This is one of those books that are difficult to classify. Some years ago, Nara Milanich delivered a powerful critique of European family historiography, challenging its self-referential questions and tired approaches. She argued that renewing the field required looking to other latitudes and seriously examining Latin American history. Paternity can be seen as the result of that call to breathe new life into family history by considering Latin America and placing it at the center of the major questions of historiography, those that restore our delight in reading good history, in being historians.
Through the question of the father, Milanich examines the problem of the political order—of rights and inclusion—in Euro-American societies that, even allowing for their great differences, share a common trunk of cultural and legal traditions. It also enables her to probe sociocultural modernization in the twentieth century through the real lives of men, women, and children and...
