Download or read book Inequality in Early America written by Carla Gardina Pestana and published by Dartmouth College Press. This book was released on 2015-03-24 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book was designed as a collaborative effort to satisfy a long-felt need to pull together many important but separate inquiries into the nature and impact of inequality in colonial and revolutionary America. It also honors the scholarship of Gary Nash, who has contributed much of the leading work in this field. The 15 contributors, who constitute a Who's Who of those who have made important discoveries and reinterpretations of this issue, include Mary Beth Norton on women's legal inequality in early America; Neal Salisbury on Puritan missionaries and Native Americans; Laurel Thatcher Ulrich on elite and poor women's work in early Boston; Peter Wood and Philip Morgan on early American slavery; as well as Gary Nash himself writing on Indian/white history. This book is a vital contribution to American self-understanding and to historical analysis.

Download or read book Inequality in Early America written by Carla Gardina Pestana and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book was designed as a collaborative effort to satisfy a long-felt need to pull together many important but separate inquiries into the nature and impact of inequality in colonial and revolutionary America. It also honors the scholarship of Gary Nash, who has contributed much of the leading work in this field. The 15 contributors, who constitute a Who's Who of those who have made important discoveries and reinterpretations of this issue, include Mary Beth Norton on women's legal inequality in early America; Neal Salisbury on Puritan missionaries and Native Americans; Laurel Thatcher Ulrich on elite and poor women's work in early Boston; Peter Wood and Philip Morgan on early American slavery; as well as Gary Nash himself writing on Indian/white history.

Download or read book Unequal Gains written by Peter H. Lindert and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2017-12-05 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A book that rewrites the history of American prosperity and inequality Unequal Gains offers a radically new understanding of the economic evolution of the United States, providing a complete picture of the uneven progress of America from colonial times to today. While other economic historians base their accounts on American wealth, Peter Lindert and Jeffrey Williamson focus instead on income—and the result is a bold reassessment of the American economic experience. America has been exceptional in its rising inequality after an egalitarian start, but not in its long-run growth. America had already achieved world income leadership by 1700, not just in the twentieth century as is commonly thought. Long before independence, American colonists enjoyed higher living standards than Britain—and America's income advantage today is no greater than it was three hundred years ago. But that advantage was lost during the Revolution, lost again during the Civil War, and lost a third time during the Great Depression, though it was regained after each crisis. In addition, Lindert and Williamson show how income inequality among Americans rose steeply in two great waves—from 1774 to 1860 and from the 1970s to today—rising more than in any other wealthy nation in the world. Unequal Gains also demonstrates how the widening income gaps have always touched every social group, from the richest to the poorest. The book sheds critical light on the forces that shaped American income history, and situates that history in a broad global context. Economic writing at its most stimulating, Unequal Gains provides a vitally needed perspective on who has benefited most from American growth, and why.

Download or read book The Lost Tradition of Economic Equality in America 1600 1870 written by Daniel R. Mandell and published by Johns Hopkins University Press. This book was released on 2020-04-07 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Informing current discussions about the growing gap between rich and poor in the United States, The Lost Tradition of Economic Equality in America is surprising and enlightening.

Download or read book History of Inequalities in American Education written by Marta Zapała-Kraj and published by GRIN Verlag. This book was released on 2015-01-29 with total page 77 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Research Paper (postgraduate) from the year 2015 in the subject Pedagogy - History of Pedagogy, grade: 5.0, , language: English, abstract: Education affects every part of our lives. For the majority of people education level determines income level, place in the class system, and even health. Without quality education in ones youth, he or she is quickly at a severe disadvantage then a peer who receives one. In doing this research the author of this thesis has found the most important obstacles in the history of American education. in order to present what factors led to such a situation in American schools, the author decided to divide the paper in three following parts - each discussing different aspect of inequalities found in educational history. The problems of education inequality are deeply rooted throughout American history. In the South segregation was upheld in the Supreme Court in the Plessy vs Ferguson Case in 1896 which mandated that schools be segregated into black and white. What is more, the educational inequalities reach out even deeper - not only did race and skin-color made difference in accesss to knowledge. The sex played also a vital role in it. The history of American education is written down by the numerous minor cases of women who were forbidden to learn, just because they were not born men.

