Over 20 million people are working part-time in the United States, more than six million of them involuntarily. Both Time and Fortune magazines have run recent cover stories about this constrained faction of the workforce, who tend to earn on average 40 percent less than full-time workers. Addressing this disturbing trend, Chris Tilly presents a current, in-depth analysis of how U.S. businesses use part-time employment, and why they are using it more and more.
Worker demand for part-time jobs peaked more than twenty years ago, but employers' desires for cheap labor and schedule flexibility have continued to drive the long-term growth of part-time jobs. Tilly argues that this growth is a reaction to the expanding trade and service industries, which, by their nature, depend on part-time workers. Examining the nature and purposes of the different types of part-time employment, he explores the roots of part-time jobs in the organization of work, and the inadequacies of existing public policies on part-time employment.
Using not only statistical analysis but over eighty interviews with employers in the retail and insurance industries, Tilly suggests new approaches to providing flexibility without insecurity.
The best way to have it all--both a full family life and a career--is to halve it all. That's the message of Francine Deutsch's refreshing and humane book, based on extensive interviews with a wide range of couples. Deutsch casts a skeptical eye on the grim story of inequality that has been told since women found themselves working a second shift at home. She brings good news: equality based on shared parenting is possible, and it is emerging all around us. Some white-collar fathers achieve as well as talk about equality, and some blue-collar parents work alternate shifts to ensure that one parent can always be with the children.
Using vivid quotations from her interviews, Deutsch tells the story of couples who share parenting equally, and some who don't. The differences between the groups are not in politics, education, or class, but in the way they negotiate the large and small issues--from whose paid job is "important" to who applies the sunscreen. With the majority of mothers in the workforce, parents today have to find ways of sharing the work at home. Rigid ideas of "good mothers" and "good fathers," Deutsch argues, can be transformed into a more flexible reality: the good parent.
Halving It All takes the discussion beyond shrill ideological arguments about working mothers and absent fathers. Deutsch shows how, with the best of intentions, people perpetuate inequalities and injustices on the home front, but also, and more important, how they can devise more equal arrangements, out of explicit principles, or simply out of fairness and love.
In 1806 an anxious crowd of thousands descended upon Lenox, Massachusetts, for the public hanging of Ephraim Wheeler, condemned for the rape of his thirteen-year-old daughter, Betsy. Not all witnesses believed justice had triumphed. The death penalty had become controversial; no one had been executed for rape in Massachusetts in more than a quarter century. Wheeler maintained his innocence. Over one hundred local citizens petitioned for his pardon--including, most remarkably, Betsy and her mother.
Impoverished, illiterate, a failed farmer who married into a mixed-race family and clashed routinely with his wife, Wheeler existed on the margins of society. Using the trial report to reconstruct the tragic crime and drawing on Wheeler's jailhouse autobiography to unravel his troubled family history, Irene Quenzler Brown and Richard D. Brown illuminate a rarely seen slice of early America. They imaginatively and sensitively explore issues of family violence, poverty, gender, race and class, religion, and capital punishment, revealing similarities between death penalty politics in America today and two hundred years ago.
Beautifully crafted, engagingly written, this unforgettable story probes deeply held beliefs about morality and about the nature of justice.
Hannah Arendt is one of the most famous political theorists of the twentieth century, yet in the social sciences her work has rarely been given the attention it deserves. This careful and comprehensive study introduces Arendt to a wider audience.
Finn Bowring shows how Arendt's writings have engaged with and influenced prominent figures in the sociological canon, and how her ideas may shed light on some of the most pressing social and political problems of today. He explores her critique of Marx, her relationship to Weber, the influence of her work on Habermas and the parallels and discrepancies between her and Foucault. This is a clearly written and scholarly text which surveys the leading debates over Arendt’s work, including discussions of totalitarianism, the public sphere and the nature of political responsibility.
This book will bring new perspectives to students and lecturers in sociology and politics.
