Download or read book The Unheralded Triumph written by Jon C. Teaford and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2019-12-01 with total page 484 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published in 1984. In 1888 the British observer James Bryce declared "the government of cities" to be "the one conspicuous failure of the United States." During the following two decades, urban reformers would repeat Bryce's words with ritualistic regularity; nearly a century later, his comment continues to set the tone for most assessments of nineteenth-century city government. Yet by the end of the century, as Jon Teaford argues in this important reappraisal, American cities boasted the most abundant water supplies, brightest street lights, grandest parks, largest public libraries, and most efficient systems of transportation in the world. Far from being a "conspicuous failure," municipal governments of the late nineteenth century had successfully met challenges of an unprecedented magnitude and complexity. The Unheralded Triumph draws together the histories of the most important cities of the Gilded Age—especially New York, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, St. Louis, and Baltimore—to chart the expansion of services and the improvement of urban environments between 1870 and 1900. It examines the ways in which cities were transformed, in a period of rapid population growth and increased social unrest, into places suitable for living. Teaford demonstrates how, during the last decades of the nineteenth century, municipal governments adapted to societal change with the aid of generally compliant state legislatures. These were the years that saw the professionalization of city government and the political accommodation of the diverse ethnic, economic, and social elements that compose America's heterogeneous urban society. Teaford acknowledges that the expansion of urban services dangerously strained city budgets and that graft, embezzlement, overcharging, and payroll-padding presented serious problems throughout the period. The dissatisfaction with city governments arose, however, not so much from any failure to achieve concrete results as from the conflicts between those hostile groups accommodated within the newly created system: "For persons of principle and gentlemen who prized honor, it seemed a failure yet American municipal government left as a legacy such achievements as Central Park, the new Croton Aqueduct, and the Brooklyn Bridge, monuments of public enterprise that offered new pleasures and conveniences for millions of urban citizens."
Download or read book The Unheralded Triumph City Government in America 1870 1900 written by Jon C. Teaford and published by . This book was released on 1984 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Unheralded Triumph written by Jon C. Teaford and published by Johns Hopkins University Press. This book was released on 1984-03-01 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published in 1984. In 1888 the British observer James Bryce declared "the government of cities" to be "the one conspicuous failure of the United States." During the following two decades, urban reformers would repeat Bryce's words with ritualistic regularity; nearly a century later, his comment continues to set the tone for most assessments of nineteenth-century city government. Yet by the end of the century, as Jon Teaford argues in this important reappraisal, American cities boasted the most abundant water supplies, brightest street lights, grandest parks, largest public libraries, and most efficient systems of transportation in the world. Far from being a "conspicuous failure," municipal governments of the late nineteenth century had successfully met challenges of an unprecedented magnitude and complexity. The Unheralded Triumph draws together the histories of the most important cities of the Gilded Age—especially New York, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, St. Louis, and Baltimore—to chart the expansion of services and the improvement of urban environments between 1870 and 1900. It examines the ways in which cities were transformed, in a period of rapid population growth and increased social unrest, into places suitable for living. Teaford demonstrates how, during the last decades of the nineteenth century, municipal governments adapted to societal change with the aid of generally compliant state legislatures. These were the years that saw the professionalization of city government and the political accommodation of the diverse ethnic, economic, and social elements that compose America's heterogeneous urban society. Teaford acknowledges that the expansion of urban services dangerously strained city budgets and that graft, embezzlement, overcharging, and payroll-padding presented serious problems throughout the period. The dissatisfaction with city governments arose, however, not so much from any failure to achieve concrete results as from the conflicts between those hostile groups accommodated within the newly created system: "For persons of principle and gentlemen who prized honor, it seemed a failure yet American municipal government left as a legacy such achievements as Central Park, the new Croton Aqueduct, and the Brooklyn Bridge, monuments of public enterprise that offered new pleasures and conveniences for millions of urban citizens."
Download or read book A History of American Law Third Edition written by Lawrence M. Friedman and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2005-06-01 with total page 642 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this brilliant and immensely readable book, Lawrence M. Friedman tells the whole fascinating story of American law from its beginnings in the colonies to the present day. By showing how close the life of the law is to the economic and political life of the country, he makes a complex subject understandable and engrossing. A History of American Law presents the achievements and failures of the American legal system in the context of America's commercial and working world, family practices, and attitudes toward property, government, crime, and justice. Now completely revised and updated, this groundbreaking work incorporates new material regarding slavery, criminal justice, and twentieth-century law. For laymen and students alike, this remains the only comprehensive authoritative history of American law.
Download or read book The Monied Metropolis written by Sven Beckert and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 516 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book, first published in 2001, is a comprehensive history of nineteenth-century New York City's powerful economic elite.
