance of society’s biases and prejudices. As the actress Mae West once stated, “Marriage is a great institution, but I’m not ready for an institution.” The following books highlight the wisdom of West’s words.
Tinder and other dating sites may seem like a very modern way to meet a spouse but, as Francesca Beauman’s book Shapley Ankle Preferred demonstrates, people have been advertising for love almost since the first newspaper advertisement was invented. Shapley Ankle shows how matrimonial advertising dramatically changed marriage and courtship. With the invention of these ads, single men and women were no longer dependent on friends and family for their marital futures. Suddenly, they could advertise for the kind of spouse they wanted and thousands did so -- many with amusing specificity.
Some examples include the man looking for a wife with “but one leg” and the woman who requested her future husband not drink “above two bottles of claret in a sitting.” Nevertheless, other advertisements were less humorous and revealed authors hoping marriage could save them from penury, cruel families, or simply loneliness. These motivations remain highly relevant today.…
What do women look for in a man? And what do men look for in a woman? And how and why has this changed over the centuries?
Every week thousands of people advertise for love either in newspapers, magazines or online. But if you think this is a modern phenomenon, think again - the ads have been running for over three hundred years. In 1695, a popular London pamphlet published the brave plea of a young gentleman who 'would willingly Match himself to some Good Young Gentlewoman, that has a Fortune of GBP3000 or thereabouts'.
As a family law professor, I spend a lot of time thinking about marriage. Although it is an extremely personal decision, the legal, social, and even political ramifications can be tremendous. Marriage is not just an individual choice. Each year, I teach my family law students that there are three parties to every marriage, the two spouses, and the state. The books on this list reveal how the state has influenced marital decision-making and also, how individual marital decisions have influenced the state. These books show that marriage can protect and benefit spouses, but that it can also harm them through the promotion and acceptance of society’s biases and prejudices. As the actress Mae West once stated, “Marriage is a great institution, but I’m not ready for an institution.” The following books highlight the wisdom of West’s words.
Most war books focus on soldiers, Entangling Alliances does not. Instead, it provides a fascinating look at the women who married soldiers. Despite the romanticism often associated with wartime marriages, many readers may be surprised to discover that war brides were rarely welcomed. In fact, these marriages were primarily treated as undesirable and problematic. Nevertheless, despite this opposition, tens of thousands of war brides immigrated to the United States throughout the 20th century and their entry forced America to confront its xenophobia and reevaluate its beliefs about the purpose and benefits of marriage. Through an exploration of wartime marriages, Entangling Alliances documents America’s changing views on love and marriage and shows how individual marital choices can have national and international repercussions.
Throughout the twentieth century, American male soldiers returned home from wars with foreign-born wives in tow, often from allied but at times from enemy nations, resulting in a new, official category of immigrant: the "allied" war bride. These brides began to appear en masse after World War I, peaked after World War II, and persisted through the Korean and Vietnam Wars. GIs also met and married former "enemy" women under conditions of postwar occupation, although at times the US government banned such unions.
In this comprehensive, complex history of war brides in 20th-century American history, Susan Zeiger uses relationships between…
The problem is not with the actions young women take but with the toxic, sexist conditions they are responding to.
Tanenbaum found, based on six years of interviews with young people ages 14-30, that young women are navigating a culture littered with gendered dress codes, revenge porn, and sexually explicit…
As a family law professor, I spend a lot of time thinking about marriage. Although it is an extremely personal decision, the legal, social, and even political ramifications can be tremendous. Marriage is not just an individual choice. Each year, I teach my family law students that there are three parties to every marriage, the two spouses, and the state. The books on this list reveal how the state has influenced marital decision-making and also, how individual marital decisions have influenced the state. These books show that marriage can protect and benefit spouses, but that it can also harm them through the promotion and acceptance of society’s biases and prejudices. As the actress Mae West once stated, “Marriage is a great institution, but I’m not ready for an institution.” The following books highlight the wisdom of West’s words.
Primates of Park Avenue provides a gripping and somewhat horrifying look at love and marriage within the elite social circles of Manhattan’s Upper East Side. The book reveals that among the uber-wealthy, marriage has more in common with the Victorian marital bargain than with modern-day ideas about partnership and equality. Readers will likely be both repulsed and enthralled by the world Martin describes; a world in which women trade professional success for wealthy husbands and receive year-end “wife bonuses” when they have performed their wifely roles well. Primates of Park Avenue proves the old adage, “when you marry for money, you’ll earn every penny.” At the same time, it also shows why, for many, the allure of marrying for money remains irresistible.
