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Central to the chapter’s survey of emerging Jewish popular-music genres is the role of the city as a new cultural context for Jewish music making by the turn of the century. Immigrants from rural Eastern Europe, Jewish musicians entered all areas of the urban musical cultures of Vienna, Berlin, and other cities, where they performed for Jewish and non-Jewish audiences with enormous success. The city was also the site for mixing musical genres, creating new sounds in popular music and establishing new genres—for example, cabaret and Yiddish theater. The chapter analyzes numerous broadsides and hit songs such as Gustav Pick’s “Viennese Coachman’s Song.” Individual musicians, music publishers, and ensembles serve as a collective biography throughout the chapter.

This chapter examines the strategies for the representation of subjects in ancient Greek collective biographies. It analyzes the Vitae philosophorum et sophistarum by Eunapius and the Historia monachorum by an anonymous author. It suggests that the authors of these works did not analyze the character so much and that their main concern was to emphasize the scintillating qualities of the subjects of their biographical sketches. They used the so-called pictorial idiom that was considered as the peculiarly expressionistic manner of the fourth century.

This chapter explores the complex and diverse relationships between older people and their adult children, who may themselves be parents and grandparents. The foundation of this chapter is the assumption that those relationships are situated within an individual and collective biography and that continuities and discontinuities over the lifecourse will affect the negotiation of family relationships, the meanings attached to those relationships, and family practices.

The introduction describes the genesis of the book, establishes the historical questions it addresses, points to the answers to come, and situates this work in the historiography of Central and Eastern Europe. Most importantly, it makes the case for collective biography, which is the most innovative feature of this book. The introduction also defines the main features of northeastern Hungary and stresses what is gained by viewing nineteenth-century history from the vantage point of this poor, remote region. Drawing on Benedict Anderson and Edward Said, it closes with reflections on the "imagined geography" as an analytical framework that captures the mixture of acute observations and bold visions of change offered by the eight men and women examined here.

The book opens by arguing that a family history approach can throw new light on important issues relating to Irish migration to Victorian Britain, notably about Irish family lives, the long-term fate of immigrants and their descendants, as well as the significance of Irish ethnicity, gender, identity, locality and the Irish diaspora. The chapter reviews conceptual approaches to studying the history of families. Three research questions are discussed – identifying how families functioned in terms of family strategy and relationships, the specific impact of migration on families and how the family related to its wider social and economic context. Stafford’s value as a case study location is outlined and the methodology and sources are discussed. The work uses collective family biography or ‘prosopography’. The database at the heart of the project is described and the varied sources are reviewed. Interviews and evidence from descendants have been combined with digital history and documentary sources to construct the genealogies of settled families, narratives of their history and an assessment of the factors that determined their fates.

This chapter uses poor law, census, police, magistrates and prison records relating to over eight-hundred women, alongside in-depth case studies of individuals, to examine the major themes that shaped the lives of women involved in prostitution in Scotland during the early twentieth century. The chapter explores various reasons why women entered or exited prostitution at certain stages during their lives; particularly their socio-economic backgrounds, their health, use of alcohol or involvement in crime and other events that shaped their lives and relationships, including the different types of relationships that existed among ‘prostitutes’, ‘pimps’ and ‘brothel-keepers. Despite the limitations of the available sources which are heavily mediated, this collective biography approach provides some important insights into the lives and experiences of the women involved in prostitution. Importantly, this evidence begins to reveal a level of women’s historical agency that has often been difficult for historians to ascertain.

From the 1970s on, banking supervision grew in size and importance. Which were the characteristics of the regulatory elite leading this activity? Based on archival material from central banks and supervisory institutions and on a collective biography analysis, this chapter explores the profile of the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision members, their role in the construction of an international regulatory institution, and some of their first achievements. It shows that some Basel Committee members were deeply involved in transnational networks of governance, others used their experience as banking supervisor in the private sector, while still others had a more national-centred career and stayed in the central banking or banking supervision sector. The Basel Committee members were the elite of banking supervisors. Over time, their committee evolved from a club to a standard-setter institution, illustrating the newly acquired influence both of banking supervision and experts and expertise in international financial governance.

The conclusion begins by reviewing how family history can reveal the lives of immigrant families and their descendants as well as their identities and family strategies. It argues that collective family biography can bridge the gap between ‘academic’ social history and antiquarian family history, to the benefit of both. The distinctive and determinant features of long-term transient, integrating and terminal families are discussed. It is argued that for Irish migration studies the work offers new evidence on the diversity of migrant experiences and the forces promoting identity and ‘ethnic fade’. The significance of women’s roles is emphasised and the argument is in favour of the ‘active opportunist’ rather than the ‘passive exile’ perspective on Irish migrants. The book concludes with some implications for family studies. The family strategy concept is seen as valuable especially by focusing on the role of women. The evidence undermines simple views on the transition to the nuclear family. There is some sustenance to the Marxist feminist perspective of the family as an ideological construct whose role was to keep people functioning and reproducing in spite of stresses in the external environment.

Introduces Rose Schneiderman, Pauline Newman, Clara Lemlich Shavelson and Fannia Cohn. Argues that they represented a vision of “industrial feminism.” Taken collectively, their biographies revise historical understanding of U.S. labor, political, immigrant and women’s history.

This chapter analyses the Italian corporate network along the twentieth century focusing on seven benchmark years (1913, 1927, 1936, 1960, 1972, 1983, and 2001). For each year, the top 250 companies (50 financial and 200 non-financial) by total assets have been selected. After showing some descriptive statistics, the chapter develops a network connectivity analysis of the system. This is integrated by a prosopographic study of the big linkers, defined as those directors who had the highest number of board positions in each year. The big linkers who held directorships in both banks and industrial firms functioned as the nation’s financial elite. These relationships were assured for a long time principally by industrialists and financiers. Bankers surged to a prominent position only at the end of the century, after the massive privatizations of the 1990s.