Contributors. Asma Afsaruddin, Orit Bashkin, Marilyn Booth, Nadia Maria El Cheikh, Julia Clancy-Smith, Joan DelPlato, Jateen Lad, Nancy Micklewright, Yaseen Noorani, Leslie Peirce, Irvin Cemil Schick, A. Holly Schissler, Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh
How representations of the preparation, sale, and consumption of leftovers in nineteenth-century urban France link socioeconomic and aesthetic history
The concept of the “harlequin” refers to the practice of reassembling dinner scraps cleared from the plates of the wealthy to sell, replated, to the poor in nineteenth-century Paris. In The Harlequin Eaters, Janet Beizer investigates how the alimentary harlequin evolved in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries from the earlier, similarly patchworked Commedia dell’arte Harlequin character and can be used to rethink the entangled place of class, race, and food in the longer history of modernism.
By superimposing figurations of the edible harlequin taken from a broad array of popular and canonical novels, newspaper articles, postcard photographs, and lithographs, Beizer shows that what is at stake in nineteenth-century discourses surrounding this mixed meal are representations not only of food but also of the marginalized people—the “harlequin eaters”—who consume it at this time when a global society is emerging. She reveals the imbrication of kitchen narratives and intellectual–aesthetic practices of thought and art, presenting a way to integrate socioeconomic history with the history of literature and the visual arts. The Harlequin Eaters also offers fascinating background to today’s problems of food inequity as it unpacks stories of the for-profit recycling of excess food across class and race divisions.
Contributors
Emma Álvarez-Tabío Albo
Eric Felipe-Barkin
Anke Birkenmaier
Velia Cecilia Bobes
Mario Coyula-Cowley
Elisabeth Enenbach
Sujatha Fernandes
Jill Hamberg
Patricio del Real
Cecelia Lawless
Jacqueline Loss
Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo
Antonio José Ponte
Nicolás Quintana
Jose Quiroga
Laura Redruello
Rafael Rojas
Joseph L. Scarpaci
Esther Whitfield
The role of American hospital expansions in health disparities and medical apartheid
Health Colonialism considers how U.S. urban development policies contribute to the uneven and unjust distribution of health care in this country. Here, Shiloh Krupar investigates the racially inequitable effects of elite U.S. hospitals on their surrounding neighborhoods and their role in consolidating frontiers of land primed for redevelopment.
Naming this frontier “medical brownfields,” Krupar shows how hospitals leverage their domestic real estate empires to underwrite international prospecting for patients and overseas services and specialty clinics. Her pointed analysis reveals that decolonizing health care efforts must scrutinize the land practices of nonprofit medical institutions and the liberal foundations of medical apartheid perpetuated by globalizing American health care.
Winner of the 2023 New England Society Book Award in the Historical Nonfiction category
Winner of an Award of Excellence, American Association for State and Local History (AASLH)
In 1822, settlers pushed north from Massachusetts and other parts of New England into Monson, Maine. On land taken from the Penobscot people, they established prosperous farms and businesses. Focusing on the microhistory of this village, Andrew Witmer reveals the sometimes surprising ways that this small New England town engaged with the wider world across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Townspeople fought and died in distant wars, transformed the economy and landscape with quarries and mills, and used railroads, highways, print, and new technologies to forge connections with the rest of the nation.
Here and Everywhere Else starts with Monson’s incorporation in the early nineteenth century, when central Maine was considered the northern frontier and over 90 percent of Americans still lived in rural areas; it ends with present-day attempts to revive this declining Maine town into an artists’ colony. Engagingly written, with colorful portraits of local characters and landmarks, this study illustrates how the residents of this remote place have remade their town by integrating (and resisting) external influences.
How women-only communities provide spaces for new forms of culture, sociality, gender, and sexuality
Women’s lands are intentional, collective communities composed entirely of women. Rooted in 1970s feminist politics, they continue to thrive in a range of ways, from urban households to isolated rural communes, providing spaces where ideas about gender, sexuality, and sociality are challenged in both deliberate and accidental ways. Herlands, a compelling ethnography of women’s land networks in the United States, highlights the ongoing relevance of these communities as vibrant cultural enclaves that also have an impact on broader ideas about gender, women’s bodies, lesbian identity, and right ways of living.
