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Ringlingville USA
The Stupendous Story of Seven Siblings and Their Stunning Circus Success
Jerry Apps
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2004

The Ringling Brothers began their business under the most modest of circumstances and through hard work, business savvy, and some luck created the largest, most famous circus in the world. They became wealthy men, one 50 cent admission ticket at a time.

Ringlingville USA chronicles the brothers' journey from immigrant poverty to enduring glory as the kings of the circus world. The Ringlings and their circus were last studied in depth over four decades ago. Now, for the first time, the brothers' detailed financial records and personal correspondence are available to researchers. Jerry Apps weaves together that information with newspaper accounts, oral histories, colorful anecdotes, and stunning circus ephemera and photos, many never before been published, to illuminate the importance of the Ringlings' accomplishments. He describes how the Ringling Brothers confronted the challenges of taxation, war, economic pressure, changing technology, and personal sorrows to find their place in history. The brothers emerge as complex characters whose ambition, imagination, and pure hucksterism fueled the phenomenon that was the Ringling Brothers' Circus.
 

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Tents, Tigers and the Ringling Brothers
Jerry Apps
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2007
This new addition to the Badger Biography series for young readers features the story of the young Ringling brothers of circus fame. The book tells the inspiring story of the seven sons of German and French immigrants who were guided by their dreams to escape poverty through hard work and ambition. These entrepreneurial brothers moved with their parents to Baraboo, Wisconsin where their fantastic circus adventure began. With no circus experience, the brothers tackled one of the riskiest businesses of the time. Each brother contributed his unique talents to make their enterprise successful. The Ringling Brothers were admired for their technological innovations, strategy and devotion to education. They were also esteemed for their genuine appreciation of their audience.
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Wild West Shows
Paul Reddin
University of Illinois Press, 1999
The Wild West: a term that conjures up pictures of wagon trains, unspoiled prairies, Indians, rough 'n' ready cowboys, roundups, and buffalo herds.  Where did this collection of images come from?
Paul Reddin exposes the mythology of the American frontier as a carefully crafted product of the Wild West show.  Focusing on such pivotal figures as George Catlin, Buffalo Bill Cody, and Tom Mix, Reddin traces the rise and fall of a popular entertainment shaped out of the "raw material of America."
 
Buffalo Bill and other entertainers capitalized on public fascination with the danger, heroism, and courage associated with the frontier by continually modifying their presentation of the West to suit their audiences.  Thus the Wild West show, contrary to its own claims of accuracy and authenticity, was highly selective in its representations of the West as well as widely influential in shaping the public image of life on the Great Plains.
 
A uniquely American entertainment—colorful, energetic, unabashed, and, as Reddin demonstrates, self-made—the Wild West show exerted an appeal that was all but irresistible to a public hovering uncertainly between industrial progress and nostalgia for a romanticized past.
 
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Rodeo Cowboys In The North American Imagination
Michael Allen
University of Nevada Press, 1998

Rodeo is an enduring relic of America’s popular culture, drawing capacity audiences to all its venues, from small western cowtowns to Madison Square Garden. The rodeo cowboy, that figure of rugged independence and solitary courage, continues to evoke the spirit of a vanished frontier and the hardy pioneers who conquered it. In this study historian Michael Allen examines the image of the rodeo cowboy and the role this image has played in popular culture over the past century. He sees rodeo as a significant American folk festival and the rodeo cowboy as the avatar of a nearly extinct authentic figure, the “real cowboy,” who embodies the skills and values of traditional western rural culture. Allen’s analysis explores the evolution of the myth of the rodeo man and its subsequent institutionalization and acculturation into the media of popular culture. He also examines the impact on this myth of significant changes in the rodeo milieu—the commercialization of the event and the professionalization of rodeo performers; the arrival on the rodeo scene of performers from outside the white, male, western, rural origins of the traditional cowboy performers. He discovers that America’s—and indeed the world’s—fascination with the rodeo cowboy reflects feelings far deeper than a taste for exciting entertainment. Allen’s discussion of the archetypal figure of the rodeo cowboy will change forever our perception of rodeo, but it will also help us understand how the ancient tension between frontier and civilization continues to play a role in our national imagination.