Download or read book In the Shadow Of the Poorhouse Tenth Anniversary Edition written by Michael B Katz and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 1996-12-11 with total page 414 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With welfare reform a burning political issue, this special anniversary edition of the classic history of welfare in America has been revised and updated to include the latest bipartisan debates on how to “end welfare as we know it.”In the Shadow of the Poorhouse examines the origins of social welfare, both public and private, from the days of the colonial poorhouse through the current tragedy of the homeless. The book explains why such a highly criticized system persists. Katz explores the relationship between welfare and municipal reform; the role of welfare capitalism, eugenics, and social insurance in the reorganization of the labor market; the critical connection between poverty and politics in the rise of the New Deal welfare state; and how the War on Poverty of the '60s became the war on welfare of the '80s.
Download or read book The Growth of American Government written by Ballard C. Campbell and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This ambitious, well-written book will be a useful resource for scholars... an excellent overview... a fine, readable introduction that presents its analysis in a straightforward manner free from ideological baggage." --Congress & The Presidency "A refreshingly unorthodox narrative. Campbell [explains] in plain language how government grew. His stance is neither liberal nor conservative, but simply well-informed and reasonable." --Walter Nugent, University of Notre Dame "The canvas is large, but one comes away from the book with an understanding of what has happened, the factors contributing to these developments, and their consequences. Strongly recommended." --Samuel McSeveney, Vanderbilt University "Ballard Campbell has synthesized an amazing range of material: federal, state and even local studies, from history, political science, economics, and assorted other specialized studies. The product is a strikingly comprehensive and readable history of the rise of government in the USA. Even better, it provides a coherent explanation of why the state grew so large." --Richard Jensen, University of Illinois-Chicago "His overview (chapter 2) should be a compulsory assignment for any seminar on modern political culture... " --The Journal of American History "Campbell's book is a marvelous multidisciplinary synthesis that builds on the findings of historians of national, state, and local government, along with those of economists and political scientists, to provide a coherent account of the rise of modern American governing structures." --Journal of Interdisciplinary History "The book should be useful in the classroom, even for freshmen classes in U.S. history and government." --American Historical Review "Readable, and refreshingly unorthodox, Campbell provides a coherent explanation of how and why government has become so large. His book deserves inclusion in any undergraduate bibliography covering the development of American government." --Political Studies Association This engaging survey of the growth of government in America in the last century focuses on the evolution of public policy and its relationship to the constitutional and political structure of government at the federal, state, and local levels.
Download or read book A Very Different Age written by Steven J. Diner and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 1998-08-05 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Steven J. Diner, drawing on the rich scholarship of recent social history, focuses on how Americans of diverse backgrounds and at all economic levels responded to the Progressive Era. Industrial workers and farmers, recent immigrants and African Americans, white-collar workers and small entrepreneurs had to reinvent the ways they managed their work, family, community, and leisure as the forces of change swept away familiar modes of economic life, rearranged hierarchies of social status, and redefined the relationship of citizens to their government. This is a striking new interpretation of a crucial epoch in our nation's history.
Download or read book Heads of the Local State written by John Garrard and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-11-28 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent decades there has been increasing historical interest in various aspects of local urban politics, resulting in a much better understanding of the recruitment and socio-economic characteristics of municipal leadership and the exercise of power at a local level. However, much less is known about the highly important offices and office-holders standing at the ceremonial, political and executive head of towns and cities. Through a comparative analysis of mayoralty since1800, this volume explores the characteristics of the office in relation to such issues as the constitutional position of mayors, their ceremonial and executive roles, their representational status in relation to local, regional and central authority, and their public visibility, which at various times has been used to highlight or blur issues of race, gender, politics or religion within a community. Drawing on examples from contrasting national contexts in Eastern and Western Europe, and North America, and with contributions from both historians and political scientists, this book will be welcomed as an important step in providing a much fuller international picture of the development and nature of urban governance.
Download or read book City Halls and Civic Materialism written by Swati Chattopadhyay and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-03-14 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The town hall or city hall as a place of local governance is historically related to the founding of cities in medieval Europe. As the space of representative civic authority it aimed to set the terms of public space and engagement with the citizenry. In subsequent centuries, as the idea and built form travelled beyond Europe to become an established institution across the globe, the parameters of civic representation changed and the town hall was forced to negotiate new notions of urbanism and public space. City Halls and Civic Materialism: Towards a Global History of Urban Public Space utilizes the town hall in its global historical incarnations as bases to probe these changing ideas of urban public space. The essays in this volume provide an analysis of the architecture, iconography, and spatial relations that constitute the town hall to explore its historical ability to accommodate the "public" in different political and social contexts, in Europe, Asia, Australia, Africa and the Americas, as the relation between citizens and civic authority had to be revisited with the universal franchise, under fascism, after the devastation of the world wars, decolonization, and most recently, with the neo-liberal restructuring of cities. As a global phenomenon, the town hall challenges the idea that nationalism, imperialism, democracy, the idea of citizenship – concepts that frame the relation between the individual and the body politic -- travel the globe in modular forms, or in predictable trajectories from the West to East, North to South. Collectively the essays argue that if the town hall has historically been connected with the articulation of bourgeois civil society, then the town hall as a global spatial type -- architectural space, urban monument, and space of governance -- holds a mirror to the promise and limits of civil society.