As a participant-observer, Keridwen N. Luis brings unique insights to the lives and stories of the women living in these communities. While documenting the experiences of specific spaces in Massachusetts, Tennessee, New Mexico, and Ohio, Herlands also explores the history of women’s lands and breaks new ground exploring culture theory, gender theory, and how lesbian identity is conceived and constructed in North America. Luis also discusses how issues of race and class are addressed, the ways in which nudity and public hygiene challenge dominant constructions of the healthy or aging body, and the pervasive influence of hegemonic thinking on debates about transgender women. Luis finds that although changing dominant thinking can be difficult and incremental, women’s lands provide exciting possibilities for revolutionary transformation in society.
Since the late 1970s, the high-rise developments of the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) have been dominated by gang violence and drugs, creating a sense of hopelessness among residents. Despite a lengthy war on crime, costing hundreds of millions of dollars, the CHA has been unable to reduce the violence that makes life intolerable. Focusing on three developments—Rockwell Gardens, Henry Horner Homes, and Harold Ickes Homes—Sue Popkin and her co-authors interview residents, community leaders, and CHA staff. The Hidden War chronicles the many failed efforts of the CHA to combat crime and improve its developments, offering a vivid portrait of what life is like when lived among bullets, graffiti, and broken plumbing.
Most families living in these developments are headed by African American single mothers. The authors reveal the dilemmas facing women and children who are often victims or witnesses of violent crime, and yet are dependent on the perpetrators and their drug-dominant economy. The CHA—plagued by financial scandals, managerial incompetence, and inconsistent funding—is no match for thegang-dominated social order. Even well-intentioned initiatives such as the recent effort to demolish and “revitalize” the worst developments seem to be ineffective at combating crime, while the drastic changes leave many vulnerable families facing an uncertain future. The Hidden War sends a humbling message to policy makers and prognosticators who claim to know the right way to “solve poverty.”
Cattelino presents a vivid ethnographic account of the history and consequences of Seminole gaming. Drawing on research conducted with tribal permission, she describes casino operations, chronicles the everyday life and history of the Seminole Tribe, and shares the insights of individual Seminoles. At the same time, she unravels the complex connections among cultural difference, economic power, and political rights. Through analyses of Seminole housing, museum and language programs, legal disputes, and everyday activities, she shows how Seminoles use gaming revenue to enact their sovereignty. They do so in part, she argues, through relations of interdependency with others. High Stakes compels rethinking of the conditions of indigeneity, the power of money, and the meaning of sovereignty.
J. Blake Perkins searches for the roots of rural defiance in the Ozarks--and discovers how it changed over time. Eschewing generalities, Perkins focuses on the experiences and attitudes of rural people themselves as they interacted with government from the late nineteenth century through the twentieth century.He uncovers the reasons local disputes and uneven access to government power fostered markedly different reactions by hill people as time went by. Resistance in the earlier period sprang from upland small farmers' conflicts with capitalist elites who held the local levers of federal power. But as industry and agribusiness displaced family farms after World War II, a conservative cohort of town business elites, local political officials, and midwestern immigrants arose from the region's new low-wage, union-averse economy. As Perkins argues, this modern antigovernment conservatism bore little resemblance to the backcountry populism of an earlier age but had much in common with the movement elsewhere.
Washington, D.C. has long been known as a frustrating and sometimes confusing city for its residents to call home. The monumental core of federal office buildings, museums, and the National Mall dominates the city’s surrounding neighborhoods and urban fabric. For much of the postwar era, Washingtonians battled to make the city their own, fighting the federal government over the basic question of home rule, the right of the city’s residents to govern their local affairs.
In Historic Capital, urban historian Cameron Logan examines how the historic preservation movement played an integral role in Washingtonians’ claiming the city as their own. Going back to the earliest days of the local historic preservation movement in the 1920s, Logan shows how Washington, D.C.’s historic buildings and neighborhoods have been a site of contestation between local interests and the expansion of the federal government’s footprint. He carefully analyzes the long history of fights over the right to name and define historic districts in Georgetown, Dupont Circle, and Capitol Hill and documents a series of high-profile conflicts surrounding the fate of Lafayette Square, Rhodes Tavern, and Capitol Park, SW before discussing D.C. today.