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Rodeo
An Anthropologist Looks at the Wild and the Tame
Elizabeth Atwood Lawrence
University of Chicago Press, 1984
Rodeo people call their sport "more a way of life than a way to make a living." Rodeo is, in fact, a rite that not only expresses a way of life but perpetuates it, reaffirming in a ritual contest between man and animal the values of American ranching society. Elizabeth Atwood Lawrence uses an interpretive approach to analyze rodeo as a symbolic pageant that reenacts the "winning of the West" and as a stylized expression of frontier attitudes toward man and nature. Rodeo constestants are the modern counterparts of the rugged and individualistic cowboys, and the ethos they inherited is marked by ambivalence: they admire the wild and the free yet desire to tame and conquer.

Based on extensive field work and drawing on comparative materials from other stock-tending societies, Rodeo is a major contribution to an understanding of the role of performance in society, the culturally constructed view of man's place in nature, and the structure and meaning of social relationships and their representations.
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Juneteenth Rodeo
Photos and essay by Sarah Bird; Afterword by Demetrius Pearson
University of Texas Press, 2024

Timeless photos offer a rare portrait of the jubilant, vibrant, vital, nearly hidden, and now all-but-vanished world of small-town Black rodeos.

Long before Americans began to officially commemorate Juneteenth, in the heat of East Texas, saddles were being cinched, buckles shined, and lassoes adjusted for a day on the Black rodeo circuit in honor of the holiday. In the late 1970s, as they had been doing for generations, Black communities across the region held local rodeos for the talented cowboys and cowgirls who were segregated from the mainstream circuit. It was to these vibrant community events that bestselling Texas writer Sarah Bird, then a young photojournalist, found herself drawn.

In Juneteenth Rodeo, Bird’s lens celebrates a world that was undervalued at the time, capturing everything, from the moment the pit master fired up his smoker, through the death-defying rides, to the last celebratory dance at a nearby honky-tonk. Essays by Bird and sports historian Demetrius Pearson reclaim the crucial role of Black Americans in the Western US and show modern rodeo riders—who still compete on today’s circuit—as “descendants” in a more than two-hundred-year lineage of Black cowboys. A gorgeous tribute to the ropers and riders—legends like Willie Thomas, Myrtis Dightman, Rufus Green, Bailey’s Prairie Kid, Archie Wycoff, and Calvin Greeley—as well as the secretaries, judges, and pick-up men and even the audience members who were as much family as fans, Juneteenth Rodeo ultimately seeks to put Black cowboys and cowgirls where they have always belonged: in the center of the frame.

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Cowgirls of the Rodeo
Pioneer Professional Athletes
Mary Lou LeCompte
University of Illinois Press, 1993
Acclaimed as a foundational study of rodeo women, Cowgirls of the Rodeosurveys the early rodeo cowgirls' achievements as professional athletes. Mary Lou LeCompte follows the story through the near-demise of women's rodeo events during World War II and the phenomenal success of the Women's Professional Rodeo Association in regaining lost ground for rodeo cowgirls. Recalling an extraordinary chapter in women's history and the history of American sport, Cowgirls of the Rodeo deepens our understanding of the challenges facing women in the American West and in American sport.
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Carnie
Les Bodnar
St. Augustine's Press, 2010

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Sideshow U.S.A.
Freaks and the American Cultural Imagination
Rachel Adams
University of Chicago Press, 2001
A staple of American popular culture during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the freak show seemed to vanish after the Second World War. But as Rachel Adams reveals in Sideshow U.S.A., images of the freak show, with its combination of the grotesque, the horrific, and the amusing, stubbornly reappeared in literature and the arts. Freak shows, she contends, have survived because of their capacity for reinvention. Empty of any inherent meaning, the freak's body becomes a stage for playing out some of the twentieth century's most pressing social and political concerns, from debates about race, empire, and immigration, to anxiety about gender, and controversies over taste and public standards of decency.

Sideshow U.S.A. begins by revisiting the terror and fascination the original freak shows provided for their audiences, as well as exploring the motivations of those who sought fame and profit in the business of human exhibition. With this history in mind, Adams turns from live entertainment to more mediated forms of cultural expression: the films of Tod Browning, the photography of Diane Arbus, the criticism of Leslie Fiedler, and the fiction Carson McCullers, Toni Morrison, and Katherine Dunn. Taken up in these works of art and literature, the freak serves as a metaphor for fundamental questions about self and other, identity and difference, and provides a window onto a once vital form of popular culture.

