Jeffrey Nichols examines how prostitution became a focal point in the moral contest between Mormons and gentiles and aided in the construction of gender systems, moral standards, and the city's physical and economic landscapes. Gentiles likened polygamy to prostitution and accused polygamous Mormons of violating Christian norms of family structure and sexual behavior. Defending their church and its ideals, Mormons blamed gentiles for introducing the sinful business of prostitution into their honorable city. Nichols traces the interplay of prostitution and reform from the 1890s, when the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints began to move away from polygamy, to World War I, when Mormon and gentile moral codes converged at the expense of prostitutes. He also considers how the conflict over polygamy distinguished Salt Lake City from other cities struggling to abolish prostitution in the Progressive Era.
It is a commonplace that the United States lagged behind the countries of Western Europe in developing modern social policies. But, as Theda Skocpol shows in this startlingly new historical analysis, the United States actually pioneered generous social spending for many of its elderly, disabled, and dependent citizens. During the late nineteenth century, competitive party politics in American democracy led to the rapid expansion of benefits for Union Civil War veterans and their families.
Some Americans hoped to expand veterans' benefits into pensions for all of the needy elderly and social insurance for workingmen and their families. But such hopes went against the logic of political reform in the Progressive Era. Generous social spending faded along with the Civil War generation.
Instead, the nation nearly became a unique maternalist welfare state as the federal government and more than forty states enacted social spending, labor regulations, and health education programs to assist American mothers and children. Remarkably, as Skocpol shows, many of these policies were enacted even before American women were granted the right to vote. Banned from electoral politics, they turned their energies to creating huge, nation-spanning federations of local women's clubs, which collaborated with reform-minded professional women to spur legislative action across the country.
Blending original historical research with political analysis, Skocpol shows how governmental institutions, electoral rules, political parties, and earlier public policies combined to determine both the opportunities and the limits within which social policies were devised and changed by reformers and politically active social groups over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
By examining afresh the institutional, cultural, and organizational forces that have shaped U.S. social policies in the past, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers challenges us to think in new ways about what might be possible in the American future.
Protecting the Empire’s Frontier tells stories of the roughly eighty officers who served in the 18th (Royal Irish) Regiment of Foot, which served British interests in America during the crucial period from 1767 through 1776. The Royal Irish was one of the most wide-ranging regiments in America, with companies serving on the Illinois frontier, at Fort Pitt, and in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, with some companies taken as far afield as Florida, Spanish Louisiana, and present-day Maine. When the regiment was returned to England in 1776, some of the officers remained in America on staff assignments. Others joined provincial regiments, and a few joined the American revolutionary army, taking up arms against their king and former colleagues.
Using a wide range of archival resources previously untapped by scholars, the text goes beyond just these officers’ service in the regiment and tells the story of the men who included governors, a college president, land speculators, physicians, and officers in many other British regular and provincial regiments. Included in these ranks were an Irishman who would serve in the U.S. Congress and as an American general at Yorktown; a landed aristocrat who represented Bath as a member of Parliament; and a naval surgeon on the ship transporting Benjamin Franklin to France. This is the history of the American Revolutionary period from a most gripping and everyday perspective.
An epilogue covers the Royal Irish’s history after returning to England and its part in defending against both the Franco-Spanish invasion attempt and the Gordon Rioters. With an essay on sources and a complete bibliography, this is a treat for professional and amateur historians alike.
A conservation easement is a legal agreement between a property owner and a conservation organization, generally a private nonprofit land trust, that restricts the type and amount of development that can be undertaken on that property. Conservation easements protect land for future generations while allowing owners to retain property rights, at the same time providing them with significant tax benefits. Conservation easements are among the fastest growing methods of land preservation in the United States today.
Protecting the Land provides a thoughtful examination of land trusts and how they function, and a comprehensive look at the past and future of conservation easements. The book:
Contributors, including noted tax attorney and land preservation expert Stephen Small, Colorado's leading land preservation attorney Bill Silberstein, and Maine Coast Heritage Trust's general counsel Karin Marchetti, describe and analyze the present status of easement law. Sharing their unique perspectives, experts including author and professor of geography Jack Wright, Dennis Collins of the Wildlands Conservancy, and Chuck Roe of the Conservation Trust of North Carolina offer case studies that demonstrate the flexibility and diversity of conservation easements. Protecting the Land offers a valuable overview of the history and use of conservation easements and the evolution of easement-enabling legislation for professionals and citizens working with local and national land trusts, legal advisors, planners, public officials, natural resource mangers, policymakers, and students of planning and conservation.
