Inheriting the Family: Objects, Identities and Emotions (New Directions in Social and Cultural History)

This open access book uses new methodologies from the history and sociology of emotions to analyse why people select specific tokens of family inheritance, and how this influences personal identity, cultural heritage, and national memory.Much of our cultural heritage emerges from family histories - with many of the objects curated in museums, stories passed between generations, and monuments marking notable figures being the direct product of familial collections, donations, and investments.This edited collection uses emotion as an analytical tool to interpret such behaviours, and offers novel ways to investigate how and why family inheritances from a range of social, racial, and ethnic groups maintain their cultural power, as they move through time and from the private to the public spheres. Drawing on a variety of case studies, and exploring items ranging from Victorian library chairs, to quilts, religious texts, and pieces of intergenerational writing - this volume considers the rol