Adams's study concludes with a revealing look at the revival of the freak show as live performance in the late 1980s and the 1990s. Celebrated by some, the freak show's recent return is less welcome to those who have traditionally been its victims. At the beginning of a new century, Adams sees it as a form of living history, a testament to the vibrancy and inventiveness of American popular culture, as well as its capacity for cruelty and injustice.

"Because of its subject matter, this interesting and complex study is provocative, as well as thought-provoking."—Virginia Quarterly Review
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Freak Show
Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit
Robert Bogdan
University of Chicago Press, 1990
From 1840 until 1940, freak shows by the hundreds crisscrossed the United States, from the smallest towns to the largest cities, exhibiting their casts of dwarfs, giants, Siamese twins, bearded ladies, savages, snake charmers, fire eaters, and other oddities. By today's standards such displays would be considered cruel and exploitative—the pornography of disability. Yet for one hundred years the freak show was widely accepted as one of America's most popular forms of entertainment.

Robert Bogdan's fascinating social history brings to life the world of the freak show and explores the culture that nurtured and, later, abandoned it. In uncovering this neglected chapter of show business, he describes in detail the flimflam artistry behind the shows, the promoters and the audiences, and the gradual evolution of public opinion from awe to embarrassment. Freaks were not born, Bogdan reveals; they were manufactured by the amusement world, usually with the active participation of the freaks themselves. Many of the "human curiosities" found fame and fortune, becoming the celebrities of their time, until the ascent of professional medicine transformed them from marvels into pathological specimans.
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For a Short Time Only
Itinerants and the Resurgence of Popular Culture in Early America
Peter Benes
University of Massachusetts Press, 2016
Winner of the 2017 Theatre Library Association's George Freedley Memorial Book Award
By the 1740s, colonists living in North America began to encounter scores of itinerant performers from England and Europe. These show people—acrobats, wire dancers, tumblers, trick riders, painters, dancing-masters, waxworks proprietors, healers, and singing and language teachers—brought novelty and culture to remote areas. Advertising in newspapers, they attracted audiences with the hook of appearing "for a short time only."

In this richly illustrated and deeply researched book, Peter Benes examines the rise of early American popular culture through the lives and work of itinerants who circulated in British North America and the United States from the late seventeenth through the early nineteenth century. Although they were frequently reviled as quacks and absconders by many provincials, these transients enjoyed a unique camaraderie and found audiences among high- and lowbrow alike. Drawing on contemporary diaries, letters, reminiscences, and hitherto inaccessible newspaper ads, broadsides, and images, Benes suggests why some elements of Europe's carnival and folklore traditions failed to gain acceptance in American society while others flourished brilliantly.
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Theme Park Fandom
Spatial Transmedia, Materiality and Participatory Cultures
Rebecca Williams
Amsterdam University Press, 2020
This book argues that serious study of theme parks and their adult fans has much to tell us about contemporary transmediality and convergence, themed and immersive spaces, and audience relationships with places of meaning. Considering the duopoly of Disney and Universal in Orlando, the book explores a range of theme park experiences including planning trips, meeting characters, eating and drinking, engaging in practices such as cosplay and re-enactment, and memorializing lost attractions. Highlighting key themes such as immersion, materiality, cultural distinctions, and self-identity, the book argues that theme parks are a crucial site for the exploration of transmediality and the development of paratexts. Proposing the key concepts of spatial transmedia and haptic fandom, the book offers analysis of the intersections between fandom, media texts, and merchandise, as well as fans' own affective and physical responses to visiting the parks.
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Denver's Lakeside Amusement Park
From the White City Beautiful to a Century of Fun
David Forsyth
University Press of Colorado, 2016
Denver's Lakeside Amusement Park details the history of Lakeside, exploring how it has managed to remain in business for more than a century (something fewer than thirty amusement parks have accomplished) and offers a unique view on larger changes in society and the amusement park industry itself. 

Once nicknamed White City in part for its glittering display of more than 100,000 lights, the park opened in 1908 in conjunction with Denver's participation in the national City Beautiful movement. It was a park for Denver elites, with fifty different forms of amusement, including the Lakeshore Railway and the Velvet Coaster, a casino, a ballroom, a theater, a skating rink, and avenues decorated with Greek statues. But after metropolitan growth, technological innovation, and cultural shifts in Denver, it began to cater to a working-class demographic as well. Additions of neon and fluorescent lighting, roller coasters like the Wild Chipmunk, attractions like the Fun House and Lakeside Speedway, and rides like the Scrambler, the Spider, and most recently the drop tower Zoom changed the face and feel of Lakeside between 1908 and 2008. The park also has weathered numerous financial and structural difficulties but continues to provide Denverites with affordable, family-friendly amusement today.

