Heirloom dishes and family food traditions are rich sources of nostalgia and provide vivid ways to learn about our families’ past, yet they can be problematic. Many family recipes and food traditions are never documented in written or photographic form, existing only as unwritten know-how and lore that vanishes when a cook dies. Even when recipes are written down, they often fail to give the tricks and tips that would allow another cook to accurately replicate the dish. Unfortunately, recipes are also often damaged as we plunk Grandma’s handwritten cards on the countertop next to a steaming pot or a spattering mixer, shortening their lives. This book is a guide for gathering, adjusting, supplementing, and safely preserving family recipes and for interviewing relatives, collecting oral histories, and conducting kitchen visits to document family food traditions from the everyday to special occasions. It blends commonsense tips with sound archival principles, helping you achieve effective results while avoiding unnecessary pitfalls. Chapters are also dedicated to unfamiliar regional or ethnic cooking challenges, as well as to working with recipes that are “orphans,” surrogates, or terribly outdated. Whether you simply want to save a few accurate recipes, help yesterday’s foodways evolve so they are relevant for today’s table, or create an extensive family cookbook, this guidebook will help you to savor your memories.

This illuminating examination of democratic ethics is “a resource for Americans who are seeking ways to secure our democracy and our future as a nation” (Congressman John Lewis). Ethical leadership, steeped in integrity and fairness, matters. The future of our nation and our world depends upon the quality of America’s character. In this absorbing look at our contemporary society and government, former Indiana congresswoman Jill Long Thompson persuasively argues that we all have a meaningful role to play in shaping America’s character and future. The citizenry, as well as their elected officials, are responsible for protecting fairness of participation and integrity in elections, as well as in the adoption and execution of laws. In this troubling time when the public is losing trust and confidence in our government, Jill Long Thompson shows us a bipartisan way forward.

This text is a synthetic history of the last half of the American century. Self shows how movements on the liberal left that demanded equal rights and greater government protection inadvertently elicited conservative activism that sought to restore the nuclear family under the rubric of 'family values'.

Written in an accessible, case study format, this groundbreaking work explores the formulation, implementation, and evaluation of family leave policy in the United States, from its beginnings at the state level in the early 1980s, through the adoption of the federal Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993, and beyond to the present day. With a political economy perspective, the book identifies the major economic and social forces affecting both the family and the workplace. And drawing on original primary research, it examines how the political system has responded to this evolving issue with various policy initiatives.

This fascinating book compares progressive and more religiously conservative views and their differing impacts on the health of families. Rejecting the definition of family promulgated by the Religious Right, Healthy American Families: A Progressive Alternative to the Religious Right offers an innovative approach to understanding 21st-century families. Proactive rather than reactive, it explores the ways families have changed over the past 200 years and builds on that to elucidate the larger forces that continue to redefine male and female roles and the shape of the modern family unit. Part one of the book shows that the Religious Right's claim that a Golden Age of Families existed when our country began is fallacious. Instead families have been changing since the days of the Puritans. Part two picks up the threads to show how, in the wake of those changes, most of today's families are "healthier" than families at the time of our country's founding. Healthy families, the book asserts, spring from a blend of "conservative" ideals (responsibility and accountability) and "liberal" ideals (innovation and change). The result is "responsible change" that benefits both the individual and society.