Implications for contemporary family life of global economic and cultural processes. Topics include pre-industrial polygyny in China; working-class family and kinship in industrializing U.K.; African American slave families in the antebellum South; the rise of the "modern" family system; and contemporary family forms and processes including gay and lesbian families, the effects of reproductive technologies on family life, and the intergenerational complexities of racial-ethnic families enmeshed in poverty, drugs, and the criminal justice system.