This book’s prosaic title belies its excitingly unconventional concepts, methods, and insights. Its topic of fatherhood might seem ordinary enough, but its singular approach assuredly is not. Originally published in German, it was awarded the 2013 Organization of American Historians Willi Paul Adams Prize for the best book in U.S. history written in a language other than English. Martschukat’s creativity surely accounts for this book’s distinctive structure and remarkably clever conceptualization of American fatherhood. Claiming as its considerable territory the transitions and underappreciated varieties within fatherhood from the Revolution to the present, the book views its subject through twelve different lenses, each receiving its own chapter, in roughly chronological order. The first chapter is a collective portrait of fatherhood’s virtually inevitable reshaping in a country newly freed from ties to its imperial parent. Thenceforward, American Fatherhood truly comes into its own, through the remaining eleven chapters and their cleverly chosen subjects—individuals either real or fictional whom Martschukat considers revealingly representative. The book’s freshness will delight many readers, but it will probably annoy others, who will deem it simply too unconventional—idiosyncratic rather than illuminating. This book does not invite neutrality.Martschukat’s exemplars are uncommon. Not all the chapters’ subjects are even fathers themselves; others are the sorts of father who have heretofore received too little attention from history and social science alike. To Martschukat, the exceptional has broad import. He is the latest in a line of deft scholars, extending back at least as far as Emile Durkheim, to show that a society as a whole, or in its dominant segments, is revealed through the scrutiny of persons considered deviant and often treated harshly for their supposed offenses.Thus, Martschukat chooses eleven unlikely subjects for American Fatherhood’s Chapters 2 through 12—the lenses that he employs to bring American fatherhood into sharp focus: the Oneida Community, with its peculiar notions of sex, love, and the family; enslaved fathers, especially Thomas H. Jones, eventual abolitionist and author of a narrative of which Martschukat makes good use; Mollie Sheehan, a mid-nineteenth-century child who made the trek from the Midwest to California with her father, a widowed Irish immigrant; John Camden West, a Confederate soldier whose life at war and at home Martschukat employs for a remarkably fresh look at white Southern masculinity; Robert McBurney, a bachelor (in a book about fatherhood!) who found a ready outlet for his paternal inclinations in the fledgling New York ymca (Martschukat’s analysis even managing to supplement Chudacoff’s magisterial book on bachelorhood’s heyday in the United States1); Minnie Goldstein, a young Jewish woman who left late nineteenth-century Poland for New York City, developing there a distinctive family culture; the mythical Native American father who—despite the genocide widely inflicted upon him in actuality—became a mainstream role model to meet the perceived needs of a rapidly modernizing United States; the long-suffering male breadwinner of the Great Depression; the middle-class white suburban male of postwar America, whose aspirations and conceits found representation in Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1955); the polarizing African-American father of the late twentieth century; and a lesbian couple parenting a child in early twenty-first century San Francisco.As these chapters suggest, no single group or simple definition owns the American family in this work, despite the strident, often transparent, claims of certain political groups to “family values.” This book also has its political slant, and it is one of inclusion. The primary sources on which American Fatherhood rests range as widely and creatively as the book’s topics. Literature sits alongside social-science research. Among Martschuka’s materials are an unpublished memoir, material from the Jacob Riis Papers, the ymca archives, a slave narrative, firsthand interviews, and nine movies. Published material, both primary and secondary, abounds. This work, substantial in quantity and quality, as well as in ideas and methods, is interdisciplinary history at its very best.
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Dec 1, 2020
John Ibson 
Open Access