Diving deep into the racial fault lines of D.C., Historic Capital also explores how the historic preservation movement affected poor and African American residents in Anacostia and the U Street and Shaw neighborhoods and changed the social and cultural fabric of the nation’s capital. Broadening his inquiry to the United States as a whole, Logan ultimately makes the provocative and compelling case that historic preservation has had as great an impact on the physical fabric of U.S. cities as any other private or public sector initiative in the twentieth century.
A surge of African American enrolment and student activism brought Black Studies to many US campuses in the 1960s. Sixty years later, Black Studies programs are taught at more than 1,300 universities worldwide. This book is the first history of how that happened.
Black Studies founder and movement veteran Abdul Alkalimat offers a comprehensive history of the discipline that will become a key reference for generations to come. Structured in three broadly chronological sections - Black Studies as intellectual history; as social movement; and as academic profession - the book demonstrates how Black people themselves established the field long before its institutionalization in university programs.
At its heart, Black Studies is profoundly political. Black Power, the New Communist Movement, the Black women’s and students’ movements – each step in the journey for Black liberation influenced and was influenced by this revolutionary discipline.
As old as the prehistoric bones jumbled in caves, as new as the latest union consummated in a test tube, the family in one form or another is at the heart of every society. Our most common institution, it is also the source of some of the world's most compelling and persistent questions, touching the very quick of history, anthropology, psychology, and sociology. A History of the Family is the first work to address all these aspects of the family over time and across the earth--to search out what the family means in its most particular and universal senses.
This monumental work in two volumes brings together experts from every discipline to show what the study of each epoch has to tell us about the family. Why is the family universal and yet so different in its various cultural manifestations? What notions of kinship regulate it, and how do these develop and change?
Françoise Zonabend's anthropological perspective on these questions, leading off Volume I, surveys familial terms and arrangements from familiar patrilinear models to matrilinear societies in Sumatra and Ghana to polyandry among the Nayar and the Toda of India. The following essays, which move from prehistory to antiquity to the middle ages, trace the evolution of the family from primate behavior to codified practices--in Sumer and Babylon and ancient Rome, in feudal Europe and medieval Byzantium, in China and Japan and Arab Islam--and relate these developments to religious, economic, and governmental concerns from land ownership to dynastic control and the maintenance of public order.
As the dominant political force in Lebanon and one of the most powerful post-Islamist organizations in the world, Hizbullah is a source of great controversy and uncertainty in the West. Despite the significant attention paid to this group by the media, the details of Hizbullah’s evolution have frequently confounded politicians—and even scholars. In this important study, Joseph Alagha, a scholar with unprecedented access to the organization, exhaustively and objectively analyzes Hizbullah’s historical evolution and offers a revolutionary new perspective on the political phenomenon of the organization.
In 1997 the United Kingdom returned control of Hong Kong to China, ending the city’s status as one of the last remnants of the British Empire and initiating a new phase for it as both a modern city and a hub for global migrations. Hong Kong is a tour of the city’s postcolonial urban landscape, innovatively told through fieldwork and photography.
Caroline Knowles and Douglas Harper’s point of entry into Hong Kong is the unusual position of the British expatriates who chose to remain in the city after the transition. Now a relatively insignificant presence, British migrants in Hong Kong have become intimately connected with another small minority group there: immigrants from Southeast Asia. The lives, journeys, and stories of these two groups bring to life a place where the past continues to resonate for all its residents, even as the city hurtles forward into a future marked by transience and transition. By skillfully blending ethnographic and visual approaches, Hong Kong offers a fascinating guide to a city that is at once unique in its recent history and exemplary of our globalized present.
Half a million Hong Kong residents fled their homeland during the thirteen years before Hong Kong's reversion to China in 1997. Nearly half of those returned within the next several years. Filled with detailed, first-hand stories of nine Hong Kong families over nearly two decades, Hong Kong Movers and Stayers is a multifaceted yet intimate look at the forces behind Hong Kong families' successful, and failed, efforts at migration and settlement.
Defining migration as a process, not a single act of leaving, Hong Kong Movers and Stayers provides an antidote to ethnocentric and simplistic theories by uncovering migration stories as they relate to social structures and social capital. The authors meld survey analysis, personal biography, and sociology and compare multiple families in order to give voice to the interplay of gender, age, and diverse family roles as motivating factors in migration.