To tell Lakeside's story, Forsyth makes use of various primary and secondary sources, including Denver newspapers, Denver's official City Beautiful publication Municipal Facts, Billboard magazine, and interviews with people connected to the park throughout its history. Denver's Lakeside Amusement Park is an important addition to Denver history that will appeal to anyone interested in Colorado history, urban history, entertainment history, and popular culture, as well as to amusement park aficionados.
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Inside the Mouse
Work and Play at Disney World
Project on Disney
Duke University Press, 1995
This entertaining and playful book views Disney World as much more than the site of an ideal family vacation. Blending personal meditations, interviews, photographs, and cultural analysis, Inside the Mouse looks at Disney World’s architecture and design, its consumer practices, and its use of Disney characters and themes. This book takes the reader on an alternative ride through "the happiest place on earth" while asking "What makes this forty-three-square-mile theme park the quintessential embodiment of American leisure?"
Turning away from the programmed entertainment that Disney presents, the authors take a peek behind the scenes of everyday experience at Disney World. In their consideration of the park as both private corporate enterprise and public urban environment, the authors focus on questions concerning the production and consumption of leisure. Featuring over fifty photographs and interviews with workers that strip "cast members" of their cartoon costumes, this captivating work illustrates the high-pressure dynamics of the typical family vacation as well as a tour of Disney World that looks beyond the controlled facade of themed attractions.
As projects like EuroDisney and the proposed Disney America test the strength of the Disney cultural monolith, Inside the Mouse provides a timely assessment of the serious business of supplying pleasure in contemporary U.S. culture. Written for the general reader interested in the many worlds of Disney, this engrossing volume will also find fans among students and scholars of cultural studies.
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Lost Wonderland
The Brief and Brilliant Life of Boston's Million Dollar Amusement Park
Stephen R. Wilk
University of Massachusetts Press, 2020
If you take Boston's Blue Line to its northern end, you'll reach the Wonderland stop. Few realize that a twenty-three-acre amusement park once sat nearby—the largest in New England, and grander than any of the Coney Island parks that inspired it. Opened in Revere on Memorial Day in 1906 to great fanfare, Wonderland offered hundreds of thousands of visitors recreation by the sea, just a short distance from downtown Boston.

The story of the park's creation and wild, but brief, success is full of larger-than-life characters who hoped to thrill attendees and rake in profits. Stephen R. Wilk describes the planning and history of the park, which featured early roller coasters, a scenic railway, a central lagoon in which a Shoot-the-Chutes boat plunged, an aerial swing, a funhouse, and more. Performances ran throughout the day, including a daring Fires and Flames show; a Wild West show; a children's theater; and numerous circus acts. While nothing remains of what was once called "Boston's Regal Home of Pleasure" and the park would close in 1910, this book resurrects Wonderland by transporting readers through its magical gates.
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Smile
A Picture History of Olympic Park, 1887-1965
Siegel, Alan A
Rutgers University Press, 1995
In Smile, Alan A. Siegel chronicles the evolution of Olympic Park from a den of hedonism and intoxication in the 1880s into Essex County's most popular family entertainment site in the 1950s and 1960s. Under the fifty-year reign of Newark brewer Henry A. Guenther, millions of men, women, and children passed under the signs Smile and Learn to Play into what the legendary beer baron called a little bit of Coney Island, the circus, an old-fashioned beer garden, and Monte Carlo rolled into one. With its myriad games, attractions, performances, and restaurants, it was impossible to walk away from the park unsatisfied and not wishing for a return. Though the doors to Olympic Park have been closed for thirty years, it will forever reside in the memories of many as a towering monument on the cultural landscape of New Jersey in a simpler, more innocent, and less affluent time.
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Gone Dollywood
Dolly Parton’s Mountain Dream
Graham Hoppe
Ohio University Press, 2018

Dolly Parton isn’t just a country music superstar. She has built an empire. At the heart of that empire is Dollywood, a 150-acre fantasy land that hosts three million people a year. Parton’s prodigious talent and incredible celebrity have allowed her to turn her hometown into one of the most popular tourist destinations in America. The crux of Dollywood’s allure is its precisely calibrated Appalachian image, itself drawn from Parton’s very real hardscrabble childhood in the mountains of east Tennessee.