Download or read book American Ideas of Equality written by Carl L Bankston and published by . This book was released on 2021-02-26 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Equality is a fundamental American value. The nation's Declaration of Independence declared equality as a self-evident foundation for political life and the pursuit of equality has continued to dominate policy debates in the twenty-first century. However, equality is a complex idea and it has had different meanings in different eras. Using a variety of data sources, this book describes how the views we hold regarding this fundamental national value developed as products of our cultural history from the origins of the American republic to 2020. It traces how cultural transmission, political and economic structures, and communication technology have shaped this core American value. The book begins with the early days of the American republic and follows ideological changes through the era of the self-made man, the rise of corporate society, the New Deal, the post-World War II era, and the era of Civil Rights. It ends with a detailed discussion of how this history has resulted in some of the most divisive political and social controversies of the twenty-first century. Most studies of equality have taken this as having a single, clear meaning. Most often, this has been either how much equality of opportunity exists now or has existed in the past, or how much equality of condition exists now or has existed in the past. They rarely consider that people can be equal or unequal in different ways, and that what we mean when we talk about equality or engage in debates about it has been shaped by historical experience. This book is a work of historical sociology that examines the forces that have shaped and re-shaped this fundamental cultural value. The book leads readers through an exploration of how different stages of American history have led to thinking about equality in terms of independence from hierarchy, the opportunity for self-creation, access to services and resources, widespread upward mobility, and equality across social categories. It takes a unique multidisciplinary approach, combining intellectual and cultural history with political, economic, and sociological analysis. No other book offers this kind of analysis of the both the historical origins and contemporary consequences of a cultural concept at the core of American national life. American Ideas of Equality will be a valuable resource for academic researchers, students, and general readers interested in American studies; cultural, economic, and political history; political science; and sociology.

Download or read book America s Founding and the Struggle over Economic Inequality written by Clement Fatovic and published by University Press of Kansas. This book was released on 2014-12-04 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If, as many allege, attacking the gap between rich and poor is a form of class warfare, then the struggle against income inequality is the longest running war in American history. To defenders of the status quo, who argue that the accumulation of wealth free of government intervention is an essential feature of the American way, this book offers a forceful answer. While many of those who oppose addressing economic inequality through public policy today do so in the name of freedom, Clement Fatovic demonstrates that concerns about freedom informed the Founding Fathers' arguments for public policy that tackled economic disparities. Where contemporary arguments against such government efforts conceptualize freedom in economic terms, however, those supporting public policies conducive to greater economic equality invoked a more participatory, republican, conception of freedom. As many of the Founders understood it, economic independence, which requires a wide if imperfect distribution of property, is a precondition of the political independence they so profoundly valued. Fatovic reveals a deep concern among the Founders--including Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, and Noah Webster--about the impact of economic inequality on political freedom. America's Founding and the Struggle over Economic Inequality traces this concern through many important political debates in Congress and the broader polity that shaped the early Republic--debates over tax policies, public works, public welfare, and the debt from the Revolution. We see how Alexander Hamilton, so often characterized as a cold-hearted apologist for plutocrats, actually favored a more progressive system of taxation, along with various policies aimed at easing the economic hardship of specific groups. In Thomas Paine, frequently portrayed as an advocate of laissez-faire government, we find a champion of a comprehensive welfare state that would provide old-age pensions, public housing, and a host of other benefits as a matter of "right, not charity." Contrary to the picture drawn by so many of today's pundits and politicians, this book shows us how, for the first American statesmen, preventing or minimizing economic disparities was essential to the preservation of the new nation's freedom and practice of self-government.

