Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of New York written by Cyrus R. K. Patell and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-03-11 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A portrait of the diverse literary cultures of New York from its beginnings as a Dutch colony to the present.
Download or read book Purified by Fire written by Stephen Prothero and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Publisher Fact Sheet A history of cremation in America.
Download or read book Tramps Unfit Mothers and Neglected Children written by Sherri Broder and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2010-11-24 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In late Victorian America few issues held the public's attention more closely than the allegedly unnatural family life of the urban poor. In Tramps, Unfit Mothers, and Neglected Children, Sherri Broder brings new insight to the powerful depictions of the urban poor that circulated in newspapers and novels, public debate and private correspondence, including the irresponsible tramp, the "fallen" single mother, and the neglected child. Broder considers how these representations contributed to debates over the nature of family life and focuses on the ways different historical actors—social reformers, labor activists, and ordinary laboring people—made use of the available cultural narratives about family, gender, and sexuality to comprehend changes in turn-of-the-century America. In the decades after the Civil War, Philadelphia was an important center of charity, child protection, and labor reform. Drawing on the rich records of the Pennsylvania Society to Protect Children from Cruelty, Broder assesses the intentions and consequences of reform efforts devoted to women and children at the turn of the century. Her research provides an eloquent study of how the terms used by social workers and their clients to discuss the condition of poverty continue to have a profound influence on social policies and develops a complex historical perspective on how social policy and representations of poor families have been and remain mutually influential.
Download or read book Rough Writing written by Aviva F. Taubenfeld and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2008-11 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As the United States struggled to absorb a massive influx of ethnically diverse immigrants at the turn of the twentieth century, the question of who and what an American is took on urgent intensity. It seemed more critical than ever to establish a definition by which Americanness could be established, transmitted, maintained, and judged. Americans of all stripes sought to articulate and enforce their visions of the nation’s past, present, and future; central to these attempts was President Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt fully recognized the narrative component of American identity, and he called upon authors of diverse European backgrounds including Israel Zangwill, Jacob Riis, Elizabeth Stern, and Finley Peter Dunne to promote the nation in popular written form. With the swell and shift in immigration, he realized that a more encompassing national literature was needed to “express and guide the soul of the nation.” Rough Writing examines the surprising place and implications of the immigrant and of ethnic writing in Roosevelt’s America and American literature.
Download or read book Women and Reform in a New England Community 1815 1860 written by Carolyn J. Lawes and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2014-07-11 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Interpretations of women in the antebellum period have long dwelt upon the notion of public versus private gender spheres. As part of the ongoing reevaluation of the prehistory of the women's movement, Carolyn Lawes challenges this paradigm and the primacy of class motivation. She studies the women of antebellum Worcester, Massachusetts, discovering that whatever their economic background, women there publicly worked to remake and improve their community in their own image. Lawes analyzes the organized social activism of the mostly middle-class, urban, white women of Worcester and finds that they were at the center of community life and leadership. Drawing on rich local history collections, Lawes weaves together information from city and state documents, court cases, medical records, church collections, newspapers, and diaries and letters to create a portrait of a group of women for whom constant personal and social change was the norm. Throughout Women and Reform in a New England Community, conventional women make seemingly unconventional choices. A wealthy Worcester matron helped spark a women-led rebellion against ministerial authority in the town's orthodox Calvinist church. Similarly, a close look at the town's sewing circles reveals that they were vehicles for political exchange as well as social gatherings that included men but intentionally restricted them to a subordinate role. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the women of Worcester had taken up explicitly political and social causes, such as an orphan asylum they founded, funded, and directed. Lawes argues that economic and personal instability rather than a desire for social control motivated women, even relatively privileged ones, into social activism. She concludes that the local activism of the women of Worcester stimulated, and was stimulated by, their interest in the first two national women's rights conventions, held in Worcester in 1850 and 1851. Far from being marginalized from the vital economic, social, and political issues of their day, the women of this antebellum New England community insisted upon being active and ongoing participants in the debates and decisions of their society and nation.
Download or read book Imagining Italians written by Joseph P. Cosco and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2012-02-01 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Integrating history, literary criticism, and cultural studies, Imagining Italians vividly tells the story of two voyages across the Atlantic: America's cultural pilgrimage to Italy and the Italian "racial odyssey" in America. It examines how American representations of Italy, Italians, and Italian Americans engaged with national debates over immigration, race, and national identity during the period 1880–1910. Joseph P. Cosco offers a close analysis of selected works by immigrant journalists Jacob Riis and Edward Steiner and American iconographic writers Henry James and Mark Twain. Exploring their Italian depictions in journalism, photos, travel narratives, and fiction, he rediscovers the forgotten Edward Steiner and offers fresh readings of Riis's reform efforts and photography, James's The Golden Bowl and The American Scene, and Mark Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson.