In looking back on his editorship of Crisis magazine, W. E. B. Du Bois said, “We condensed more news about Negroes and their problems in a month than most colored papers before this had published in a year.” Since its founding by Du Bois in 1910, Crisis has been the primary published voice of the NAACP. Born in an age of Jim Crow racism, often strapped for funds, the magazine struggled and endured, all the while providing a forum for people of color to document their inherent dignity and proclaim their definitive worth as human beings.
As the magazine’s editor from 1910 until 1934, Du Bois guided the content and the aim of Crisis with a decisive hand. He ensured that each issue argued for civil rights, economic justice, and social equality, always framing America’s intractable color line in an international perspective. Du Bois benefited from a deep pool of black literary and artistic genius, whether by commissioning the visual creativity of Harlem Renaissance artists for Crisis covers or by publishing poems and short stories from New Negro writers. From North to South, from East to West, and even reaching across the globe, Crisis circulated its ideas and marshaled its impact far and wide.
Building on the solid foundation Du Bois laid, subsequent editors and contributors covered issues vital to communities of color, such as access to resources during the New Deal era, educational opportunities related to the historic Brown decision, the realization of basic civil rights at midcentury, American aid to Africa and Caribbean nations, and the persistent economic inequalities of today’s global era.
Despite its importance, little has been written about the historical and cultural significance of this seminal magazine. By exploring how Crisis responded to critical issues, the essays in Protest and Propaganda provide the first well-rounded, in-depth look at the magazine's role and influence. The authors show how the essays, columns, and visuals published in Crisis changed conversations, perceptions, and even laws in the United States, thereby calling a fractured nation to more fully live up to its democratic creed. They explain how the magazine survived tremendous odds, document how the voices of justice rose above the clamor of injustice, and demonstrate how relevant such literary, journalistic, and artistic postures remain in a twenty-first-century world still in crisis.
This book is about some of the largest events of the twentieth century, about international war, economic collapse, new science and technologies, and about the transformation of an old mill town region into a modern American metropolis. But it sees those sweeping changes through the eyes of fourteen particular Bostonians, in an ambitious attempt to understand the disorienting experiences of recent history. These lives span the years from 1850 to 1980, a time when Boston, like all American cities, was being rebuilt according to the continually changing specifications of science, engineering, mass wealth, and big corporations.
From Boston Brahmins to self-made millionaires, Sam Warner, Jr., brings us into the diverse worlds of Robert Grant, judge and popular novelist; Mary Antin, mystic and advocate for immigrants; Fred Allen, radio comedian; Charles A. Stone and Edwin S. Webster, electrical engineers; Laura Elizabeth Richards, reformist clubwoman; Emily Greene Balch, economist and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize; William Madison Wood, textile magnate; Fred Erwin Beal, socialist labor organizer; Louise Andrews Kent, suburban housewife and writer; Vannevar Bush, science administrator; Laurence K. Marshall, electronics entrepreneur; James Bryant Conant, university president and educational reformer; and Rachel Carson, renowned science writer.
These varied lives have been deftly brought together to illuminate the many contradictory qualifies of today’s metropolitan life: ambitions for education and pervasive social neglect; conspicuous luxuries and endemic poverty; elaborate science and a poisoned environment; far-reaching cooperative networks of strangers and narrow, segregated neighborhoods; the multiplication of women’s roles and the entrapment of women in the home.
Individual experience—how one person lived as a child in a family and in a particular place, how people did their work—can bring renewed insight to the conflicts of modern life. This engrossing story speaks from an urge to recapture history through human lives and to examine its meaning as authentic experience. As Alfred Kazin expresses it, we are a nation of men and women who have endeavored to escape traditions, and therefore self-discovery is our preoccupation and delight.
You know the value of your library, but elected officials, donors, community leaders, funders, and other important stakeholders may not. How can you make the library a priority for these groups, who may have preconceived notions about what the library does, as you compete with other important community organizations for funding? In this book from United for Libraries, you’ll learn how to use The E’s of Libraries® (Education, Employment, Entrepreneurship, Engagement, and Empowerment) to quickly demonstrate why your library is essential and worthy of funding, using messaging that is organized, persuasive, and memorable. With the help of worksheets, charts, and prompts, you will learn how to
This book's innovative framework can be used by any size or type of library, and by any library advocate, including Friends groups, library staff, trustees, and foundations.
Prussia, like much of nineteenth-century Germany, was governed by the belief that knowledge, and thus understanding, was best derived from direct observation and communicated through documentation. Justus Scheibert, an officer in the Royal Prussian Engineers, was therefore sent to the United States for seven months to observe the Civil War and report the effects of artillery on fortifications. His interests, however, surpassed that limited assignment, and his observations, as well as the writings translated in this work, went on to include tactics, strategy, logistics, intelligence, combined operations, and the medical service.