Download or read book The Politics of Inequality written by Michael Thompson and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the early days of the American republic, political thinkers have maintained that a grossly unequal division of property, wealth, and power would lead to the erosion of democratic life. Yet over the past thirty-five years, neoconservatives and neoliberals alike have redrawn the tenets of American liberalism. Nowhere is this more evident than in our current mainstream political discourse, in which the politics of economic inequality are rarely discussed. In this impassioned book, Michael J. Thompson reaches back into America's rich intellectual history to reclaim the politics of inequality from the distortion of recent American conservatism. He begins by tracing the development of the idea of economic inequality as it has been conceived by political thinkers throughout American history. Then he considers the change in ideas and values that have led to the acceptance and occasional legitimization of economic divisions. Thompson argues that American liberalism has made a profound departure from its original practice of egalitarian critique. It has all but abandoned its antihierarchical and antiaristocratic discourse. Only by resuscitating this tradition can democracy again become meaningful to Americans. The intellectuals who pioneered egalitarian thinking in America believed political and social relations should be free from all forms of domination, servitude, and dependency. They wished to expose the antidemocratic character of economic life under capitalism and hoped to prevent the kind of inequalities that compromise human dignity and freedom-the core principles of early American politics. In their wisdom is a much broader, more compelling view of democratic life and community than we have today, and with this book, Thompson eloquently and adamantly fights to recover this crucial strand of political thought. In this impassioned book, Michael J. Thompson reaches back into America's rich intellectual history to reclaim the politics of inequality from the distortion of recent American conservatism. He begins by tracing the development of the idea of economic inequality as it has been conceived by political thinkers throughout American history. Then he considers the change in ideas and values that have led to the acceptance and occasional legitimization of economic divisions. Thompson argues that American liberalism has made a profound departure from its original practice of egalitarian critique; it has all but abandoned its antihierarchical and antiaristocratic discourse. Only by resuscitating this tradition can democracy again become meaningful to Americans. The intellectuals who pioneered egalitarian thinking in America believed political and social relations should be free from all forms of domination, servitude, and dependency. They wished to expose the antidemocratic character of economic life under capitalism and hoped to prevent the kind of inequalities that compromise human dignity and freedom--the core principles of early American politics. In their wisdom is a much broader, more compelling view of democratic life and community than we have today, and with this book, Thompson eloquently and adamantly fights to recover this crucial strand of political thought.

Download or read book Down and Out in Early America written by Billy G. Smith and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2010-11-01 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It has often been said that early America was the &"best poor man&’s country in the world.&" After all, wasn&’t there an abundance of land and a scarcity of laborers? The law of supply and demand would seem to dictate that most early American working people enjoyed high wages and a decent material standard of living. Down and Out in Early America presents the evidence for poverty versus plenty and concludes that financial insecurity was a widespread problem that plagued many early Americans. The fact is that in early America only an extremely thin margin separated those who required assistance from those who were able to secure independently the necessities of life. The reasons for this were many: seasonal and cyclical unemployment, inadequate wages, health problems (including mental illness), alcoholism, a large pool of migrants, low pay for women, abandoned families. The situation was made worse by the inability of many communities to provide help for the poor except to incarcerate them in workhouses and almshouses. The essays in this volume explore the lives and strategies of people who struggled with destitution, evaluate the changing forms of poor relief, and examine the political, religious, gender, and racial aspects of poverty in early North America. Down and Out in Early America features a distinguished lineup of historians. In the first chapter, Gary B. Nash surveys the scholarship on poverty in early America and concludes that historians have failed to appreciate the numerous factors that generated widespread indigence. Philip D. Morgan examines poverty among slaves while Jean R. Soderlund looks at the experience of Native Americans in New Jersey. In the other essays, Monique Bourque, Ruth Wallis Herndon, Tom Humphrey, Susan E. Klepp, John E. Murray, Simon Newman, J. Richard Olivas, and Karin Wulf look at the conditions of poverty across regions, making this the most complete and comprehensive work of its kind.

Download or read book The Crisis of the Middle Class Constitution written by Ganesh Sitaraman and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2018-02-06 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this original, provocative contribution to the debate over economic inequality, Ganesh Sitaraman argues that a strong and sizable middle class is a prerequisite for America’s constitutional system. For most of Western history, Sitaraman argues, constitutional thinkers assumed economic inequality was inevitable and inescapable—and they designed governments to prevent class divisions from spilling over into class warfare. The American Constitution is different. Compared to Europe and the ancient world, America was a society of almost unprecedented economic equality, and the founding generation saw this equality as essential for the preservation of America’s republic. Over the next two centuries, generations of Americans fought to sustain the economic preconditions for our constitutional system. But today, with economic and political inequality on the rise, Sitaraman says Americans face a choice: Will we accept rising economic inequality and risk oligarchy or will we rebuild the middle class and reclaim our republic? The Crisis of the Middle-Class Constitution is a tour de force of history, philosophy, law, and politics. It makes a compelling case that inequality is more than just a moral or economic problem; it threatens the very core of our constitutional system.