An instant #1 New York Times bestseller, Primates of Park Avenue is an "amusing, perceptive and...deliciously evil" (The New York Times Book Review) memoir of the most secretive and elite tribe-Manhattan's Upper East Side mothers. When Wednesday Martin first arrives on New York City's Upper East Side, she's clueless about the right addresses, the right wardrobe, and the right schools, and she's taken aback by the glamorous, sharp-elbowed mommies around her. She feels hazed and unwelcome until she begins to look at her new niche through the lens of her academic background in anthropology. As she analyzes the tribe's mating…
I’m a writer of Regency Romance fiction with a perfectionist’s zeal to get the details right. Most Regency Romances are tales of aristocrats falling in love and marrying—or marrying and then falling in love! But in real life, romantic love was often not an essential aspect of courtship in this era. Aristocratic families might ensure that a couple was “suited”, but they arranged unions for bloodlines and wealth, and the ties were almost impossible to break. Enjoy these true tales of marriage and divorce, and the two novels of heartbreak, divorce, and happy-ever-after.
This book provides a helpful overview of the marriage and divorce laws of England during the period in question, as well as twelve “case studies,” all useful for research. Most of the marital breakups covered in this volume occurred before the Regency era, a few even before the greater Georgian era. Each story takes a reader through the heartache and drama of these unhappy marriages and the legal machinations needed to end them.
In Road to Divorce, Lawrence Stone explored and analysed the ambiguous nature of the law and pratice concerning marriage, separation, and divorce in England from 1530 to the present day. He showed how husbands and wives, lovers and lawyers, adapted, circumvented, of defied the law in order to achieve their end, namely either a secure marriage, or a marital separation on favourable terms. In Uncertain Unions, he offered a series of detailed case-studies, which painted a vivid picture of how certain individuals coped with the manifold uncertainties of the law of marriage before the Marriage Act of 1753. Now, Broken…
I work on topics where medicine, crime, and the law intersect, aided by an undergraduate degree in chemistry and stimulated by my fascination with how criminal justice systems work. I have published on the history of poisoning, vitriol attacks, assault, child murder, and the role of scientific expertise in criminal investigations and trials, focusing on Britain since the seventeenth century. I’ve contributed to many TV documentaries over the years, and enjoy the opportunity to explain just why the history of crime is about so much more than individual criminals: it shows us how people in the past lived their lives and helps explain how we got where we are today.
This fascinating study shows that victim-blaming has a long history and doctors have been part of the problem, playing a significant role in constructing and reinforcing rape myths in the years 1850-1914. The unique focus on age, medical beliefs about puberty, and public concerns about sexual offences and working-class sexuality explains why even children under the legal age of consent might not be seen as sexually innocent. Medicine provided a scientific rationale for deeply entrenched and remarkably stable popular beliefs about ‘real rape’ and ‘victimhood’, contributing to the serious burden that female victims faced in court.
Drawing on court records from London and the South West, Sexual Forensics in Victorian and Edwardian England explores medical roles in trials for sexual offences. Its focus on sexual maturity, a more flexible concept than the legal age of consent, enables histories of sexual crime to be seen in a new light.
Crossing is a vividly human re-imagining of the love, sacrifices, and accomplishments that two Chinese brothers - American Immigrants - experience as they travel to California to build the Transcontinental Railroad.
As a youngster I used to drive my parents crazy because I was so passionate about recycling. I rekindled this passion about five years ago and started Everyday Recycler. Through my website I help people improve their recycling habits by offering actionable instructions with a focus on explaining how recycling works and its intrinsic value. I also advocate strongly for recycled products. I believe that by purchasing recycled products, we can help generate demand for the materials we toss in our recycling bin and contribute to the overall success of recycling. These works have educated and inspired me over the years. I hope they inspire you as much.
In researching my own book I learnt that e-waste is one of the fastest-growing waste streams on the planet. It impacts the environment and humans at all stages from extraction of raw materials to the end of life disposal.
A key solution is to keep items in their originally intended use as long as possible. Right to Repair explores the critical issues of corporations limiting consumers' ability to repair their own products, leading to planned obsolescence and ultimately unnecessary waste. This is an urgent issue that requires more attention and plays a crucial role in reducing e-waste and its negative effects on the environment.
Right to Repair will help the reader understand their rights to repair-friendly technology and help them become a more informed consumer.
In recent decades, companies around the world have deployed an arsenal of tools - including IP law, hardware design, software restrictions, pricing strategies, and marketing messages - to prevent consumers from fixing the things they own. While this strategy has enriched companies almost beyond measure, it has taken billions of dollars out of the pockets of consumers and imposed massive environmental costs on the planet. In The Right to Repair, Aaron Perzanowski analyzes the history of repair to show how we've arrived at this moment, when a battle over repair is being waged - largely unnoticed - in courtrooms, legislatures,…
I am a historian of education and twentieth-century U.S. history. Public schooling has been transformative for me, opening up a world of opportunities, but I know many others are not nearly so lucky. This has shaped my interest in the history of public schooling, including its promise of democracy and opportunity and the too-often reality of the way it replicates and deepens social and economic inequalities. I think history helps us understand our world, including to see the roots of inequality we live with today and to think about how we might build a more equitable system.
I love how this book shows us how we can’t understand the failures of recent education reforms to fix educational inequality without putting them into a longer and wider context, namely the history of school desegregation.
