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This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
New York's Newsboys is a lively historical account of Charles Loring Brace's founding and development of the Children's Aid Society to combat a newly emerging social problem, youth homelessness, during the nineteenth century. Poor children slept on the docks, pilfered, and peddled cheap wares to survive, activities which frequently landed them in prison-like juvenile asylums. Brace offered a radical alternative, the Newsboys' Lodging House. From there he launched a network of additional programs, each respecting his clients' free will, contrasting with the policing interventions favored by other reformers. Over four decades Brace built a comprehensive child welfare agency which sought to alleviate suffering, prevent delinquency, and divert children from a life of poverty. Using primary documents and analysis of over 700 original CAS case records, New York's Newsboys offers a new way to look at the foundational roots of social work and child welfare in the United States. In this book, Karen Staller argues that the significance of this chapter in history to the profession, the city of New York, and the country has been under appreciated.
This updated edition includes a new afterword that identifies the role the Buck story plays in the Supreme Court's review of emerging state laws that seek to limit access to abortion. "Three generations of imbeciles are enough." Few lines from U.S. Supreme Court opinions are as memorable as this declaration by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. in the landmark 1927 case Buck v. Bell. The ruling allowed states to forcibly sterilize residents in order to prevent "feebleminded and socially inadequate" people from having children. It is the only time the Supreme Court endorsed surgery as a tool of government policy. Though Buck set the stage for more than sixty thousand involuntary sterilizations in the United States and was cited at the Nuremberg trials in defense of Nazi sterilization experiments, it has never been overturned. It has been more than a decade since Paul A. Lombardo's classic Three Generations, No Imbeciles first exposed the Buck case's fraudulent roots. During that time, several of the remaining twentieth-century eugenic sterilization statutes have finally been repealed, and reparations to sterilization survivors have been paid in two states. Discussion of the Buck case has once again engendered controversy in the courts. The Wisconsin Supreme Court invoked Buck most recently in a debate over the power of the state to enact restrictions on citizens and businesses during the COVID-19 crisis, and the US Supreme Court cited Three Generations, No Imbeciles in arguments over the newest state laws seeking to limit access to abortion. This updated edition collects and analyzes information related to events and trends discussed in the earlier volume and includes a completely new afterword, "Looking Back at Buck," that explains how the case remains a key feature of public discourse about disability, government power, and reproductive rights. It also presents restored copies of the letters of Carrie Buck and points readers to an online archive of legal documents, images, and other material relevant to the case. The book remains a key resource for law school faculties, legal and medical historians, and anyone with an interest in the history of reproduction in the United States. "Startling."—Reason "Compelling and well-researched . . . Three Generations, No Imbeciles gives Carrie Buck's long-untold story the attention it deserves."—Harvard Law Review "Three Generations provides valuable, new, and timely revelations for students and professional scholars across many disciplines."—Disability Studies Quarterly "Meticulously detailed and researched history . . . this book is enjoyable, thought provoking, and troubling in equal measure. I highly recommend it."—Psychiatric Services
The American urban scene, and in particular New York's, has given us a rich cultural legacy of slang words and phrases, a bonanza of popular speech. Hot dog, rush hour, butter-and-egg man, gold digger, shyster, buttinsky, smart aleck, sidewalk superintendent, yellow journalism, breadline, straphanger, tar beach, the Tenderloin, the Great White Way, to do a Brodie--these are just a few of the hundreds of popular words and phrases that were born or took on new meaning in the streets of New York. In The City in Slang, Irving Lewis Allen traces this flowering of popular expressions that accompanied the emergence of the New York metropolis from the early nineteenth century down to the present. This unique account of the cultural and social history of America's greatest city provides in effect a lexicon of popular speech about city life. With many stories Allen shows how this vocabulary arose from city streets, often interplaying with vaudeville, radio, movies, comics, and the popular songs of Tin Pan Alley. Some terms of great pertinence to city people today have unexpectedly old pedigrees. Rush hour was coined by 1890, for instance, and rubberneck dates to the late 1890s and became popular in New York to describe the busloads of tourists who craned their necks to see the tall buildings and the sights of the Bowery and Chinatown. The Big Apple itself (since 1971 the official nickname of New York) appeared in the 1920s, though first in reference to the city's top racetracks and to Broadway bookings as pinnacles of professional endeavor. Allen also tells fascinating stories behind once-popular slang that is no longer in use. Spielers, for example, were the little girls in tenement districts who danced ecstatically on the sidewalks to the music of the hurdy-gurdy men and, when they were old enough, frequented the dance halls of the Lower East Side. Following the trail of these words and phrases into the city's East Side, West Side, and all around the town, from Harlem to Wall Street, and into the haunts of its high and low life, The City in Slang is a fascinating look at the rich cultural heritage of language about city life.
This volume examines a diverse set of spaces and buildings seen through the lens of popular practice and belief to shed light on the complexities of sacred space in America. Contributors explore how dedication sermons document shifting understandings of the meetinghouse in early 19th-century Connecticut; the changes in evangelical church architecture during the same century and what that tells us about evangelical religious life; the impact of contemporary issues on Catholic church architecture; the impact of globalization on the construction of traditional sacred spaces; the urban practice of Jewish space; nature worship and Central Park in New York; the mezuzah and domestic sacred space; and, finally, the spiritual aspects of African American yard art.
Child abuse policy in the United States contains dangerous contradictions, which have only intensified as the public slowly accepted it as a middle class problem. One contradiction is the rapidly expanding child abuse industry (made up of enterprising psychotherapists and attorneys) which is consuming enormous resources, while thousands of poor children are seriously injured or killed, many while being "protected" by public agencies. This "rediscovery" has also led to the frenzied pursuit of offenders, resulting in the sacrifice of some innocent people. Moreover, the media's focus on the sensational details of high-visibility sexual abuse cases has helped to trivialize, if not commercialize, the child abuse problem. As such, child abuse has gone from a social problem to a social spectacle. By the 1980s the child welfare system had become a virtual "nonsystem," marked by a staggering turnover of staff, unmanageable caseloads, a severe shortage of funding, and caseloads composed of highly dysfunctional families (many with drug-related problems). To make room for these families, public agencies rationed services by increasingly screening-out child abuse reports which contained little likelihood of serious bodily harm. In The Politics of Child Abuse in America, the authors argue that child abuse must be viewed as a public safety problem. This redefinition would make it congruent with other family-based social trends, including the crackdown on domestic violence. Children must have the same legal protection currently extended to physically and sexually abused women. This can be done by creating a "Children's Authority," which would have the overall charge for protecting children. Specifically, Children's Authorities would have the responsibility for providing the six main functions of child protection: investigation, enforcement, placement services, prevention and education, family support, and research and development. Offering a unique perspective on the cold reality of this crisis, The Politics of Child Abuse in America will be a provocative work for social workers and human service personnel, as well as the general reader concerned with this timely issue.
