An American Family: Four Centuries. Two Continents By: S. Frederick Starr This book recounts the history of an American family that was formed in the 1930s by the marriage of seeming opposites from the two sides of the ethnic divide that separated descendants of earlier Anglo-Saxon and German settlers from the millions of newcomers from Central Europe and Italy who arrived after 1900. Its immediate geographical focus is the American Midwest, the areas surrounding Cleveland and Cincinnati, Ohio. Its deeper geography extends to Maryland’s Eastern Shore, Lancastershire and Cumbria in northern England and Southampton on England’s south coast, to the Rhineland-Palatinate region of Germany, to St. Petersburg in Russia, and to Austria, Budapest and the distant eastern lands of Hungary. Religiously, it embraces Catholics, Jews. The Church of England, Quakers, Methodists, and Unitarians. And with respect to professions, it includes farmers, home-makers, preachers, artists, shop-keepers, photographers, lawyers, educators, housemaids, judges, scholars, and businessmen. Finally, this is a book about change. One of the families involved changed its religion three times and the other changed its name three times. Yet there are also continuities aplenty, and most notably in the qualities of seriousness, ambition, tenacity, and commitment to family that prevail throughout.