Scheibert, an expert on warfare, had access to the Confederate high command, including such luminaries as Robert E. Lee, J. E. B. Stuart, and Stonewall Jackson. He brought to the war not only the fresh perspective of a foreigner, but also the insightful eye of a career military officer and a skillful author and correspondent. Although he was personally sympathetic to the South, Scheibert researched both sides of the conflict in order to write unbiased, informed commentary for his fellow Prussian officers. His firsthand account of many aspects of the Civil War included a theoretical discussion of every branch of service and the Confederate high command, illustrated with his personal observations.
Sheibert's narrative portrays soldiers, weaponry, and battles, including the first, and one of the few, studies of combined operations in the Civil War. Trautmann combines two of Scheibert's publications, The Civil War in the North American States: A Military Study for the German Officer (1874) and Combined Operations by Army and Navy: A Study Illustrated by the War on the Mississippi, 1861-1863 (ca. 1887), which for decades influenced German military writing. Trautmann's translations evince the grace and achieve the readability of Scheibert's intricate and complex works.
A Prussian Observes the American Civil War makes an important addition to Civil War studies and will appeal greatly to professional historians and those interested in, and dedicated to, Civil War and military studies.
• Two weeks after Johnny Moore was discharged from a psychiatric hospital, the deeply troubled teenager took a lethal overdose of the antidepressant prescribed by his psychiatrist.
• Dennis Gould suffered from paranoid schizophrenia. He let a streetcar cut off his right arm rather than carry out his divine mission to kill his ex-girlfriend, Shelley Rotman; three years later––while under psychiatric care and after several hospitalizations––Gould stabbed the young woman to death with his left arm.
• After seven months of psychotherapy as his only treatment in a private psychiatric hospital, Raphael Osheroff’s symptoms of the agitated depression that had destroyed his medical practice and personal life were more severe than ever. At a second hospital, Osheroff was given the antidepressant drugs he had been asking for––and he rapidly improved.
• Joan Barkley went to Dr. Jonathan Fox for help in overcoming her addiction to Darvon. After a year of therapy, the twice-weekly sessions turned into intense sexual encounters, which continued for two years.
James Kelley tells the true stories of people who sought help from psychiatrists and ended up suing them for malpractice. These tales are compelling, tragic, and sometimes bizarre. They offer a unique view into a relationship that is normally confidential and caring––but can be catastrophic when it goes wrong. Kelley discusses several cases that received national attention: former Reagan administration press secretary James Brady's suit against the psychiatrist who had been treating John Hinckley; the Tarasoff decision that established the psychiatrist’s duty to warn potential victims of a patient’s threats; and the disciplinary proceedings against Dr. Margaret Bean-Bayog for her unusual “mothering” treatment of Paul Lozano.
Kelley accompanies detailed accounts of courtroom clashes––based on court records––with clear, even-handed treatments of four kinds of psychiatric malpractice cases: a patient’s suicide, a patient’s violence against other people, a psychotherapist's sexual misconduct, and the use of unconventional treatments. With a wealth of examples, he explains the role of psychiatrists as expert witnesses against each other, the difficulties of predicting the outcomes of these suits, and the balances psychiatrists and judges have to strike between the duties owed to patients, on the one hand, and to society on the other.
Whether you identify with the patients or the psychiatrists, you will find these tales unforgettable. Kelley writes in nontechnical language for the general reader, stressing the human elements. His lucid analyses of key, current issues make his book essential reading for professionals in mental health or law––and for anyone contemplating a malpractice suit.
The essays in Public Affairs reflect on a number of sex scandals while emphasizing the Clinton/Lewinsky affair, certainly the most avidly followed and momentous sex scandal in American political history. Leading scholars situate contemporary public affairs in the context not only of earlier sex scandals in American politics (such as Thomas Jefferson’s and Sally Hemings’s affair), but also of more purely political scandals (including Teapot Dome and Watergate) and sex scandals centered around public figures other than politicians (such as the actor Hugh Grant and the minister Jimmy Swaggart). Some essays consider the Clinton affair in light of feminist and anti-racist politics, while others discuss the dynamics of scandals as major media events. By charting a critical path through the muck of scandal rather than around it, Public Affairs illuminates why sex scandals have become such a prominent feature of American public life.
Contributors. Paul Apostolidis, Jodi Dean, Joshua Gamson, Theodore J. Lowi, Joshua D. Rothman, George Shulman, Anna Marie Smith, Jeremy Varon, Juliet A. Williams
In his compelling reinterpretation of American history, The Public and Its Possibilities, John Fairfieldargues that our unrealized civic aspirations provide the essential counterpoint to an excessive focus on private interests. Inspired by the revolutionary generation, nineteenth-century Americans struggled to build an economy and a culture to complement their republican institutions. But over the course of the twentieth century, a corporate economy and consumer culture undercut civic values, conflating consumer and citizen.