Download or read book A Genealogy of the Good and Critique of Hubris written by Phillip Dybicz and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023 with total page 441 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ""Is this intervention effective?" This is a question that social workers have asked themselves since the birth of the profession and which social welfare agents have asked since the birth of our country. In our attempts at advancing the social welfare of the client and society, it is essential that we constantly evaluate the impact of our interventions. Over the years, however, the above question has yielded some surprising answers. During the Colonial era, those individuals suffering from mental illness who demonstrated a proclivity for aberrant and sometimes harmful behaviors were locked away in barns or small rooms. During the late 1800s in New York City, social welfare agents organized the orphan trains, sending poor immigrant children-many who were not orphans-out to the more "wholesome" environment of family farms in the Midwest. In the 1950s, social workers placed themselves in the role of social police by conducting midnight 'raids' (i.e. unscheduled visits at midnight) at the homes of welfare recipients to ensure that welfare mothers were not benefiting from a man's company in secret, and thus, disqualifying themselves from receiving aid. Looking upon these interventions with our present eyes, from a viewpoint firmly grounded in notions of self-determination and empowerment, our profession can easily see the moral failings of these interventions. From these examples, as a profession we are able to note that simply applying good intentions-by themselves-are not adequate to ensure effective and worthy interventions. We are also able to note that simply having an outcome measure is not enough to ensure the worthiness of an intervention, as the examples above contained easily measured outcomes"--
Download or read book Reconsidering Regions in an Era of New Nationalism written by Alex Finkelstein and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Empire of Scrounge written by Jeff Ferrell and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Throughout this engaging narrative, full of a colorful cast of characters, from the mansion living suburbanites to the junk haulers themselves, Ferrell makes a persuasive argument about the dangers of over-consumption.
Download or read book Florence Kelley and the Nation s Work written by Kathryn Kish Sklar and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1995-01-01 with total page 460 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of America's foremost historians of women tells the story of Florence Kelley, a leading reformer in the Progressive Era. The book is also a political history of the United States during a period of transforming change, when women worked to end the abuses of unregulated industrial capitalism. This first of a two-volume series covers the first 40 years of Florence Kelley's life. 53 illustrations.
Download or read book Before Central Park written by Sara Cedar Miller and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2022-06-28 with total page 568 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner - 2023 John Brinkerhoff Jackson Book Prize, UVA Center for Cultural Landscapes With more than eight hundred sprawling green acres in the middle of one of the world’s densest cities, Central Park is an urban masterpiece. Designed in the middle of the nineteenth century by the landscape architects Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, it is a model for city parks worldwide. But before it became Central Park, the land was the site of farms, businesses, churches, wars, and burial grounds—and home to many different kinds of New Yorkers. This book is the authoritative account of the place that would become Central Park. From the first Dutch family to settle on the land through the political crusade to create America’s first major urban park, Sara Cedar Miller chronicles two and a half centuries of history. She tells the stories of Indigenous hunters, enslaved people and enslavers, American patriots and British loyalists, the Black landowners of Seneca Village, Irish pig farmers, tavern owners, Catholic sisters, Jewish protesters, and more. Miller unveils a British fortification and camp during the Revolutionary War, a suburban retreat from the yellow fever epidemics at the turn of the nineteenth century, and the properties that a group of free Black Americans used to secure their right to vote. Tales of political chicanery, real estate speculation, cons, and scams stand alongside democratic idealism, the striving of immigrants, and powerfully human lives. Before Central Park shows how much of the history of early America is still etched upon the landscapes of Central Park today.
Download or read book American Hungers written by Gavin Jones and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2009-10-12 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Social anxiety about poverty surfaces with startling frequency in American literature. Yet, as Gavin Jones argues, poverty has been denied its due as a critical and ideological framework in its own right, despite recent interest in representations of the lower classes and the marginalized. These insights lay the groundwork for American Hungers, in which Jones uncovers a complex and controversial discourse on the poor that stretches from the antebellum era through the Depression. Reading writers such as Herman Melville, Theodore Dreiser, Edith Wharton, James Agee, and Richard Wright in their historical contexts, Jones explores why they succeeded where literary critics have fallen short. These authors acknowledged a poverty that was as aesthetically and culturally significant as it was socially and materially real. They confronted the ideological dilemmas of approaching poverty while giving language to the marginalized poor--the beggars, tramps, sharecroppers, and factory workers who form a persistent segment of American society. Far from peripheral, poverty emerges at the center of national debates about social justice, citizenship, and minority identity. And literature becomes a crucial tool to understand an economic and cultural condition that is at once urgent and elusive because it cuts across the categories of race, gender, and class by which we conventionally understand social difference. Combining social theory with literary analysis, American Hungers masterfully brings poverty into the mainstream critical idiom.
