This new edition of Patterson's widely used book carries the story of battles over poverty and social welfare through what the author calls the "amazing 1990s," those years of extraordinary performance of the economy. He explores a range of issues arising from the economic phenomenon--increasing inequality and demands for use of an improved poverty definition. He focuses the story on the impact of the highly controversial welfare reform of 1996, passed by a Republican Congress and signed by a Democratic President Clinton, despite the laments of anguished liberals.
Analyzes efforts to eliminate poverty during each U.S. president's administration from George Washington to Barack Obama, looking at why no president has been able to end poverty and challenges each has faced in his quest to do so.
Precise connections between race, poverty, and the condition of America's cities are drawn in this collection of seventeen essays. Policymakers and scholars from a variety of disciplines analyze the plight of the urban poor since the riots of the 1960s an
In this study Dr McKay examines the interaction between presidential policy preferences and the political environment, concentrating on welfare and urban policy and intergovernmental relations under Johnson, Nixon, Carter and Reagan. Throughout the work, McKay measures the independent influence of the White House on policy and draws conclusions for theories of American political development.
Is the United States a nation divided by the "color line," as W.E.B. Dubois declared? What is the impact of race on the lives of Americans today? In this powerful new assessment of the social reality of race, Reynolds Farley and Walter Allen compare demographic, social, and economic characteristics of blacks and whites to discover how and to what extent racial identity influences opportunities and outcomes in our society. They conclude that despite areas of considerable gain, black Americans continue to be substantially disadvantaged relative to whites. A Volume in the Russell Sage Foundation Census Series
The tide of 1960s political upheaval, while mistaken at the time by some as a unified assault against America carried out by revolutionaries at home and abroad, was actually hundreds of locally constructed expressions of political discourse, reflecting the influences of race, class, gender, and local conditions on each unique group of practitioners. This is a comparative study of how radicals at the local level staged, displayed, and ultimately narrated symbolic acts of performative violence against the symbols of the American system. The term performative violence refers to a method of public protest whereby participants create the conditions in which their violent actions become a political text, a powerful symbol with a strong historical precedent. Recognizing the textuality of history, this interdisciplinary examination deconstructs the performative violence within its historically specific and socially constructed contexts using four representative case histories of late 1960s and early 1970s activism. These are the African-American rioters in Kansas City, the Black Panther Party in Detroit, campus radicals at Kansas State University, and activists at the University of Kansas. Rather than focusing on the major clashes of the Vietnam era, this book contributes to recent scholarship on the 1960s which has attempted to offer a more textured analysis of the era's activism, particularly its political violence, based on more local studies.
Silent Film and the Triumph of the American Myth connects the rise of film and the rise of America as a cultural center and twentieth-century world power. Silent film, Paula Cohen reveals, allowed America to sever its literary and linguistic ties to Europe and answer the call by nineteenth-century writers like Emerson, Thoreau and Whitman for an original form of expression compatible with American strengths and weaknesses. When film finally began to talk in 1927, the medium had already done its work. It had helped translate representation into a dynamic visual form and had "Americanized" the world. Cohen explores the way film emerged as an American medium through its synthesis of three basic elements: the body, the landscape, and the face. Nineteenth-century American culture had already charged these elements with meaning--the body through vaudeville and burlesque, landscape through landscape painting and moving panoramas, and the face through portrait photography. Integrating these popular forms, silent film also developed genres that showcased each of its basic elements: the body in comedy, the landscape in the western, and the face in melodrama. At the same time, it helped produce a new idea of character, embodied in the American movie star. Cohen's book offers a fascinating new perspective on American cultural history. It shows how nineteenth-century literature can be said to anticipate twentieth-century film--how Douglas Fairbanks was, in a sense, successor to Walt Whitman. And rather than condemning the culture of celebrity and consumption that early Hollywood helped inspire, the book highlights the creative and democratic features of the silent-film ethos. Just as notable, Cohen champions the concept of the "American myth" in the wake of recent attempts to discredit it. She maintains that American silent film helped consolidate and promote a myth of possibility and self-making that continues to dominate the public imagination and stands behind the best impulses of our contemporary world.