Hot Towns is about the vast, current national relocation of one million Americans a year. Successful, accomplished, and well-financed people of all ages are moving to communities they view as choice—places distinguished by fine climate, physical beauty, abundant natural recreation resources, and minimal social problems and low crime. Towns in this elite roster include Santa Fe, Aspen, Boulder, Bozeman, Chapel Hill, East Hampton, and many others.
These American boom towns, Peter Wolf writes, have grown in jobs and population at two to three times the national average. But warning signs of deterioration are already evident: overbuilding, failing natural resources, rising taxes, and traffic congestion are all taking a toll on these communities. Rapid migration can enhance or swamp America’s fastest growing and most desirable communities
Wolf examines the choices that people in these areas can make to both effectively accommodate growth and yet ensure their economic futures. A wise town undergoing growth will realize that what must be preserved is not the growth in-and-for itself, but the qualities which attract people in the first place. Wolf demonstrates how it is possible—even during a town’s rapid expansion—to enhance the quality of residents’ lives, to incorporate aesthetics and design into town evolution, to protect what is precious in nature, and to preserve the best that has already been built.
Wolf concludes with a practical checklist for the residents of hot towns, allowing them to evaluate how their communities are coping with growth.
The Housing Act of 1949 called for a “decent home and suitable living environment” for every American. The progress toward this goal over the last fifty years is generally a story of success. Kent Colton documents the remarkable progress in the areas of housing production, homeownership, and rental housing, the transformation of the nation’s housing finance system, the role of government, and the place of housing in the economy. However, significant challenges remain and new issues have arisen.
This work looks to the future using case studies developed during the author’s fifteen-year tenure as head of the National Association of Home Builders and includes discussions of real-world problems and the people involved. Highlighting the process of developing and implementing housing policy given the great challenges of working with many diverse interests, the author outlines a housing policy framework based on a set of principles for achieving common ground.
A Chronicle of Higher Education “Top 10 Books on Teaching” Selection
Winner of the Virginia and Warren Stone Prize
Constrained by shrinking budgets, can colleges do more to improve the quality of education? And can students get more out of college without paying higher tuition? Daniel Chambliss and Christopher Takacs conclude that the limited resources of colleges and students need not diminish the undergraduate experience. How College Works reveals the surprisingly decisive role that personal relationships play in determining a student's collegiate success, and puts forward a set of small, inexpensive interventions that yield substantial improvements in educational outcomes.
“The book shares the narrative of the student experience, what happens to students as they move through their educations, all the way from arrival to graduation. This is an important distinction. [Chambliss and Takacs] do not try to measure what students have learned, but what it is like to live through college, and what those experiences mean both during the time at school, as well as going forward.”
—John Warner, Inside Higher Ed
Contributors. Victor Agadjanian, Boaventura Cau, José Miguel Cruz, Susan Eva Eckstein, Kyle Eischen, David Scott FitzGerald, Natasha Iskander, Riva Kastoryano, Cecilia Menjívar, Adil Najam, Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, Alejandro Portes, Min Ye
Of the some sixty thousand vacant properties in Philadelphia, half of them are abandoned row houses. Taken as a whole, these derelict homes symbolize the city’s plight in the wake of industrial decline. But a closer look reveals a remarkable new phenomenon—street-level entrepreneurs repurposing hundreds of these empty houses as facilities for recovering addicts and alcoholics. How It Works is a compelling study of this recovery house movement and its place in the new urban order wrought by welfare reform.
To find out what life is like in these recovery houses, Robert P. Fairbanks II goes inside one particular home in the Kensington neighborhood. Operating without a license and unregulated by any government office, the recovery house provides food, shelter, company, and a bracing self-help philosophy to addicts in an area saturated with drugs and devastated by poverty. From this starkly vivid close-up, Fairbanks widens his lens to reveal the intricate relationships the recovery houses have forged with public welfare, the formal drug treatment sector, criminal justice institutions, and the local government.
White identity in the United States is place bound, asserts George Lipsitz in How Racism Takes Place. An influential scholar in American and racial studies, Lipsitz contends that racism persists because a network of practices skew opportunities and life chances along racial lines. That is, these practices assign people of different races to different spaces and therefore allow grossly unequal access to education, employment, transportation, and shelter.