Fairfield places the city at the center of American experience, describing how a resilient demand for an urban participatory democracy has bumped up against the fog of war, the allure of the marketplace, and persistent prejudices of race, class, and gender. In chronicling and synthesizing centuries of U.S. history—including the struggles of the antislavery, labor, women’s rights movements—Fairfield explores the ebb and flow of civic participation, activism, and democracy. He revisits what the public has done for civic activism, and the possibility of taking a greater role.
In this age where there has been a move towards greater participation in America's public life from its citizens, Fairfield’s book—written in an accessible, jargon-free style and addressed to general readers—is especially topical.
Budgeting has long been considered a rational process using neutral tools of financial management, but this outlook fails to consider the outside influences on leaders’ behavior. Steven G. Koven shows that political culture (moralistic, traditionalistic, individualistic) and ideological orientations (liberal vs. conservative) are at least as important as financial tools in shaping budgets.
Koven examines budget formation at the national, state, and local levels to demonstrate the strong influence of attitudes about how public money should be generated and spent. In addition to statistical data, the book includes recent case studies: the 1997 budget agreement; Governor George W. Bush’s use of the budget process to advance a conservative policy agenda in the state of Texas; and Mayor Marion Barry’s abuses of power in Washington, D.C.
Koven demonstrates that administrative principles are at best an incomplete guide for public officials and that budgeters must learn to interpret signals from the political environment.
The authors provide an eye-opening account of recent battles over publicly financed stadiums in some of America’s largest cities. Their interviews with the key decision makers present a behind-the-scenes look at how and why powerful individuals and organizations foist these sports palaces on increasingly unreceptive communities.
Delaney and Eckstein show that in the face of studies demonstrating that new sports facilities don’t live up to their promise of big money, proponents are using a new tactic to win public subsidies¾intangible “social” rewards, such as prestige and community cohesion. The authors find these to be empty promises as well, demonstrating that new stadiums may exacerbate, rather than erase, social problems in cities.
Reformers argue that public financing of campaigns will help rescue American democracy from the corruptive influence of money in elections. Public Financing in American Elections evaluates this claim and aims to remove much of the guesswork from the discussion about public finance.
Featuring some of the most senior scholars in political science and electoral studies, this book provides an up-to-date treatment of campaign finance research and thinking about public campaign financing reforms. Exploring proposals at the local, state, and federal levels, the contributors provide a comprehensive overview of public financing initiatives in the United States and discuss their impact. Focused analyses of several current public programs are also presented.
Public Health and the State constitutes both a fine piece of social history and an ideal model for evaluating our current definition of public health. In this thought-provoking account, Ms. Rosenkrantz perceptively traces the development of the Massachusetts State Board of Health--established in 1869 as the first state institution in the United States responsible for preventing unnecessary mortality and promoting all aspects of public health.
This study describes the areas in which state responsibility for deterring disease assumed increased authority after the Civil War. It begins at a time when the definition of health' implied that it could be achieved, supported by the perfectionist belief that a healthy populace--obedient to the laws of nature--guaranteed a sound society. As rapid urban and industrial growth began to sweep the country, however, there was an expressed concern that this expansion threatened the health and morals of the people. During this period, when the etiology of disease was ascribed to a variety of environmental and behavioral factors, the Massachusetts Board developed a comprehensive program of investigation and advice on such diverse issues as housing, water supplies, slaughterhouse conditions, and the use of alcohol.
Later, as specific medical prophylaxis and therapy came to characterize public health policy, the relationship between sanitary science and social reform was redefined by both professional standards and public expectation. The State Board depended less and less upon its ability to influence individual conduct. Laboratory scientists, chemists, and physicians, who tended to describe disease in biological terms, directed public health toward science.
In view of pressing public health problems posed by such hazards as drug abuse and environmental pollution, Ms. Rosenkrantz warns us that it is as important to identify the origins of the social and scientific assumptions regarding public health as it is to discover the biological etiology of disease. The last chapter of Public Health and the State suggests that the goal of perfect health, based upon the ideal concepts of the past, may no longer be a viable objective. For these reasons she views the development of the Massachusetts State Board of Health as "the story of a successful endeavor that can never be re-enacted."
In this book, based almost exclusively on original source material, Dr. Blake takes a detailed look at the public health history of the town of Boston. Historically, the author tells us, public health may be viewed as the science and art of preventing disease and promoting health through organized community activity. A significant part of this study is the insight it offers into the early attitudes toward disease and death as well as other basic political, social, and economic questions.