What does Dollywood have to offer besides entertainment? What do we find if we take this remarkable place seriously? How does it both confirm and subvert outsiders’ expectations of Appalachia? What does it tell us about the modern South, and in turn what does that tell us about America at large? How is regional identity molded in service of commerce, and what is the interplay of race, gender, and class when that happens?

In Gone Dollywood, Graham Hoppe blends tourism studies, celebrity studies, cultural analysis, folklore, and the acute observations and personal reflections of longform journalism into an unforgettable interrogation of Southern and American identity.

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Riding the Black Ship
Japan and Tokyo Disneyland
Aviad E. Raz
Harvard University Press, 1999
In 1997, over 17 million people visited Tokyo Disneyland, making it the most popular of the many theme parks in Japan. Since it opened in 1983, Tokyo Disneyland has been analyzed mainly as an example of the globalization of the American leisure industry and its organizational culture, particularly the “company manual.” By looking at how Tokyo Disneyland is experienced by employees, management, and visitors, Aviad Raz produces not only a cultural reading of the onstage show but also an ethnographic analysis of its production by those who work there and its reception by its customers. Previous studies have seen Disneyland as a “black ship”—an exported, hegemonic model of American leisure and pop culture—that “conquered” Japan. By concentrating on the Japanese point of view, Raz shows that it is much more an example of successful domestication and that it has succeeded precisely because it has become Japanese even while marketing itself as foreign. Rather than being an agent of Americanization, Tokyo Disneyland is a simulated “America” showcased by and for the Japanese.
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Ferris Wheels
An Illustrated History
Norman Anderson
University of Wisconsin Press, 1993
Norman Anderson has written a gripping story of one of the engineering marvels of both the nineteenth and the twentieth century, the ferris wheel. The idea of this contraption may be as old as the water wheel, and written descriptions and drawings of pleasure wheels go back at least four centuries. There have been dozens of experiments with design and construction—early portable wheels by Strobel, the Condermans, Sullivan and others; one-of-a-kind wheels like Schnitzler’s Asbury Park wheel with a tower and Stubb’s water-turned wheel at Electric Park in Waterloo, Iowa; giant wheels in London, Blackpool, Vienna, Paris and recently in Japan.
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The Incredible Scream Machine
A History of the Roller Coaster
Robert Cartmell
University of Wisconsin Press, 1987
In 1984 America celebrated the one hundredth anniversary of the first successful roller coaster device: La Marcus A. Thompson’s switchback railway, erected at Coney Island. Robert Cartmell examines every phase of roller coaster history, from the use of the roller coaster by Albert Einstein to demonstrate his theory of physics, to John Allen’s use of psychology in designing one.
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Metatheory in Social Science
Pluralisms and Subjectivities
Edited by Donald W. Fiske and Richard A. Shweder
University of Chicago Press, 1986
What is the nature of the social sciences? What kinds of knowledge can they—and should they—hope to create? Are objective viewpoints possible and can universal laws be discovered? Questions like these have been asked with increasing urgency in recent years, as some philosophers and researchers have perceived a "crisis" in the social sciences. Metatheory in Social Science offers many provocative arguments and analyses of basic conceptual frameworks for the study of human behavior. These are offered primarily by practicing researchers and are related to problems in disciplines as diverse as sociology, psychology, psychiatry, anthropology, and philosophy of science.

While various points of view are expressed in these nineteen essays, they have in common several themes, including the comparison of social and natural science, the role of knowledge in meeting the demands of society and its pressing problems, and the nature and role of subjectivity in science. Some authors hold that subjectivity cannot be studied scientifically; others argue that it can and must be if progress in knowledge is to be made. The essays demonstrate the philosophical pluralism they discuss and give a wide range of alternative positions on the future of the social and behavioral sciences in a postpositivist intellectual world.
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Sociology and Architectural Design
John Zeisel
Russell Sage Foundation, 1975
This book, encouraging more effective collaboration between professional architects and social scientists, outlines how social science research can aid the design process, detailing how physical environment relates to behavior. With a foreword by Hugh F. Cline.
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Cherokees in Transition
A Study of Changing Culture and Environment Prior to 1775
Gary C. Goodwin
University of Chicago Press, 1977
Cherokees in Transition offers a comprehensive description from an eco-historical perspective of the multitudinous changes that occurred within the Cherokee cultural-environmental system during the period preceding the American Revolution.
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Annotated World List of Selected Current Geographical Serials
Chauncey D. Harris
University of Chicago Press, 1980