Download or read book Henry George and the Crisis of Inequality written by Edward O'Donnell and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2015-06-09 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: America's remarkable explosion of industrial output and national wealth at the end of the nineteenth century was matched by a troubling rise in poverty and worker unrest. As politicians and intellectuals fought over the causes of this crisis, Henry George (1839–1897) published a radical critique of laissez-faire capitalism and its threat to the nation's republican traditions. Progress and Poverty (1879), which became a surprise best-seller, offered a provocative solution for preserving these traditions while preventing the amassing of wealth in the hands of the few: a single tax on land values. George's writings and years of social activism almost won him the mayor's seat in New York City in 1886. Though he lost the election, his ideas proved instrumental to shaping a popular progressivism that remains essential to tackling inequality today. Edward T. O'Donnell's exploration of George's life and times merges labor, ethnic, intellectual, and political history to illuminate the early militant labor movement in New York during the Gilded Age. He locates in George's rise to prominence the beginning of a larger effort by American workers to regain control of the workplace and obtain economic security and opportunity. The Gilded Age was the first but by no means the last era in which Americans confronted the mixed outcomes of modern capitalism. George's accessible, forward-thinking ideas on democracy, equality, and freedom have tremendous value for contemporary debates over the future of unions, corporate power, Wall Street recklessness, government regulation, and political polarization.

Download or read book The American Class Structure in an Age of Growing Inequality written by Dennis L. Gilbert and published by SAGE Publications. This book was released on 2017-12-07 with total page 421 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With the latest data on income, wealth, earnings, and residential segregation by income, The American Class Structure in an Age of Growing Inequality, Tenth Edition describes a consistent pattern of growing inequality in the United States since the early 1970s. Focusing on the socioeconomic core of the American class system, author Dennis L. Gilbert examines how changes in the economy, family life, globalization, and politics are contributing to increasing class inequality. New to this Edition “The Class Basis of Trump's Victory” looks at why for the first time since before the 1932 election, the Republican presidential candidate won a greater proportion of the working class vote than the Democratic opponent. Addresses the role of technology and other factors in the decline of manufacturing employment and how the trend is crucial for understanding growing inequality and changes in working class family life. Offers international comparisons to show how the U.S. compares with other wealthy nations on social mobility and poverty, and questions our conception of the U.S. as a uniquely open society.

Download or read book Punishment and Inequality in America written by Bruce Western and published by Russell Sage Foundation. This book was released on 2006-05-25 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the last thirty years, the prison population in the United States has increased more than seven-fold to over two million people, including vastly disproportionate numbers of minorities and people with little education. For some racial and educational groups, incarceration has become a depressingly regular experience, and prison culture and influence pervade their communities. Almost 60 percent of black male high school drop-outs in their early thirties have spent time in prison. In Punishment and Inequality in America, sociologist Bruce Western explores the recent era of mass incarceration and the serious social and economic consequences it has wrought. Punishment and Inequality in America dispels many of the myths about the relationships among crime, imprisonment, and inequality. While many people support the increase in incarceration because of recent reductions in crime, Western shows that the decrease in crime rates in the 1990s was mostly fueled by growth in city police forces and the pacification of the drug trade. Getting "tough on crime" with longer sentences only explains about 10 percent of the fall in crime, but has come at a significant cost. Punishment and Inequality in America reveals a strong relationship between incarceration and severely dampened economic prospects for former inmates. Western finds that because of their involvement in the penal system, young black men hardly benefited from the economic boom of the 1990s. Those who spent time in prison had much lower wages and employment rates than did similar men without criminal records. The losses from mass incarceration spread to the social sphere as well, leaving one out of ten young black children with a father behind bars by the end of the 1990s, thereby helping perpetuate the damaging cycle of broken families, poverty, and crime. The recent explosion of imprisonment is exacting heavy costs on American society and exacerbating inequality. Whereas college or the military were once the formative institutions in young men's lives, prison has increasingly usurped that role in many communities. Punishment and Inequality in America profiles how the growth in incarceration came about and the toll it is taking on the social and economic fabric of many American communities.

Download or read book Two Nations Indivisible written by Jamie L. Bronstein and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2016-10-17 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While examining the arguments made in favor of egalitarianism, this book debunks the notion that the United States is now or has ever been a nation offering equal opportunity to all. In the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson famously asserted that "all men are created equal." Likewise, social mobility—the idea that any child can grow up to be president—has been key to the myth of what makes America great. Yet the hard truth is that inequality of both opportunity and resulting condition has been a defining feature of America's story. Written by a comparative labor historian, this book combines economic and social history with intellectual history to reveal the major trends of inequality that have been evident in America from Revolutionary times through the present. The book opens with an introduction to the burgeoning issue of inequality in America. The following chronological chapters describe how inequality was manifest in various periods. Each chapter not only provides a full survey of the secondary literature related to the topic of inequality in the particular time period but also examines prescriptions from thinkers who espoused equality, including Thomas Paine, Thomas Skidmore, Henry George, Jane Addams, Upton Sinclair, and Harry Caudill. By assessing these and other arguments relevant to social change, the work helps readers understand the cases made for and against equality of opportunity and condition throughout U.S. history.