Dr. Blake outlines the development of public health practice from occasional emergency measures to a continuing program for the prevention and control of certain epidemic diseases. The introduction and increasing use of smallpox inoculation and later of vaccination are described and their importance evaluated. The book also discusses the further developments in the 1790s and the following two decades that resulted from a series of yellow-fever epidemics in northern seaports, including the establishment of a board of health and its efforts to prevent recurrence of this disease. The prevention of other endemic infectious diseases, though far more important in their effect on the community’s health, was largely neglected. Nevertheless, the principles of notification, isolation, and quarantine had been established and the need for governmental activity to protect the public health, for special public health officials, and for expenditure of tax money for public health purposes had been recognized.
This study, restricted in time to the period before Boston became a city (1630–1822), deals with the early years of the public health movement, a period that has been largely neglected. In comparing Boston’s experience with that of other colonies and England, Dr. Blake presents the European background in both the theory and practice of epidemiology and public health. The colonies themselves, whose differences caused many contemporaries to despair of their ever becoming a single nation, were yet bound by an essential homogeneity. “By and large they had the same language, the same religion, the same inheritance of British social and political ideals. And by and large they had the same diseases. Thus the history of public health in Boston becomes significant for the whole American experience.”
In this timely book, the first comprehensive study of the modern American public intellectual--that individual who speaks to the public on issues of political or ideological moment--Richard Posner charts the decline of a venerable institution that included worthies from Socrates to John Dewey.
With the rapid growth of the media in recent years, highly visible forums for discussion have multiplied, while greater academic specialization has yielded a growing number of narrowly trained scholars. Posner tracks these two trends to their inevitable intersection: a proliferation of modern academics commenting on topics outside their ken. The resulting scene--one of off-the-cuff pronouncements, erroneous predictions, and ignorant policy proposals--compares poorly with the performance of earlier public intellectuals, largely nonacademics whose erudition and breadth of knowledge were well suited to public discourse.
Leveling a balanced attack on liberal and conservative pundits alike, Posner describes the styles and genres, constraints and incentives, of the activity of public intellectuals. He identifies a market for this activity--one with recognizable patterns and conventions but an absence of quality controls. And he offers modest proposals for improving the performance of this market--and the quality of public discussion in America today.
This paperback edition contains a new preface and and a new epilogue.
—Char Miller, from the introduction
New public library directors quickly learn what seasoned directors already know: running a library means you’ve always got your hands full—balancing the needs of staff, patrons, facilities, library boards, and other stakeholders with professional responsibilities like community interactions, legal and financial requirements, and whole lot else that wasn’t exactly in the job description. Whether you are considering becoming a public library director, are brand new to the role, or have settled in but find yourself thinking “there’s got to be a better way,” authors Hall and Parker are here to help. This book walks you through the core components of getting up to speed and then provides templates, sample documents, checklists, and other resources that will make your job easier. Gleaned from their own decades of experience in library leadership positions, in this toolkit they
Margolis provides readings of fiction by Hawthorne and James as well as Susan Warner, Mark Twain, Charles Chesnutt, and Pauline Hopkins. In these writers’ works, she traces a distinctive novelistic tradition that viewed social developments—such as changes in political partisanship and childhood education and the rise of new politico-legal forms like negligence law—as means for understanding how individuals were shaped by their interactions with society. The Public Life of Privacy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature adds a new level of complexity to understandings of nineteenth-century American culture by illuminating a literary tradition full of accidents, mistakes, and unintended consequences—one in which feelings and desires were often overshadowed by all that was external to the self.
Art and entertainment constitute America’s second-largest export. Most Americans—96%, to be exact—are somehow involved in the arts, whether as audience participants, hobbyists, or via broadcast, recording, video, or the Internet. The contribution of the arts to the U.S. economy is stunning: the nonprofit arts industry alone contributes over 857 billion dollars per year, and America’s fine and performing arts enjoy world-class status.
Despite its size, quality, and economic impact, the arts community is not articulate about how they serve public interests, and few citizens have an appreciation of the myriad of public policies that influence American arts and culture. The contributors to this volume argue that U.S. policy can—and should—support the arts and that the arts, in turn serve a broad rather than an elite public. Indeed, increased support for the arts and culture equals good economic and trade policy; it also contributes to the quality of life and community, and helps sustain the creativity of American artists and organizations.
By encouraging policy-makers to systematically start investigating the crucial role and importance of all of the arts in the United States, The Arts and Public Purpose moves the field forward with fresh ideas, new concepts, and important new data.