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Nagara and Commandery
Origins of the Southeast Asian Urban Traditions
Paul Wheatley
University of Chicago Press, 1983

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Environmental Perception and Behavior
An Inventory and Prospect
Edited by Thomas F. Saarinen, David Seamon, and James L. Sell
University of Chicago Press, 1984

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Northern Frontiers of Qing China and Tokugawa Japan
A Comparative Study of Frontier Policy
Richard Louis Edmonds
University of Chicago Press, 1985

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World Patterns in Modern Urban Change
Essays in Honor of Chauncey D. Harris
Edited by Michael P. Conzen
University of Chicago Press, 1986

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Cities on the Beach
Management Issues of Developed Coastal Barriers
Edited by Rutherford H. Platt, Sheila G. Pelczarski, and Barbara K. Burbank
University of Chicago Press, 1987

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Social Aspects of the Prolongation of Life
Diana Crane
Russell Sage Foundation, 1969
A volume of the Russell Sage Foundation's Social Science Frontiers, occasional publications reviewing new fields for social science development. This paper explores the links between the social and biomedical sciences concerning the prolongation and termination of life, with the aim to stimulate scholars, foundations, and government agencies to further study death and dying in American society.
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Social Aspects of Applied Human Genetics
James R. Sorenson
Russell Sage Foundation, 1971
This report explores the complex ethical, political, psychological, and economic questions that arise from developments in medical genetics. It reviews research in applied genetics at the interface of the social and bio-medical fields, including the counseling and study of birth control, as well as the active treatment and selection of individual genetic attributes.
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Political Aspects of Social Indicators
Implications for Research
Peter J. Henriot
Russell Sage Foundation, 1972
Complementing the focus on the structural and social-psychological aspects of measuring social change, this report establishes a research approach relating social measurement to antecedent and consequent political considerations: political values, policy impact, power consequences, administrative influences, institutionalization, and so forth. This study is directed to any social scientist interested in political phenomena and in the issue of the relationship between social science and public policy.
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The Corporate Social Audit
Raymond A. Bauer
Russell Sage Foundation, 1972
Much has been said about the general subject [of how to measure a corporation's social performance] but little has been contributed to answering this fundamental question. Thus, in November 1971, Russell Sage Foundation sponsored a development effort aimed at examining the "state-of-the-art" and at suggesting a program of research that would advance that state. "Raymond Bauer and Dan Fenn have provided us with a first product—a state-of-the-art conception and description, and recommendations for future development. They are to be commended for their astute considerations and their clear thinking in the murky pond of corporate social audits. Their effort has provided the social science community with a point of departure for future research in the area."—Eleanor Bernert Sheldon A Volume in the Russell Sage Foundation's Social Science Frontiers Series
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Social Forecasting Methodology
Suggestions for Research
Daniel P. Harrison
Russell Sage Foundation, 1976
A volume in the Social Science Frontiers series, which are occasional publications reviewing new fields for social science development. These occasional publications seek to summarize recent work being done in particular areas of social research, to review new developments in the field, and to indicate issues needing further investigation. The publications are intended to help orient those concerned with developing current research programs and broadening the use of social science in the policy-making process. A Volume in the Russell Sage Foundation's Social Science Frontiers Series
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The Vulnerable Age Phenomenon
Michael Inbar
Russell Sage Foundation, 1976
A volume in the Social Science Frontiers series, which are occasional publications reviewing new fields for social science development. These occasional publications seek to summarize recent work being done in particular areas of social research, to review new developments in the field, and to indicate issues needing further investigation. The publications are intended to help orient those concerned with developing current research programs and broadening the use of social science in the policy-making process. A Volume in the Russell Sage Foundation's Social Science Frontiers Series
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Work and Family in the United States
A Critical Review and Agenda for Research and Policy
Rosabeth Moss Kanter
Russell Sage Foundation, 1977
Now considered a classic in the field, this book first called attention to what Kanter has referred to as the "myth of separate worlds." Rosabeth Moss Kanter was one of the first to argue that the assumes separation between work and family was a myth and that research must explore the linkages between these two roles.
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Choice and Consequence
Thomas C. Schelling
Harvard University Press, 1984

Thomas Schelling is a political economist “conspicuous for wandering”—an errant economist. In Choice and Consequence, he ventures into the area where rationality is ambiguous in order to look at the tricks people use to try to quit smoking or lose weight. He explores topics as awesome as nuclear terrorism, as sordid as blackmail, as ineffable as daydreaming, as intimidating as euthanasia. He examines ethical issues wrapped up in economics, unwrapping the economics to disclose ethical issues that are misplaced or misidentified.

