Historical Germany represents a perfect laboratory for studying interregional demographic differences, yet the historical family structures in this part of the European continent remain largely unexplored. This study seeks to fill this gap by documenting the variability of living arrangements...

This essay represents an attempt at a re-examination of the Western scientific evidence for the existence of the divergent “Eastern European family pattern.” This evidence is challenged by almost entirely unknown contributions of Eastern European scholars, revealing the stark incompatibility...

In 1940, almost two years into World War II, the book, “Agrarverfassung und Bevölkerung in Litauen und Weißrussland”(Agrarian constitution and population in Lithuania and Belarus), was published. The habilitation thesis of the young German historian Werner Conze, the book was an extensive...

We trace the development of numeracy in Poland and Russia from the early 17th century onwards, and numeracy in Belarus, Ukraine, and Lithuania from the 18th century onwards. The fact that western Poland was doing relatively well during the 16th and early 17th centuries, but was not able to...

The view of Eastern Europe as a locus of complex family organisation and familistic societal values has reached the status of general dogma in Western social sciences and demography. By offering an overview of almost entirely unknown scholarly achievements of Eastern Europeanists, this essay...

This study is informed by competing perspectives on family behaviour in periods of turbulent social change, and intends to provide some fresh insights into the effect of macro-level changes on micro-level processes involving the family. In this pilot study, we take our first step towards...

The main purpose of this paper is to report on an initial validation of methods for dealing with micro-census data with no delineated households. After describing the 1819 census of Rostock we test the possibilities of using an algorithm that creates households according to a strictly defined...