Leading scholars present the most complete, as well as the most advanced, treatment of public management reform and innovation available
The subject of reform in the public sector is not new; indeed, its latest rubric, reinventing government, has become good politics. Still, as the contributors ask in this volume, is good politics necessarily good government?Despite widespread agreement that the District of Columbia's political system has collapsed, there is a serious lack of thoughtful proposals addressing the political future of the nation's capital. In this book, Edward M. Meyers examines the opinions of average Americans about Washington, D.C., in order to understand how many Americans are likely to approach the question of what reforms are needed.
Meyers first explores the political, economic, and social conditions of the District, providing an informed context for understanding and evaluating its political options. Presenting the results of in-depth qualitative research with focus groups held across the country, Meyers reveals that regardless of the participants' knowledge about the District, their beliefs in six basic concepts or schemata—such as respect for democratic rights, attitudes about race, and aversion to an intrusive federal government—molded their opinions about various options for District self-governance. The book concludes with insights into the District by local and national political leaders, including OMB Director Alice Rivlin, Jesse Jackson, Representatives Eleanor Holmes Norton, Thomas Davis, and James Walsh, and Marion Barry.
A solution to inequalities wherever we look—in health care, secure retirement, education—is as close as the public library. Or the post office, community pool, or local elementary school. Public options—reasonably priced government-provided services that coexist with private options—are all around us, ready to increase opportunity, expand freedom, and reawaken civic engagement if we will only let them.
Whenever you go to your local public library, send mail via the post office, or visit Yosemite, you are taking advantage of a longstanding American tradition: the public option. Some of the most useful and beloved institutions in American life are public options—yet they are seldom celebrated as such. These government-supported opportunities coexist peaceably alongside private options, ensuring equal access and expanding opportunity for all.
Ganesh Sitaraman and Anne Alstott challenge decades of received wisdom about the proper role of government and consider the vast improvements that could come from the expansion of public options. Far from illustrating the impossibility of effective government services, as their critics claim, public options hold the potential to transform American civic life, offering a wealth of solutions to seemingly intractable problems, from housing shortages to the escalating cost of health care.
Imagine a low-cost, high-quality public option for child care. Or an extension of the excellent Thrift Savings Plan for federal employees to all Americans. Or every person having access to an account at the Federal Reserve Bank, with no fees and no minimums. From broadband internet to higher education, The Public Option reveals smart new ways to meet pressing public needs while spurring healthy competition. More effective than vouchers or tax credits, public options could offer us all fairer choices and greater security.
Contributors. Rodney K. Baxter, Julia G. Brody, Bruce Clary, Lori Cramer, William H. Desvousges, Riley E. Dunlap, Douglas Easterling, Judy K. Fleishman, James Flynn, William R. Freudenburg, Michael E. Kraft, Richard S. Krannich, Howard Kunreuther, Mark Layman, Ronald L. Little, Robert Cameron Mitchell, Alvin H. Mushkatel, Joanne M. Nigg, K. David Pijawka, Eugene A. Rosa, Paul Slovic
Thomas J Billard and Silvio Waisbord curate essays from a wide range of specialties within the study of communication. Aimed at scholars and students alike, the contributors use approaches from critical meditations to case studies to how-to guides as they explore the possibilities of seeing shared knowledge not as a gift to be granted but as an imperative urging readers to address the problems of the world. Throughout the volume, the works show that a pivot to ideas of scholarship as public service is already underway in corners of communication studies across the country.
Visionary and provocative, Public Scholarship in Communication Studies proposes a needed reconsideration of knowledge and a roadmap to its integration with community.
Contributors: Elaine Almeida, Becca Beets, Thomas J Billard, Danielle K. Brown, Aymar Jean Christian, Stacey L. Connaughton, Paula Gardner, Larry Gross, Amy Jordan, Daniel Kreiss, Rachel Kuo, Susan Mancino, Shannon C. McGregor, Philip M. Napoli, Todd P. Newman, Srividya Ramasubramanian, Chad Raphael, Sue Robinson, Silvio Waisbord, Yidong Wang, and Holley Wilkin
In the first social history of what happened to public schools in those “years of the locust,” the authors explore the daily experience of schoolchildren in many kinds of communities—the public school students of working-class northeastern towns, the rural black children of the South, the prosperous adolescents of midwestern suburbs. How did educators respond to the fiscal crisis, and why did Americans retain their faith in public schooling during the cataclysm? The authors examine how New Dealers regarded public education and the reaction of public school people to the distinctive New Deal style in programs such as the National Youth Administration. They illustrate the story with photographs, cartoons, and vignettes of life behind the schoolhouse door.