Download or read book Homeless Lives in American Cities written by P. Webb and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-08-07 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Homeless Lives in American Cities explores how the American discourse on homelessness arose from Victorian social and political anxieties about the impacts of immigration and urbanization on the middle class family. It demonstrates how contemporary social work and policy emerge from Victorian cultural attitudes.
Download or read book Child Labor written by Hugh D. Hindman and published by M.E. Sharpe. This book was released on 2002 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite its decline throughout the advanced industrial nations, child labor remains one of the major social, political, and economic concerns of modern history, as witnessed by the many high-profile stories on child labor and sweatshops in the media today. This work considers the issue in three parts. The first section discusses child labor as a social and economic problem in America from an historical and theoretical perspective. The second part presents child labor as National Child Labor Committee investigators found it in major American industries and occupations, including coal mines, cotton textile mills, and sweatshops in the early 1900s. Finally, the concluding section integrates these findings and attempts to apply them to child labor problems in America and the rest of the world today.
Download or read book George Bellows and Urban America written by Marianne Doezema and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1992-01-01 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: George Bellows's spirited and virile paintings of New York in the early decades of the twentieth century celebrated the city's bigness and bolness. Although these works clearly challenged the conservative practices of the National Academy and linked Bellows with the anti-academic art of Robert Henri and the Eight, they were highly popular, even with arch-conservatives. In this book Marianne Doezema explores why it was that Bellows's paintings--despite being considered coarse in technique and subject matter--were acclaimed by critics and patrons, by conservatives, progressives, and radicals alike. Doezema focuses on three of Bellows's principal urban themes: the excavation for Pennsylvania Station, prizefights, and tenement life on the Lower East Side. Drawing on journals and periodicals of the period, she discusses how the prominent, often newsworthy motifs painted by Bellows evoked particular associations and meanings for his contemporaries. Arguing that the implicit message of these paintings was distinctly unrevolutionary, she shows that the excavation paintings celebrated industrialization and urbanization, the boxing pictures presented the sport as brutal and its fans as bloodthirsty, and the depictions of the Lower East Side conformed to a moralistic, middle-class view of poverty. In many of Bellows's subject pictures of this era, says Doezema, the artist approached issues of changing moral and social values in a way that not only seemed congenial to many members of his audience but also verified their attitudes and preconceptions about urban life in America.
Download or read book The Nature of Childhood written by Pamela Riney-Kehrberg and published by University Press of Kansas. This book was released on 2014-04-04 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When did the kid who strolled the wooded path, trolled the stream, played pick-up ball in the back forty turn into the child confined to the mall and the computer screen? How did “Go out and play!” go from parental shooing to prescription? When did parents become afraid to send their children outdoors? Surveying the landscape of childhood from the Civil War to our own day, this environmental history of growing up in America asks why and how the nation’s children have moved indoors, often losing touch with nature in the process. In the time the book covers, the nation that once lived in the country has migrated to the city, a move whose implications and ramifications for youth Pamela Riney-Kehrberg explores in chapters concerning children’s adaptation to an increasingly urban and sometimes perilous environment. Her focus is largely on the Midwest and Great Plains, where the response of families to profound economic and social changes can be traced through its urban, suburban, and rural permutations—as summer camps, scouting, and nature education take the place of children’s unmediated experience of the natural world. As the story moves into the mid-twentieth century, and technology in the form of radio and television begins to exert its allure, Riney-Kehrberg brings her own experience to bear as she documents the emerging tug-of-war between indoors and outdoors—and between the preferences of children and parents. It is a battle that children, at home with their electronic amenities, seem to have won—an outcome whose meaning and likely consequences this timely book helps us to understand.
Download or read book The Restless City written by Joanne Reitano and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2010-07 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Restless City: A Short History of New York from Colonial Times to the Present is a short, lively history of the world’s most exciting and diverse metropolis. It shows how New York’s perpetual struggles for power, wealth, and status exemplify the vigor, creativity, resilience, and influence of the nation’s premier urban center. The updated second edition includes nineteen images and brings the story right up through the mayoral election of 2009. In these pages are the stories of a broad cross-section of people and events that shaped the city, including mayors and moguls, women and workers, and policemen and poets. Joanne Reitano shows how New York has invigorated the American dream by confronting the fundamental economic, political, and social challenges that face every city. Energized by change, enriched by immigrants, and enlivened by provocative leaders, New York City’s restlessness has always been its greatest asset.