Download or read book American Inequality written by Jeffrey G. Williamson and published by New York ; Toronto : Academic Press. This book was released on 1980 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Monograph presenting a macroeconomic analysis of the relationship of economic development to wealth and income distribution inequality trends in the USA from the historical 1770s to the 1970s - rejects the notion that inequality was a necessary precondition of economic growth, and argues that complex interactions among such variables as technological change, labour supply and capital formation were sources of economic disparity. Bibliography pp. 335 to 349 and graphs.

Download or read book White Trash written by Nancy Isenberg and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2017-04-04 with total page 498 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The New York Times Bestseller, with a new preface from the author “This estimable book rides into the summer doldrums like rural electrification. . . . It deals in the truths that matter.”—Dwight Garner, The New York Times “This eye-opening investigation into our country’s entrenched social hierarchy is acutely relevant.”—O, The Oprah Magazine “White Trash will change the way we think about our past and present.” —T. J. Stiles, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Custer’s Trials In her groundbreaking bestselling history of the class system in America, Nancy Isenberg, co-author of The Problem of Democracy, takes on our comforting myths about equality, uncovering the crucial legacy of the ever-present, always embarrassing—if occasionally entertaining—poor white trash. “When you turn an election into a three-ring circus, there’s always a chance that the dancing bear will win,” says Isenberg of the political climate surrounding Sarah Palin. And we recognize how right she is today. Yet the voters that put Trump in the White House have been a permanent part of our American fabric, argues Isenberg. The wretched and landless poor have existed from the time of the earliest British colonial settlement to today's hillbillies. They were alternately known as “waste people,” “offals,” “rubbish,” “lazy lubbers,” and “crackers.” By the 1850s, the downtrodden included so-called “clay eaters” and “sandhillers,” known for prematurely aged children distinguished by their yellowish skin, ragged clothing, and listless minds. Surveying political rhetoric and policy, popular literature and scientific theories over four hundred years, Isenberg upends assumptions about America’s supposedly class-free society––where liberty and hard work were meant to ensure real social mobility. Poor whites were central to the rise of the Republican Party in the early nineteenth century, and the Civil War itself was fought over class issues nearly as much as it was fought over slavery. Reconstruction pitted poor white trash against newly freed slaves, which factored in the rise of eugenics–-a widely popular movement embraced by Theodore Roosevelt that targeted poor whites for sterilization. These poor were at the heart of New Deal reforms and LBJ’s Great Society; they haunt us in reality TV shows like Here Comes Honey Boo Boo and Duck Dynasty. Marginalized as a class, white trash have always been at or near the center of major political debates over the character of the American identity. We acknowledge racial injustice as an ugly stain on our nation’s history. With Isenberg’s landmark book, we will have to face the truth about the enduring, malevolent nature of class as well.

Download or read book The Rich Don t Always Win written by Sam Pizzigati and published by Seven Stories Press. This book was released on 2012-11-27 with total page 389 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Occupy Wall Street protests have captured America's political imagination. Polls show that two-thirds of the nation now believe that America's enormous wealth ought to be "distributed more evenly." However, almost as many Americans--well over half--feel the protests will ultimately have "little impact" on inequality in America. What explains this disconnect? Most Americans have resigned themselves to believing that the rich simply always get their way. Except they don't. A century ago, the United States hosted a super-rich even more domineering than ours today. Yet fifty years later, that super-rich had almost entirely disappeared. Their majestic mansions and estates had become museums and college campuses, and America had become a vibrant, mass middle class nation, the first and finest the world had ever seen. Americans today ought to be taking no small inspiration from this stunning change. After all, if our forbears successfully beat back grand fortune, why can't we? But this transformation is inspiring virtually no one. Why? Because the story behind it has remained almost totally unknown, until now. This lively popular history will speak directly to the political hopelessness so many Americans feel. By tracing how average Americans took down plutocracy over the first half of the 20th Century--and how plutocracy came back-- The Rich Don't Always Win will outfit Occupy Wall Street America with a deeper understanding of what we need to do to get the United States back on track to the American dream.