Moving from that troubled period to our own, the authors compare the anxieties of the depression decade with the uncertainties of the 1970s and 1980s. Heirs to an optimistic tradition and trained to manage growth, school staff have lately encountered three shortages: of pupils, money, and public confidence. Professional morale has dropped as expectations and criticism have mounted. Changes in the governing and financing of education have made planning for the future even riskier than usual.
Drawing on the experience of the 1930s to illuminate the problems of the 1980s, the authors lend historical perspective to current discussions about the future of public education. They stress the basic stability of public education while emphasizing the unfinished business of achieving equality in schooling.
Through detailed chronologies, B. J. Bullert traces how independently produced documentaries pushed the limits of public television between 1985 and 1993. She interviews the key players, film makers, programmers, journalists, and representatives of interest groups to illuminate how together they sought to frame and constrain viewers on perceptions of provocative works. Their stories are set against the backdrop of a larger story about the relationship between federal funding for the arts and public broadcasting and the promise of a democratic society. Bullert brings to light the subtle forces and interests that effectively control the style and content of documentaries that have been broadcast with the PBS logo.
When film makers brought uncommon realities to the public television airwaves, a complex collective response from station programmers, interest groups, journalists, and viewers ensued. Public Television charts the communication process through which visions of reality deemed threatening to some are packaged to make them more palatable for public television viewers.We commonly think of marriage as a private matter between two people, a personal expression of love and commitment. In this pioneering history, Nancy F. Cott demonstrates that marriage is and always has been a public institution.
From the founding of the United States to the present day, imperatives about the necessity of marriage and its proper form have been deeply embedded in national policy, law, and political rhetoric. Legislators and judges have envisioned and enforced their preferred model of consensual, lifelong monogamy--a model derived from Christian tenets and the English common law that posits the husband as provider and the wife as dependent.In early confrontations with Native Americans, emancipated slaves, Mormon polygamists, and immigrant spouses, through the invention of the New Deal, federal income tax, and welfare programs, the federal government consistently influenced the shape of marriages. And even the immense social and legal changes of the last third of the twentieth century have not unraveled official reliance on marriage as a "pillar of the state."
By excluding some kinds of marriages and encouraging others, marital policies have helped to sculpt the nation's citizenry, as well as its moral and social standards, and have directly affected national understandings of gender roles and racial difference. Public Vows is a panoramic view of marriage's political history, revealing the national government's profound role in our most private of choices. No one who reads this book will think of marriage in the same way again.
From white-collar executives to mail carriers, public workers meet the needs of the entire nation. Frederick W. Gooding Jr. and Eric S. Yellin edit a collection of new research on this understudied workforce. Part One begins in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth century to explore how questions of race, class, and gender shaped public workers, their workplaces, and their place in American democracy. In Part Two, essayists examine race and gender discrimination while revealing the subtle contemporary forms of marginalization that keep Black men and Black and white women underpaid and overlooked for promotion. The historic labor actions detailed in Part Three illuminate how city employees organized not only for better pay and working conditions but to seek recognition from city officials, the public, and the national labor movement. Part Four focuses on nurses and teachers to address the thorny question of whether certain groups deserve premium pay for their irreplaceable work and sacrifices or if serving the greater good is a reward unto itself.
Contributors: Eileen Boris, Cathleen D. Cahill, Frederick W. Gooding Jr., William P. Jones, Francis Ryan, Jon Shelton, Joseph E. Slater, Katherine Turk, Eric S. Yellin, and Amy Zanoni
From the white editorial authentication of slave narratives, to the cultural hybridity of the Harlem Renaissance, to the overtly independent publications of the Black Arts Movement, to the commercial power of Oprah's Book Club, African American textuality has been uniquely shaped by the contests for cultural power inherent in literary production and distribution. Always haunted by the commodification of blackness, African American literary production interfaces with the processes of publication and distribution in particularly charged ways. An energetic exploration of the struggles and complexities of African American print culture, this collection ranges across the history of African American literature, and the authors have much to contribute on such issues as editorial and archival preservation, canonization, and the "packaging" and repackaging of black-authored texts. Publishing Blackness aims to project African Americanist scholarship into the discourse of textual scholarship, provoking further work in a vital area of literary study.
In Pueblos, Plains, and Province Joseph P. Sánchez offers an in-depth examination of sociopolitical conflict in seventeenth-century New Mexico, detailing the effects of Spanish colonial policies on settlers’, missionaries’, and Indigenous peoples’ struggle for economic and cultural control of the region. Sánchez explores the rich archival documentation that provides cultural, linguistic, and legal perspectives of the values of the period.
