The search for “family continuity” after a mortality during a severe conflict – not restricted to the two World War Wars – will include the study of any strategy, by men and women, intending to replace missing sons and other family members that have died during the War, on the front or from other dramatic reasons, illness, epidemic, famine, exodus etc.
These strategies may be marriage, divorce, remarriage, having other children, adopting, moving, forced or voluntary migrating far from home, working, changing job, transmitting memory of past events or, on the contrary, hiding owns past in order to start a new family and construct another life elsewhere.Read More →

Throughout history military conflicts had a direct impact on soldiers and civilians lives, particularly on health. This panel aims at analysing and discussing some of war impacts on health. Wars had consequences over populations, including food deprivation, poor hygiene and stress affecting their well-being and contributing to reduce their health conditions. In the same way, this also affected soldiers that were more exposed to illness and epidemics, apart the physical and psychological wounds of the war.Read More →

Scientists belonging to various disciplines have attempted to develop explanatory models of intergenerational exchanges, or to identify the motives and mechanisms whereby parents and their adult offspring engage in a particular type of intergenerational behaviour. The European society in the modern era was still profoundly traditional, as the modernity usually associated with urban and industrial spaces had only occasionally managed to dislodge the traditional type of relations both within the family and in the community. We wish to reconstruct succinctly, outlining aspects of continuity and discontinuity concerning the European society in 19-20th centuries. We shall focus on the communication between the combatants on the “heated” front (the soldiers in the trenches) and the combatants on the “internal” front, back home. The communication reveal the complex dimensions of intergenerational and family relations during the war. The increased mobility of the population, especially of those deployed on the battle fields in those years, was likely to contribute to the “contamination” of large population segments with practices, attitudes and feelings that could hardly have been noticed under normal peace conditions and against a traditional mental horizon. What undeniably also happened during those years was the beginning of destructuring the absolute authority of the man in the family, coupled with the woman’s tendency to earn her right to equality but not only.Read More →