Block 1:

An introduction to historical Legacies.

Culture and Family.

Historical family: categories, and systems.

Identifying European historical family regions.

Block 2:

Overview of studies of historical legacies of family: Economy; Values and social norms; Political ideology and violence.

The course will be divided in three sections, the first one is dedicated to providing the basics of the study of cultural legacies, showing the basic history and logic of the field (how and why did it emerged), and a brief overlook of the logical causal chain that the studies on historical and cultural legacies rely on. The second part will be focused in presenting the pre-industrial family systems in Europe, this will serve as example on how to approach historical differences, this block centres on how the different authors categorize the variables, how to interpret and use data from with different historical sources and the challenges of homogenize large datasets on historical data. And the third part will be dedicated to the studies that apply the study of cultural legacies over different outcomes (economic development, values and social norms, and political behaviour and violence).

Block 1 will cover topics one and two; and the block 2 will cover the third topic.

The session per day will be divided in two sections (one in the morning and other in the afternoon), each section with a lecture and a seminar. The sections will be divided with a pause of an hour.

From the day 2, seminars will start with a presentation of a topic paper by the students (groups of 2 or 3). The presentation should have a duration of 10-15 minutes, students should prepare some questions for the discussion on class after their presentation. There will be one or two presentations per seminar depending on the class size (each group will only have to prepare one presentation during the course). 

Coursework will consist in:   

1) Reading the papers for the course.

2) Class presentation.

3) Short quiz, debate and class participation.

4) Final paper: research proposal ( 5-7 pages) - by the same groups done for the presentations.

Learning outcomes:

•   Students will be able to define what Cultural/historical legacies are, why the field of research emerged and what it is used for. Also, they will be able to identify different cultural legacies in the current world.

•   Students will be able to describe the different functions of family as a social institution, indicate the different elements that compose family systems and recognize the different pre-industrial family systems in Europe.

•   Students will be able to interpret the main theories on historical family legacies and apply them to different examples.

•   Students should be able to propose their own hypothesis and defend the causal chain between the antecedent and the studied outcome.