Microhistories: demography, society and culture in rural England, 1800-1930 uses a local study of the Blean area of Kent in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to explore some of the more significant societal changes of the modern western world. Drawing on a wide range of research techniques, including family reconstitution and oral history, Barry Reay aims to show that the implications of the microstudy can range way beyond its modest geographical and historical boundaries. Combining cultural, demographic, economic and social history in a way rarely encountered in historical literature, Dr Reay examines a fascinating range of topics. He extends the parameters of the fertility transition, sketches out a medical-social history of nineteenth-century rural England, charts the contours of family labour and the complexities of class, questions orthodoxies about kinship and the nuclear family, and explores the contexts of Victorian sexuality and the meaning of popular literacy. This book demonstrates the challenging potentials of microhistory, and makes a central contribution to the 'new rural history'. It will be of interest to family and oral historians, as well as historical anthropologists, demographers, geographers, and sociologists.