Spanish dual Indian policies for Pueblo and Plains tribes challenged Indigenous political and social systems to conform to the imperial structure for pacification purposes. Meanwhile, missionary efforts to supplant Indigenous religious beliefs with a Christian worldview resulted, in part, in a syncretism of the two worlds. Indigenous resentment of these policies reflected the contentious disagreements between Spanish clergymen and civil authorities, who feuded over Indigenous labor and encroachment on tribal sovereignties with demands for sworn loyalty to Spanish governance. The little-studied “starvation period” adversely affected Spanish-Pueblo relationships for the remainder of the century and contributed significantly to the battle at Acoma, the Jumano War, and the Pueblo Revolt of 1680.
Pueblos, Plains, and Province shows how history, culture, and tradition in New Mexico shaped the heritage shared by Spain, Mexico, the United States, and Native American tribes and will be of interest to scholars and students of Indigenous, colonial, and borderlands history.
Building its incisive narrative from a wide range of archival sources, interviews, and first-person accounts of Puerto Rican life in New York, this book illuminates the rich history of a group that is still largely invisible to many scholars. At the center of Puerto Rican Citizen are Puerto Ricans’ own formulations about political identity, the responses of activists and ordinary migrants to the failed promises of American citizenship, and their expectations of how the American state should address those failures. Complicating our understanding of the discontents of modern liberalism, of race relations beyond black and white, and of the diverse conceptions of rights and identity in American life, Thomas’s book transforms the way we understand this community’s integral role in shaping our sense of citizenship in twentieth-century America.
Puerto Rican Women and Work: Bridges in Transnational Labor is the only comprehensive study of the role of Puerto Rican women workers in the evolution of a transnational labor force in the twentieth century.
This book examines Puerto Rican women workers, both in Puerto Rico and on the U.S. mainland. It contains a range of information--historical, ethnographic, and statistical. The contributors provide insights into the effects of migration and unionization on women's work, taking into account U.S. colonialism and globalization of capitalism throughout the century as well as the impact of Operation Bootstrap. The essays are arranged in chronological order to reveal the evolutionary nature of women's work and the fluctuations in migration, technology, and the economy. This one-of-a-kind collection will be a valuable resource for those interested in women's studies, ethnic studies, and Puerto Rican and Latino studies, as well as labor studies.
Redefining the way we view business success, Pamela Laird demolishes the popular American self-made story as she exposes the social dynamics that navigate some people toward opportunity and steer others away. Who gets invited into the networks of business opportunity? What does an unacceptable candidate lack? The answer is social capital—all those social assets that attract respect, generate confidence, evoke affection, and invite loyalty.
In retelling success stories from Benjamin Franklin to Andrew Carnegie to Bill Gates, Laird goes beyond personality, upbringing, and social skills to reveal the critical common key—access to circles that control and distribute opportunity and information. She explains how civil rights activism and feminism in the 1960s and 1970s helped demonstrate that personnel practices violated principles of equal opportunity. She evaluates what social privilege actually contributes to business success, and analyzes the balance between individual characteristics—effort, innovation, talent—and social factors such as race, gender, class, and connections.
In contrasting how Americans have prospered—or not—with how we have talked about prospering, Laird offers rich insights into how business really operates and where its workings fit within American culture. From new perspectives on entrepreneurial achievement to the role of affirmative action and the operation of modern corporate personnel systems, Pull shows that business is a profoundly social process, and that no one can succeed alone.
Unmasking old-time racism in southern Illinois
Pulling off the Sheets tells the previously obscured history of the Second Ku Klux Klan which formed in deep southern Illinois in the early 1920s. Through meticulous research into both public and private records, Darrel Dexter and John A. Beadles recount the Klan’s mythical origins, reemergence, and swift disappearance. This important historical account sets out to expose the lasting impact of the Klan on race relations today.
The ideation of the Klan as a savior of the white race and protector of white womanhood was perpetuated by books, plays, and local news sources of the time. The very real but misplaced fear of Black violence on whites created an environment in which the Second Klan thrived, and recruitment ran rampant in communities such as the Protestant church. Events like the murder of Daisy Wilson intensified the climate of racial segregation and white supremacy in the region, and despite attempts at bringing justice to the perpetrators, most failed. The Second Klan’s presence may have been short-lived, but the violence and fear it inflicted continues to linger.
This disturbing historical account challenges readers to “pull back the sheet” and confront the darkest corners of their past. Dexter and Beadles emphasize the importance of acknowledging the damage that white supremacy and racism cause and how we can move toward healing.
READERS
Browse our collection.
PUBLISHERS
See BiblioVault's publisher services.
STUDENT SERVICES
Files for college accessibility offices.
UChicago Accessibility Resources
home | accessibility | search | about | contact us
BiblioVault ® 2001 - 2025
The University of Chicago Press