This book explores how the failure of courts and policymakers to go far enough in school desegregation—especially to challenge the city-suburban boundary as a primary axis of racial and socioeconomic inequality—has doomed all subsequent reforms, including school finance reform, school choice, and standards and accountability.
This book has shaped my thinking about educational reform and inequality today, especially the importance of boundaries and funding. It helps us look at our current education policy landscape with a much more critical eye and see some of the things that are missing from this discussion today.
How is it that half a century after Brown v. Board of Education--and in spite of increased funding for urban schools and programs like No Child Left Behind--educational opportunities for blacks and whites in America still remain so unequal? In Five Miles Away, A World Apart, James Ryan provides a sobering answer to this question by tracing the fortunes of two schools in Richmond, Virginia--one suburban, relatively affluent, and mostly white, and the other urban, relatively poor, and mostly black. Ryan shows how court rulings against desegregation in the 1970s laid the groundwork for the massive disparities between urban and…
I grew up in the 1960s when the Supreme Court was widely praised in liberal circles for its path-breaking decisions protecting rights. Inspired by this vision of rights through law, I went to law school and then to graduate school, including a couple of years in England where I was confronted with skepticism about the role of courts. Are liberal beliefs about the role of the Supreme Court correct? Can courts really produce progressive social change, not just on paper, but in practice? Most of my research and scholarship addresses these questions that go to the heart of the belief that Supreme Court decisions protecting and furthering rights matter.
Lucas Powe’s magnificent study focuses on the relationship between the Supreme Court and elites throughout American history.
The Court, Powe argues, is not an independent institution dedicated to protecting the rights of the disadvantaged. Rather, it works in tandem with elites to further their interests. The book is beautifully written and persuasively argued.
'The Supreme Court follows the election returns', the fictional Mr. Dooley observed a hundred years ago. And for all our ideals and dreams of a disinterested judiciary, above the political fray, it seems Mr. Dooley was right. In this engaging - and disturbing - book, a leading historian of the Court reveals the close fit between its decisions and the nation's politics. The story begins with the creation of the Constitution and ends with the June 2008 decisions on the rights of detainees at Guantanamo Bay. Rendering crisp (and often controversial) judgments on key decisions from Marbury v. Madison to…
At five years old, Kasiel was found with the pointed ends of his ears cut off. Despite that brutal start, he’s lived twelve peaceful years with the man who took him in. Keeping his hair long over his mutilated ears helps him hide the fact that he is Vanrian, a…
I'm now retired. But like many historians of my generation, I've been lucky. Having gone to the University of California when there was no tuition and got through graduate school thanks to the GI Bill, I then taught history for five decades, briefly at San Francisco State College and the University of Hawaii, and for a long stretch at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. During those years, I wrote eight books, one was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1987, and three won prizes—the Albert J. Beverage Award in 1970, the second-place Lincoln Prize in 2001, and the Langum Trust Prize in 2015. All but one deal with slavery and power.
This book also deserves more attention than it has received. And it, too, is a corrective. Taking to task a host of biographers and historians who have pretended that the “founding fathers” were blind to slavery and that slavery was a secondary issue in 1787, Finkleman contends that slavery was always a major bone of contention. Moreover, contends Finkelman, Thomas Jefferson was anything but an antislavery man. Instead, he was on the proslavery and anti-Black side in most controversies.
In Slavery and the Founders, Paul Finkelman addresses a central issue of the American founding: how the first generation of leaders of the United States dealt with the profoundly important question of human bondage. The book explores the tension between the professed idea of America as stated in the Declaration of Independence, and the reality of the early American republic, reminding us of the profound and disturbing ways that slavery affected the U.S. Constitution and early American politics. It also offers the most important and detailed short critique of Thomas Jefferson's relationship to slavery available, while at the same time…
![Book cover of Shapely Ankle Preferr'd: A History of the Lonely Hearts Ad [1695-2010]](https://media.bookdna-cdn.com/cdn-cgi/image/format=avif,width=440,quality=75/media/covers/61-5BRaHc3L_uyqt7s "Book cover of Shapely Ankle Preferr'd: A History of the Lonely Hearts Ad [1695-2010]")
![Book cover of Shapely Ankle Preferr'd: A History of the Lonely Hearts Ad [1695-2010]](https://media.bookdna-cdn.com/cdn-cgi/image/format=avif,width=220,quality=75/media/covers/61-5BRaHc3L_uyqt7s "Book cover of Shapely Ankle Preferr'd: A History of the Lonely Hearts Ad [1695-2010]")
![Book cover of Shapely Ankle Preferr'd: A History of the Lonely Hearts Ad [1695-2010]](https://media.bookdna-cdn.com/cdn-cgi/image/format=avif,width=110,quality=75/media/covers/61-5BRaHc3L_uyqt7s "Book cover of Shapely Ankle Preferr'd: A History of the Lonely Hearts Ad [1695-2010]")