Download or read book Urban Policy in Twentieth century America written by Arnold Richard Hirsch and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 1993 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The recent riots in Los Angeles brought the urban crisis back to the center of public policy debates in Washington, D.C., and in urban areas throughout the United States. The contributors to this volume examine the major policy issues--race, housing, transportation, poverty, the changing environment, the effects of the global economy--confronting contemporary American cities. Raymond A. Mohl begins with an extended discussion of the origins, evolution, and current state of Federal involvement in urban centers. Michael B. Katz follows with an insightful look at poverty in turn-of-the-century New York and the attempts to ameliorate the desperate plight of the poor during this period of rapid economic growth. Arnold R. Hirsch, Mohl, and David R. Goldfield then pursue different facets of the racial dilemma confronting American cities. Hirsch discusses historical dimensions of residential segregation and public policy, while Mohl uses Overtown, Miami, as a case study of the social impact of the construction of interstate highways in urban communities. David Goldfield explores the political ramifications and incongruities of contemporary urban race relations. Finally, Carl Abbott and Sam Bass Warner, Jr., examine the impact of global economic developments and the environmental implications of past policy choices. Collectively, the authors show us where we have been, some of the needs that must be addressed, and the urban policy alternatives we face.
Download or read book Unto a Good Land written by David Edwin Harrell Jr. and published by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. This book was released on 2005-08-23 with total page 814 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Introducing a New U.S. History Text That Takes Religion Seriously Unto a Good Land offers a distinctive narrative history of the American people -- from the first contacts between Europeans and North America's native inhabitants, through the creation of a modern nation, to the 2004 presidential election. Written by a team of highly regarded historians, this textbook shows how grasping the uniqueness of the "American experiment" depends on understanding not only social, cultural, political, and economic factors but also the role that religion has played in shaping U. S. history. While most United States history textbooks in recent decades have expanded their coverage of social and cultural history, they still tend to shortchange the role of religious ideas, practices, and movements in the American past. Unto a Good Land restores the balance by giving religion its appropriate place in the story. This readable and teachable text also features a full complement of maps, historical illustrations, and "In Their Own Words" sidebars with excerpts from primary source documents.
Download or read book The Gilded Age written by Charles William Calhoun and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2007 with total page 410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Broad in scope, The Gilded Age brings together sixteen original essays that offer lively syntheses of modern scholarship while making their own interpretive arguments. These engaging pieces allow students to consider the various societal, cultural and political factors that make studying the Gilded Age crucial to our understanding of America today.
Download or read book Crisis and Commission Government in Memphis written by Lynette Boney Wrenn and published by Univ. of Tennessee Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This centralization of political power in a small commission aided the efficient transaction of municipal business, but the public policies that resulted from it tended to benefit upper-class Memphians while neglecting the less affluent residents and neighborhoods.
Download or read book Historical Dictionary of the Gilded Age written by Leonard C. Schlup and published by M.E. Sharpe. This book was released on 2003 with total page 680 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Covers all the people, events, movements, subjects, court cases, inventions, and more that defined the Gilded Age.
Download or read book School Society and State written by Tracy L. Steffes and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2012-05-15 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the connections between public school reform in the early twentieth century and American political development from 1890 to 1940.
Download or read book Seeing with Their Hearts written by Maureen A. Flanagan and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-07-21 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the turn of the last century, as industrialists and workers made Chicago the hardworking City of Big Shoulders celebrated by Carl Sandburg, Chicago women articulated an alternative City of Homes in which the welfare of residents would be the municipal government's principal purpose. Seeing With Their Hearts traces the formation of this vision from the relief efforts following the Chicago fire of 1871 through the many political battles of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. In the process, it presses a new understanding of the roles of women in public life and writes a new history of urban America. Heeding the call of activist Louise de Koven Bowen to become third-class passengers on the train of life, thousands of women "put their shoulders to the wheel and their whole hearts into the work" of fighting for better education, worker protections, clean air and water, building safety, health care, and women's suffrage. Though several well-known activists appeared frequently in these initiatives, Maureen Flanagan offers compelling evidence that women established a broad and durable solidarity that spanned differences of race, class, and political experience. She also shows that these women--emphasizing their common identity as women seeking a city amenable to the needs of women, children, families, and homes--pursued a vision and goals distinct from the reform agenda of Progressive male activists. They fought hard and sometimes successfully in a variety of public places and sites of power, winning victories from increased political clout and prenatal care to municipal garbage collection and pasteurized milk. While telling the fascinating and in some cases previously untold stories of women activists during Chicago's formative period, this book fundamentally recasts urban social and political history.
