BiblioVault - Books by Cohen, David

America, the Dream of My Life

Selections from the Federal Writers' Project's New Jersey Ethnic Survey

Cohen, David Steven

Rutgers University Press, 1990

This selection is the first statewide collection of life histories from the Social-Ethnic Studies program of the Federal Writers's Project. They represent for ethnic history what the more famous Federal Writers' Project's Slave Narratives have meant for African-American history.

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Anthrohistory

Unsettling Knowledge, Questioning Discipline

Chandra Bhimull, David William Cohen, Fernando Coronil, Edward L. Murphy, Monica Patterson, and Julie Skurski, Editors

University of Michigan Press, 2011

Stretching back to the 1950s, interdisciplinary work between anthropology and history has taken diverse expressions. Yet it has developed with more coherence since the 1980s, largely in response to the declining promise of global modernity and the rise of poststructuralism and deconstructionism. Through a critical and contemporary engagement with this wave of scholarship, this volume challenges readers to think of work at the crossroads of anthropology and history as transdisciplinary and anthrohistorical, moving beyond a partial integration of the disciplines as it critically evaluates their assumptions and trajectories.

This approach permits Anthrohistory: Unsettling Knowledge, Questioning Discipline to present a broader perspective that unsettles the constraints of existing academic practice. The volume does not offer a blueprint for fulfilling this goal, but rather a variety of positions taken by anthrohistorians who work in diverse contexts. Adopting an innovative and accessible style, Anthrohistory opens a provocative window into broader questions of interdisciplinarity, representation, epistemology, methodology, and social commitment.

Edward Murphy is Assistant Professor of History and Global Urban Studies at Michigan State University.

David William Cohen is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and Professor Emeritus of History, College of Literature, Science, and the Arts, University of Michigan.

Chandra D. Bhimull is Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology and the African-American Studies Program at Colby College.

Fernando Coronil is Presidential Professor at the Graduate Center at the City University of New York and Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and Professor Emeritus of History, College of Literature, Science, and the Arts, University of Michigan.

Monica Eileen Patterson is Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for Ethnographic Research and Exhibition in the Aftermath of Violence at Concordia University in Montreal.

Julie Skurski is Distinguished Lecturer in Anthropology at the Graduate Center at the City University of New York.

Cover art: Paul Klee, Tightrope Walker (1923), © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

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The Combing of History

David William Cohen

University of Chicago Press, 1994

How is historical knowledge produced? And how do silence and forgetting figure in the knowledge we call history? Taking us through time and across the globe, David William Cohen's exploration of these questions exposes the circumstantial nature of history. His investigation uncovers the conventions and paradigms that govern historical knowledge and historical texts and reveals the economic, social, and political forces at play in the production of history.

Drawing from a wide range of examples, including African legal proceedings, German and American museum exhibits, Native American commemorations, public and academic debates, and scholarly research, David William Cohen explores the "walls and passageways" between academic and non-academic productions of history.

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The Folklore and Folklife of New Jersey

David Steven Cohen

Rutgers University Press, 1983

An examination of the traditional culture and customs of New Jersey includes discussions of crafts, jokes, names, songs, cooking, legends, and games.

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Improvement by Design

The Promise of Better Schools

David K. Cohen, Donald J. Peurach, Joshua L. Glazer, Karen E. Gates, and Simona Goldin

University of Chicago Press, 2013

One of the great challenges now facing education reformers in the United States is how to devise a consistent and intelligent framework for instruction that will work across the nation’s notoriously fragmented and politically conflicted school systems. Various programs have tried to do that, but only a few have succeeded. Improvement by Design looks at three different programs, seeking to understand why two of them—America’s Choice and Success for All—worked, and why the third—Accelerated Schools Project—did not.

The authors identify four critical puzzles that the successful programs were able to solve: design, implementation, improvement, and sustainability. Pinpointing the specific solutions that clearly improved instruction, they identify the key elements that all successful reform programs share. Offering urgently needed guidance for state and local school systems as they attempt to respond to future reform proposals, Improvement by Design gets America one step closer to truly successful education systems.

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The Ordeal of Equality

Did Federal Regulation Fix the Schools?

David K. Cohen and Susan L. Moffitt

Harvard University Press, 2009

American schools have always been locally created and controlled. But ever since the Title I program in 1965 appropriated nearly one billion dollars for public schools, federal money and programs have been influencing every school in America.What has been accomplished in this extraordinary assertion of federal influence? What hasn’t? Why not? With incisive clarity and wit, David K. Cohen and Susan L. Moffitt argue that enormous gaps existed between policies and programs and the real-world practices that they attempted to change. Learning and teaching are complicated and mysterious. So the means to achieve admirable goals are uncertain, and difficult to develop and sustain, particularly when teachers get little help to cope with the blizzard of new programs, new slogans, new tests, and new rules.Ironically, as the authors observe, the least experienced and least well-trained teachers are often in the most needy schools, so federal support “is compromised by the inequality it is intended to ameliorate.” If new policies and programs don’t include means to create the capability they require, they cannot succeed. We don’t know what we need to enable states, school systems, schools, teachers, and students to use the resources that programs offer. The trouble with standards-based reform is that standards and tests still don’t teach you how to teach.

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The Ramapo Mountain People

Cohen, David Steven

Rutgers University Press, 1986

Northwest of Manhattan where the New York-New Jersey boundary crosses the tree-covered ridges and hollows ridges and hollows of the Ramapo Mountains there is a group of about 1,500 racially mixed people who have long been referred to by journalists and historians as the "Jackson Whites."

In a study combining tee disciplines of anthropology, sociology, folklore, and history, David Cohen found that the old stories about these people were legends, not history.

