BiblioVault - Books about United states

Family Matters

Secrecy and Disclosure in the History of Adoption

E. Wayne Carp

Harvard University Press, 1998

Adoption is a hot topic--played out in the news and on TV talk shows, in advice columns and tell-all tales--but for the 25 million Americans who are members of the adoption triad of adoptees, adoptive parents, and birth parents, the true story of adoption has not been told until now. Family Matters cuts through the sealed records, changing policies, and conflicting agendas that have obscured the history of adoption in America and reveals how the practice and attitudes about it have evolved from colonial days to the present.

Amid recent controversies over sealed adoption records and open adoption, it is ever more apparent that secrecy and disclosure are the defining issues in American adoptions--and these are also the central concerns of E. Wayne Carp's book. Mining a vast range of sources (including for the first time confidential case records of a twentieth-century adoption agency), Carp makes a startling discovery: openness, not secrecy, has been the norm in adoption for most of our history; sealed records were a post-World War II aberration, resulting from the convergence of several unusual cultural, demographic, and social trends.

Pursuing this idea, Family Matters offers surprising insights into various notions that have affected the course of adoption, among them Americans' complex feelings about biological kinship versus socially constructed families; the stigma of adoption, used at times to promote both openness and secrecy; and, finally, suspect psychoanalytic concepts, such as "genealogical bewilderment," and bogus medical terms, such as "adopted child syndrome," that paint all parties to adoption as psychologically damaged.

With an unswerving gaze and incisive analysis, Carp brings clarity to a subject often muddled by extreme emotions and competing agendas. His book is essential reading for adoptees and their adoptive and biological families, and for the countless others who follow their fortunes.

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The Kennedy Family

Edward Shorter

Temple University Press, 2000

According to Edward Shorter, just forty years ago the institutions housing people with mental retardation (MR) had become a national scandal. The mentally retarded who lived at home were largely isolated and a source of family shame. Although some social stigma still attaches to the people with developmental disabilities (a range of conditions including what until recently was called mental retardation), they now actively participate in our society and are entitled by law to educational, social, and medical services. The immense improvement in their daily lives and life chances came about in no small part because affected families mobilized for change but also because the Kennedy family made mental retardation its single great cause.

Long a generous benefactor of MR-related organizations, Joseph P. Kennedy made MR the special charitable interest of the family foundation he set up in the 1950s. Although he gave all of his children official roles, he involved his daughter Eunice in performing its actual work -- identifying appropriate recipients of awards and organizing the foundation's activities. With unique access to family and foundation papers, Shorter brings to light the Kennedy family's strong commitment to public service, showing that Rose and Joe taught their children by precept and example that their wealth and status obligated them to perform good works. Their parents expected each of them to apply their considerable energies to making a difference.

Eunice Kennedy Shriver took up that charge and focused her organizational and rhetorical talent on putting MR on the federal policy agenda. As a sister of the President of the United States, she had access to the most powerful people in the country and drew their attention to the desperate situation of families affected by mental retardation. Her efforts made an enormous difference, resulting in unprecedented public attention to MR and new approaches to coordinating medical and social services. Along with her husband, R. Sargent Shriver, she made the Special Olympics an international, annual event in order to encourage people with mental retardation to develop their skills and discover the joy of achievement. She emerges from these pages as a remarkable and dedicated advocate for people with developmental disabilities.

Shorter's account of mental retardation presents an unfamiliar view of the Kennedy family and adds a significant chapter to the history of disability in this country.

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Labor's Time

Shorter Hours, The Uaw, And The

Jonathan Cutler

Temple University Press, 2004

The movement for a shorter workweek that once defined the labor movement in the United States was largely displaced by the new corporatist structure of organized labor in the post-New Deal era. Labor's Time examines the changes that occurred within organized labor and traces their influence on the decline of the shorter hours movement. Focusing on the internal union politics of the influential United Automobile Workers and Local 600, its chapter at Henry Ford's massive River Rouge factory, Jonathan Cutler demonstrates how an all-but-forgotten interracial movement for a shorter workweek during the 1950s and 1960s became a casualty of an increasingly top-heavy union bureaucracy that lost touch with the desires, fears, and aspirations of rank and file workers and dug its own grave in the process. Jonathan Cutler examines the political context in which the shorter hours movement emerged within Local 600 in the 1940s, then chronicles the attempts by Walter Reuther, the head of the UAW, to suppress it. Cutler also reviews the role the Communist Party played in the controversy. Finally, he documents the UAW response to rank and file pressure for a shorter workweek, and how the local's own organizational flaws allowed Reuther and the national union to wrest control from the dissidents. Fresh and boldly written, Labor's Time recreates a moment when unions—as a movement, not as an amalgam of leaders—could have transformed the landscape of work in the United States.

