Jan Kok

Why do people rebel? This is one of the most important questions historians and social scientists have been grappling with over the years. It is a question to which no satisfactory answer has been found, despite more than a century of research. However, in most cases the research has focused on what people do if they rebel but hardly ever, why they rebel. The essays in this volume offer an alternative perspective, based on the question at what point families decided to add collective action to their repertoires of survival strategies, In this way this volume opens up a promising new field of historical research: the intersection of labour and family history. The authors offer fascinating case studies in several countries spanning over four continents during the last two centuries. In an extensive introduction the relevant literature on households and collective action is discussed, and the volume is rounded off by a conclusion that provides methodological and theoretical suggestions for the further exploration of this new field in social history.

Household Strategies and Collective Action in the 19th and 20th Centuries

Rebellious Families

Dalia Leinarte

Originating from discussions about the reasons for, and regional variations behind, the remarkable rise in cohabitation that started in the 1970s – a rise that continues to this day – this book explores the main stimuli behind cohabitation. The variation in levels of cohabitation cannot be explained solely by regional differences, religious affiliation, nationality, levels of education, or by the varying rate in which contraceptive measures spread across Europe. The book also focuses on the ways in which cohabitants are legitimized or rejected by certain communities. Did communities develop specific terms to define cohabitation and because of which underlying reasons were these different terms created? Illegitimacy is another phenomenon inseparably tied to cohabitation, based on the hypothesis that the understanding of marriage differs between societies and regions. In 1971, Shorter, Knodel and Van de Walle found that children born in rural Slavic communities in unlawful but stable, consensual unions were not recognised by civil law and the Church, and were registered as illegitimates, but in a cultural perspective were considered as legitimate. They also found more or less the same pattern in Scandinavian countries. This book explores the correlations that exist between illegitimacy and cohabitation across space and time in Europe? This book was originally published as a special issue of The History of the Family.

A revenge of history?

Cohabitation in Europe

Roland J. Siezen

Tjakko Abee

Gertjan Schaafsma

Foods fermented with lactic acid bacteria are an important part of the human diet. Lactic acid bacteria play an essential role in the preservation of food raw materials and contribute to the nutritional, organoleptic, and health properties of food products and animal feed. The importance of lactic acid bacteria in the production of foods throughout the world has resulted in a continued scientific interest in these micro-organisms over the last two decades by academic research groups as well as by industry. This research has resulted in a number of important scientific breakthroughs and has led to new applications. The most recent of these advances is the establishment of the complete genome sequences of a number of different lactic acid bacterial species. To communicate and stimulate the research on lactic acid bacteria and their applications, a series of tri-annual symposia on lactic acid bacteria was started in 1983 under the auspices of the Netherlands Society for Microbiology (NVVM), which was later also supported by the Federation of European Microbiological Societies (FEMS). The aim of these state-of-the-art symposia is to offer a unique platform for universities, institutes, and industry in this area of biotechnology, to present recent work, to obtain information on new developments, and to exchange views with colleagues from all over the world on scientific progress and applications. The growing number of participants at these symposia has been a clear demonstration of the interest of the international industrial and scientific community in this area of research. The 7th Symposium is based on a number of plenary lectures that review the scientific progress of the last years in the different areas of research on lactic acid bacteria, and which are documented in this special issue of Antonie van Leeuwenhoek.

Proceedings of the seventh Symposium on lactic acid bacteria: genetics, metabolism and applications, 1–5 September 2002, Egmond aan Zee, the Netherlands

Lactic Acid Bacteria: Genetics, Metabolism and Applications

Konstantinos Papadimitriou

Pierre Renault

Kimberly Kline

The economic importance of lactic acid bacteria (LAB) for the food industry and their implication in health and disease has rendered them attractive models for research in many laboratories around the world. Over the past three decades, molecular and genetic analysis of LAB species provided important insights into the biology and application of starter and probiotic LAB and in the virulence of LAB pathogens. The knowledge obtained prepared LAB researchers for the forthcoming opportunities provided by the advent of microbial genomics. Today, developments in next-generation sequencing technologies have rocketed LAB genome research and the sequences of several hundreds of strains are available. This flood of information has revolutionized our view of LAB. First of all, a detailed picture has emerged about the evolutionary mechanisms allowing LAB to inhabit the very diverge ecological niches in which they can be found. Adaptation of LAB to nutrient-rich environments has led to degenerative evolution processes that resulted in shortening of chromosomes and simplified metabolic potential. Gene acquisition through horizontal transfer, on the other hand, is also important in shaping LAB gene pools. Horizontally acquired genes have been shown to be essential in technological properties of starters and in probiosis or virulence of commensals. Progress in bioinformatics tools has allowed rapid annotation of LAB genomes and the direct assignment of genetic traits among species/strains through comparative genomics. In this way, the molecular basis of many important traits of LAB has been elucidated, including aspects of sugar fermentation, flavor and odor formation, production of textural substances, stress responses, colonization of and survival in the host, cell-tocell interactions and pathogenicity. Functional genomics and proteomics have been employed in a number of instances to support in silico predictions. Given that the costs of advanced next-generation methodologies like RNA-seq are dropping fast, bottlenecks in the in silico characterization of LAB genomes will be rapidly overcome. Another crucial advancement in LAB research is the application of systems biology approaches, by which the properties and interactions of components or parts of a biological system are investigated to accurately understand or predict LAB behavior. Practically, systems biology involves the mathematical modeling of complex biological systems that can be refined iteratively with wet-lab experiments. High-throughput experimentation generating huge amounts of data on the properties and quantities of many components such as transcripts, enzymes and metabolites has resulted in several systems models of LAB. Novel techniques allow modelling of additional levels of complexity including the function of small RNAs, structural features of RNA molecules and post-translational modifications. In addition, researchers have started to apply systems approaches in the framework of LAB multispecies ecosystems in which each species or strain is considered as a part of the system. Metatransciptomics, metaproteomics and metametabolomics offer the means to combine cellular behavior with population dynamics in microbial consortia.

Omics and Systems Approaches to Study the Biology and Applications of Lactic Acid Bacteria

Margarida Durães

Antoinette Fauve-Chamoux

What does well-being mean when we talk about men and women in the past? Their sheer chances of survival, their protection from want, their social status, their individual agency and their self-esteem were all strongly mediated by the family, the predominant social institution. Family laws and customs of family formation created differences between insiders and outsiders in terms of well-being. Within families, there were strong differences in autonomy, status and freedom between the genders and generations. The book offers a fascinating exploration of gender differences in well-being in many regions of historic Europe, with some comparative perspectives. It explores how historic family systems differed with respect to choosing a marriage partner, transmitting property, living and care conditions of widows and widowers and the position of children born out of wedlock.

Jan Kok

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