He found no reliable evidence that their ancestors were Tuscarora Indians, Hessian deserters from the British army, escaped slaves, and British and West Indian prostitutes imported by a sea captain named Jackson for the pleasure of British soldiers occupying Manhattan during the War for Independence.

David Cohen lived among the Ramapo Mountain People for a year, conducting genealogical research into church records, deeds, wills, and inventories in county courthouses and libraries. He established that their ancestors included free black landowners in New York City and mulattoes with some Dutch ancestry who were among the first pioneers to settle in the Hackensack River Valley of New Jersey.

In describing his findings and his experiences, Professor Cohen shows how their racially mixed ancestry, their special family and kinship system, and their intergroup attitudes and folkways distinguish and socially isolate these people as a separate racial group today, despite modern communications and transportation and their proximity to New York City.

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Reforming the Reform

Problems of Public Schooling in the American Welfare State

Susan L. Moffitt, Michaela Krug O'Neill, and David K. Cohen

University of Chicago Press, 2023

An expansive study of the problems encountered by educational leaders in pursuit of reform, and how these issues cyclically translate into future topics of reform.

School reform is almost always born out of big dreams and well-meaning desires to change the status quo. But between lofty reform legislation and the students whose education is at stake, there are numerous additional policies and policymakers who determine how reforms operate. Even in the best cases, school reform initiatives can perpetuate problems created by earlier reforms or existing injustices, all while introducing new complications. In Reforming the Reform, political scientist Susan L. Moffitt, education policy scholar Michaela Krug O’Neill, and the late policy and education scholar David K. Cohen take on a wide-ranging examination of the many intricacies of school reform.

With a particular focus on policymakers in the spaces between legislation and implementation, such as the countless school superintendents and district leaders tasked with developing new policies in the unique context of their district or schools, the authors identify common problems that arise when trying to operationalize ambitious reform ideas. Their research draws on more than 250 interviews with administrators in Tennessee and California (chosen as contrasts for their different political makeup and centralization of the education system) and is presented here alongside survey data from across the United States as well as archival data to demonstrate how public schools shoulder enormous responsibilities for the American social safety net. They provide a general explanation for problems facing social policy reforms in federalist systems (including healthcare) and offer pathways forward for education policy in particular.

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The Risks of Knowledge

Investigations into the Death of the Hon. Minister John Robert Ouko in Kenya, 1990

David William Cohen

Ohio University Press, 2004

In February 1990 assailants murdered Kenya’s distinguished Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation, Robert Ouko. The horror of the attack, the images of his mutilated and burned corpse, the evidence of a notorious cover-up, and the revelations of the pressures, conflicts, and fears he faced in his last weeks have engaged Kenya’s publics for years. The Risks of Knowledge minutely examines the multiple and unfinished investigations into the crime.

Among the probes was an extensive 1990 inquiry organized by a New Scotland Yard team invited to Kenya by the government, as well as an open public commission of inquiry appointed by President Daniel arap Moi. The commission ran for seventeen months in 1990-91 before the president shut it down. International and Kenyan unrest over Ouko’s brutal death brought increasing attention to corruption and violence associated with the Moi government, leading in late 1991 to multiparty politics and in December 2002 to the elections that ended the Moi era.

This powerfully argued book raises important issues about the production of knowledge and the politics of memory that will interest a large interdisciplinary audience.

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Siaya

The Historical Anthropology of an African Landscape

David William Cohen

Ohio University Press, 1989

The authors of this highly original book set out to remove the persistent boundary between the authors and readers of ethnography on one hand and the subjects of ethnography on the other – those who observe and those who are observed.

The authors use stories to reveal Siaya, the Luo-speaking area of Western Kenya down near the Lake but still surprisingly vulnerable to drought. There are the stories of survival by a woman with her carpenter husband in Nairobi, there is the launching of a boat as bride into the Lake and there is the great Boro Christmas disco riot. The book finishes with an Afterword on the burial of the lawyer S. M. Otiono that divided its whole of Kenya.

It is both written about and for the Luo. It brings together Luo ideas and debates about their own past and present with findings, arguments and questions produced about this “other people;” by outside scholars writing in their own disciplines. Among the Luo, what constitutes culture, what is correct behavior, what is history, are questions that are heavily fought over.

This is one of those rare books that makes students and other interested individuals question their own cultural preconceptions and what are the genuine concerns of academic disciplines.

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Teaching and Its Predicaments

David K. Cohen

Harvard University Press, 2011

Ever since Socrates, teaching has been a difficult and even dangerous profession. Why is good teaching such hard work?

In this provocative, witty, and sometimes rueful book, David K. Cohen writes about the predicaments that teachers face. Like therapists, social workers, and pastors, teachers embark on a mission of human improvement. They aim to deepen knowledge, broaden understanding, sharpen skills, and change behavior. One predicament is that no matter how great their expertise, teachers depend on the cooperation and intelligence of their students, yet there is much that students do not know. To teach responsibly, teachers must cultivate a kind of mental double vision: distancing themselves from their own knowledge to understand students’ thinking, yet using their knowledge to guide their teaching. Another predicament is that although attention to students’ thinking improves the chances of learning, it also increases the uncertainty and complexity of the job.

The circumstances in which teachers and students work make a difference. Teachers and students are better able to manage these predicaments if they have resources—common curricula, intelligent assessments, and teacher education tied to both—that support responsible teaching. Yet for most of U.S. history those resources have been in short supply, and many current accountability policies are little help. With a keen eye for the moment-to-moment challenges, Cohen explores what “responsible teaching” can be, the kind of mind reading it seems to demand, and the complex social resources it requires.

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