Revealing how seemingly race-neutral urban sites contain hidden racial assumptions and imperatives, Lipsitz examines the ways in which urban space and social experience are racialized and emphasizes that aggrieved communities do not passively acquiesce to racism. He recognizes the people and communities that have reimagined segregated spaces in expressive culture as places for congregation.
How Racism Takes Place not only exposes the degree to which this white spatial imagining structures our society but also celebrates the black artists and activists who struggle to create a just and decent society.
Since 1959 The John Harvard Library has been instrumental in publishing essential American writings in authoritative editions.
Jacob Riis’s pioneering work of photojournalism takes its title from Rabelais’s Pantagruel: “One half of the world knoweth not how the other half liveth; considering that no one has yet written of that Country.” An anatomy of New York City’s slums in the 1880s, it vividly brought home to its first readers through the powerful combination of text and images the squalid living conditions of “the other half,” who might well have inhabited another country. The book pricked the conscience of its readers and raised the tenement into a symbol of intransigent social difference. As Alan Trachtenberg makes clear in his introduction, it is a book that still speaks powerfully to us today of social injustice.
Except for the modernization of spelling and punctuation, the John Harvard Library edition of How the Other Half Lives reproduces the text of the first published book version of November 1890. For this edition, prints have been made from Riis’s original photographs now in the archives of the Museum of the City of New York. Endnotes aid the contemporary reader.
Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish is one of the best-selling works of critical theory and a key text on many undergraduate courses. However, it is a long, difficult text which makes Anne Schwan and Stephen Shapiro's excellent step-by-step reading guide a welcome addition to the How to Read Theory series.
Undergraduates across a wide range of disciplines are expected to have a solid understanding of Foucault's key terms, which have become commonplace in critical thinking today. While there are many texts that survey Foucault's thought, these are often more general overviews or biographical précis that give little in the way of robust explanation and discussion. In contrast, Schwan and Shapiro take a plain-speaking, yet detailed, approach, specifically designed to give students a thorough understanding of one of the most influential texts in contemporary cultural theory.
Victor Fuchs, author of Who Shall Live?, cuts through the hand wringing and the “pop” panaceas for America's current social crises in a brilliant analysis of the way we live. The facts are familiar. A doubled rate of divorce. A birth rate cut nearly in half while the percentage of illegitimate births nearly tripled. The young face dismal job prospects, and many of the old are totally dependent on the federal government.
Fuchs's economic approach shows us that the societal upheaval of American life is not created by fiat but rather emerges as millions of men and women make seemingly small choices that are constrained by their circumstances: “Should I go back to school?” “How many children should we have?” “When should I retire?” In a masterly synthesis, he shows the interrelatedness of our choices regarding family, work, health, and education throughout the life cycle. He uses the latest facts of American life to explore three major themes—the fading family, the impact of simple demographics on individual destiny, and the effect of weighing present and future costs and benefits on individual choice.
Fuchs concludes by offering innovative solutions to many contemporary problems: social security, health insurance, child care, youth unemployment, and illegitimate births. Moving beyond the outworn orthodoxies of liberalism and conservatism, he offers a clearer view of our circumstances so that readers from all walks of life can make better private choices, and contribute to more effective public policies.
Finding fresh fruits and vegetables is as easy as going to the grocery store for most Americans—which makes it all too easy to forget that our food is cultivated, harvested, and packaged by farmworkers who labor for less pay, fewer benefits, and under more dangerous conditions than workers in almost any other sector of the U.S. economy. Seeking to end the public's ignorance and improve workers' living and working conditions, this book addresses the major factors that affect farmworkers' lives while offering practical strategies for action on farmworker issues.
The contributors to this book are all farmworker advocates—student and community activists and farmworkers themselves. Focusing on workers in the Southeast United States, a previously understudied region, they cover a range of issues, from labor organizing, to the rise of agribusiness, to current health, educational, and legal challenges faced by farmworkers. The authors blend coverage of each issue with practical suggestions for working with farmworkers and other advocates to achieve justice in our food system both regionally and nationally.
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