With an ingenious, often startling approach, Schelling brings new perspectives to problems ranging from drug abuse, abortion, and the value people put on their lives to organized crime, airplane hijacking, and automobile safety. One chapter is a clear and elegant exposition of game theory as a framework for analyzing social problems. Another plays with the hypothesis that our minds are not only our problem-solving equipment but also the organ in which much of our consumption takes place.

What binds together the different subjects is the author’s belief in the possibility of simultaneously being humane and analytical, of dealing with both the momentous and the familiar. Choice and Consequence was written for the curious, the puzzled, the worried, and all those who appreciate intellectual adventure.

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Terms of Exchange
Brazilian Intellectuals and the French Social Sciences
Ian Merkel
University of Chicago Press, 2022
A collective intellectual biography that sheds new light on the Annales school, structuralism, and racial democracy.

Would the most recognizable ideas in the French social sciences have developed without the influence of Brazilian intellectuals? While any study of Brazilian social sciences acknowledges the influence of French scholars, Ian Merkel argues the reverse is also true: the “French” social sciences were profoundly marked by Brazilian intellectual thought, particularly through the University of São Paulo. Through the idea of the “cluster,” Merkel traces the intertwined networks of Claude Lévi-Strauss, Fernand Braudel, Roger Bastide, and Pierre Monbeig as they overlapped at USP and engaged with Brazilian scholars such as Mário de Andrade, Gilberto Freyre, and Caio Prado Jr..
 
Through this collective intellectual biography of Brazilian and French social sciences, Terms of Exchange reveals connections that shed new light on the Annales school, structuralism, and racial democracy, even as it prompts us to revisit established thinking on the process of knowledge formation through fieldwork and intellectual exchange. At a time when canons are being rewritten, this book reframes the history of modern social scientific thought.
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The Practical Imagination
The German Sciences of State in the Nineteenth Century
David F. Lindenfeld
University of Chicago Press, 1997
Drawing on the work of Foucault and Bourdieu, David Lindenfeld illuminates the practical imagination as it was exhibited in the transformation of the political and social sciences during the changing conditions of nineteenth-century Germany. Using a wealth of information from state and university archives, private correspondence, and a survey of lecture offerings in German universities, Lindenfeld examines the original group of learned disciplines which originated in eighteenth-century Germany as a curriculum to train state officials in the administration and reform of society and which included economics, statistics, politics, public administration, finance, and state law, as well as agriculture, forestry, and mining. He explores the ways in which some systems of knowledge became extinct, and how new ones came into existence, while other migrated to different subject areas.

Lindenfeld argues that these sciences of state developed a technique of deliberation on practical issues such as tax policy and welfare, that serves as a model for contemporary administrations.



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Social Science in the Crucible
The American Debate over Objectivity and Purpose, 1918–1941
Mark C. Smith
Duke University Press, 1994
The 1920s and 30s were key decades for the history of American social science. The success of such quantitative disciplines as economics and psychology during World War I forced social scientists to reexamine their methods and practices and to consider recasting their field as a more objective science separated from its historical foundation in social reform. The debate that ensued, fiercely conducted in books, articles, correspondence, and even presidential addresses, made its way into every aspect of social science thought of the period and is the subject of this book.
Mark C. Smith first provides a historical overview of the controversy over the nature and future of the social sciences in early twentieth-century America and, then through a series of intellectual biographies, offers an intensive study of the work and lives of major figures who participated in this debate. Using an extensive range of materials, from published sources to manuscript collections, Smith examines "objectivists"—economist Wesley Mitchell and political scientist Charles Merriam—and the more "purposive thinkers"—historian Charles Beard, sociologist Robert Lynd, and political scientist and neo-Freudian Harold Lasswell. He shows how the debate over objectivity and social purpose was central to their professional and personal lives as well as to an understanding of American social science between the two world wars. These biographies bring to vivid life a contentious moment in American intellectual history and reveal its significance in the shaping of social science in this country.
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