The rise of nationalist and totalitarian ideologies in Europe profoundly affected the family. Having been both bolstered and confined by religion and custom under the old order, the oldest human institution was transformed, distorted and sometimes destroyed by what followed. In "Family Politics", a haunting, vivid and thought-provoking new work of social history, Paul Ginsborg, a British-born pro- fessor in Florence, uses the prism of family life to make sense of the first half of the 20th century in the five European countries to which it brought the sharpest changes. They are Italy under Benito Mussolini, Germany under the Nazis, Spain during the civil war and under General Franco, Turkey under Mustafa Kemal Ata-turk and Russia (later the Soviet Union) in the revolution and under Joseph Stalin.
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