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Learning to Work

The Case for Reintegrating Job Training and Education

W. Norton Grubb

Russell Sage Foundation, 1996

"Grubb's powerful vision of a workforce development system connected by vertical ladders for upward mobility adds an important new dimension to our continued efforts at system reform. The unfortunate reality is that neither our first-chance education system nor our second-chance job training system have succeeded in creating clear pathways out of poverty for many of our citizens. Grubb's message deserves a serious hearing by policy makers and practitioners alike." —Evelyn Ganzglass, National Governors' Association Over the past three decades, job training programs have proliferated in response to mounting problems of unemployment, poverty, and expanding welfare rolls. These programs and the institutions that administer them have grown to a number and complexity that make it increasingly difficult for policymakers to interpret their effectiveness. Learning to Work offers a comprehensive assessment of efforts to move individuals into the workforce, and explains why their success has been limited. Learning to Work offers a complete history of job training in the United States, beginning with the Department of Labor's manpower development programs in the1960s and detailing the expansion of services through the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act in the 1970s and the Job Training Partnership Act in the 1980s.Other programs have sprung from the welfare system or were designed to meet the needs of various state and corporate development initiatives. The result is a complex mosaic of welfare-to-work, second-chance training, and experimental programs, all with their own goals, methodology, institutional administration, and funding. Learning to Work examines the findings of the most recent and sophisticated job training evaluations and what they reveal for each type of program. Which agendas prove most effective? Do their effects last over time? How well do programs benefit various populations, from welfare recipients to youths to displaced employees in need of retraining? The results are not encouraging. Many programs increase employment and reduce welfare dependence, but by meager increments, and the results are often temporary. On average most programs boosted earnings by only $200 to $500 per year, and even these small effects tended to decay after four or five years.Overall, job training programs moved very few individuals permanently off welfare, and provided no entry into a middle-class occupation or income. Learning to Work provides possible explanations for these poor results, citing the limited scope of individual programs, their lack of linkages to other programs or job-related opportunities, the absence of academic content or solid instructional methods, and their vulnerability to local political interference. Author Norton Grubb traces the root of these problems to the inherent separation of job training programs from the more successful educational system. He proposes consolidating the two domains into a clearly defined hierarchy of programs that combine school- and work-based instruction and employ proven methods of student-centered, project-based teaching. By linking programs tailored to every level of need and replacing short-term job training with long-term education, a system could be created to enable individuals to achieve increasing levels of economic success. The problems that job training programs address are too serious too ignore. Learning to Work tells us what's wrong with job training today, and offers a practical vision for reform.

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Oneida Indian Journey

From New York to Wisconsin, 1784–1860

Edited by Laurence M. Hauptman and L. Gordon McLester III

University of Wisconsin Press, 1999

For the first time, the traumatic removal of the Oneida Indians from New York to Wisconsin is examined in a groundbreaking collection of essays, The Oneida Indian Journey from New York to Wisconsin, 1784–1860. To shed light on this vital period of Oneida history, editors Laurence Hauptman and L. Gordon McLester, III, present a unique collaboration between an American Indian nation and the academic community. Two professional historians, a geographer, anthropologist, archivist and attorney join in with eighteen voices from the Oneida community—local historians, folklorists, genealogists, linguists, and tribal elders—discuss tribal dispossession and community; Oneida community perspectives of Oneida history; and the means of studying Oneida history.

Contributors include: Debra Anderson, Eileen Antone, Jim Antone, Abrahms Archiquette, Oscar Archiquette, Jack Campisi, Richard Chrisjohn, Amelia Cornelius, Judy Cornelius, Katie Cornelius, Melissa Cornelius, Jonas Elm, James Folts, Reginald Horsman, Elizabeth Huff, Francis Jennings, Arlinda Locklear, Jo Margaret Mano, Loretta Metoxen, Liz Obomsawin, Jessie Peters, Sarah Summers, and Rachel Swamp

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The Ownership of Enterprise

Henry Hansmann

Harvard University Press, 2000

The investor-owned corporation is the conventional form for structuring large-scale enterprise in market economies. But it is not the only one. Even in the United States, noncapitalist firms play a vital role in many sectors. Employee-owned firms have long been prominent in the service professions--law, accounting, investment banking, medicine--and are becoming increasingly important in other industries. The buyout of United Airlines by its employees is the most conspicuous recent instance. Farmer-owned produce cooperatives dominate the market for most basic agricultural commodities. Consumer-owned utilities provide electricity to one out of eight households. Key firms such as MasterCard, Associated Press, and Ace Hardware are service and supply cooperatives owned by local businesses. Occupant-owned condominiums and cooperatives are rapidly displacing investor-owned rental housing. Mutual companies owned by their policyholders sell half of all life insurance and one-quarter of all property and liability insurance. And nonprofit firms, which have no owners at all, account for 90 percent of all nongovernmental schools and colleges, two-thirds of all hospitals, half of all day-care centers, and one-quarter of all nursing homes.

Henry Hansmann explores the reasons for this diverse pattern of ownership. He explains why different industries and different national economies exhibit different distributions of ownership forms. The key to the success of a particular form, he shows, depends on the balance between the costs of contracting in the market and the costs of ownership. And he examines how this balance is affected by history and by the legal and regulatory framework within which firms are organized.

With noncapitalist firms now playing an expanding role in the former socialist countries of Eastern Europe and Asia as well as in the developed market economies of the West, The Ownership of Enterprise will be an important book for business people, policymakers, and scholars.

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Take the Young Stranger by the Hand

Same-Sex Relations and the YMCA

John Donald Gustav-Wrathall

University of Chicago Press, 1998

Now associated with family health clubs, the YMCA's bland image is the result of relentless outreach and the studied avoidance of controversy. But, as John Gustav-Wrathall shows in his revealing social history of the organization, the life of the YMCA has been filled with strife, tragedy, and irony, a life that itself reflects the struggle over the shifting societal mores regarding masculine friendship and intimacy. Take the Young Stranger by the Hand presents the YMCA as an institution of profound contradictions, reflective of society's views of same-sex love and sexuality.

"Gustav-Wrathall's book offers an in-depth history of the origins and purposes of the Young Men's Christian Association and how it evolved into—and out of—a gay playland."—Arnie Kantrowitz, Lambda Book Report

"The book's absorbing exploration of the sometimes schismatic, sometimes synergistic relationship between spirituality and sexuality is a fascinating addition to the growing body of social history."—Jim Van Buskirk, San Francisco Bay Guardian

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