A chronological history of children's playtime over the last 200 years If you believe the experts, "child's play"; is serious business. From sociologists to psychologists and from anthropologists to social critics, writers have produced mountains of books about the meaning and importance of play. But what do we know about how children actually play, especially American children of the last two centuries? In this fascinating and enlightening book, Howard Chudacoff presents a history of children's play in the United States and ponders what it tells us about ourselves. Through expert investigation in primary sources-including dozens of children's diaries, hundreds of autobiographical recollections of adults, and a wealth of child-rearing manuals-along with wide-ranging reading of the work of educators, journalists, market researchers, and scholars-Chudacoff digs into the "underground" of play. He contrasts the activities that genuinely occupied children's time with what adults thought children should be doing. Filled with intriguing stories and revelatory insights, Children at Play provides a chronological history of play in the U.S. from the point of view of children themselves. Focusing on youngsters between the ages of about six and twelve, this is history "from the bottom up." It highlights the transformations of play that have occurred over the last 200 years, paying attention not only to the activities of the cultural elite but to those of working-class men and women, to slaves, and to Native Americans. In addition, the author considers the findings, observations, and theories of numerous social scientists along with those of fellow historians. Chudacoff concludes that children's ability to play independently has attenuated over time and that in our modern era this diminution has frequently had unfortunate consequences. By examining the activities of young people whom marketers today call "tweens," he provides fresh historical depth to current discussions about topics like childhood obesity, delinquency, learning disability, and the many ways that children spend their time when adults aren't looking.

This elegantly written book offers an unexpected and unprecedented account of blindness and sight. Legally blind since the age of eleven, Georgina Kleege draws on her experiences to offer a detailed testimony of visual, impairment -- both her own view of the world and the worlds view of the blind. "I hope to turn the reader's gaze outward, to say, not only Heres what I see but also 'Here's what you see, to show both what's unique and what's universal", Kleege writes.

Kleege describes the negative social status of the blind, analyzes stereotypes of the blind that have been perpetuated by movies, and discusses how blindness has been portrayed in literature. She vividly conveys the visual experience of someone with severely impaired sight and explains what she can see and what she cannot (and how her inability to achieve eye contact -- in a society that prizes that form of connection -- has affected her). Finally she tells of the various ways she reads, and the freedom she felt when she stopped concealing her blindness and acquired skills, such as reading braille, as part of a new, blind identity. Without sentimentality or cliches, Kleege offers us the opportunity to imagine life without sight.

Produced under the auspices of the "Section on the Sociology of Children and Youth of the American Sociological Association", this volume provides a cohesive, wide-ranging source of information on the life courses of children and youths. Contributions reflect: demographic analyses and projections; dualitative aspects of children's lives; children and youth in historical and cross-cultural perspective; issues of development in social context; children and public policy; and social and psychological dynamics of childhood and adolescence.

Born after 1940 and finishing higher education between 1965 and 1982, a generation of Russia's best, brightest, and most privileged came of age in the Brezhnev era. Using recently declassified archival material to uncover bother personal and professional beliefs, this study explores the formative experiences of this group, who now hold key positions in all parts of the government and society. Comparison of these official documents with letters, petitions, and complaints published in the Soviet press provides new insight into the dynamic interaction between the Brezhnev regime and Soviet times.

Confined by the Brezhnev regime's parameters and stability, young Soviet specialists developed an ethos that focused personally upon humanism and individualism, and professionally upon dignity and autonomy. Censored and manipulated, they came to hold a complex system of beliefs, frustrations, and expectations that stood in stark contrast to many of the ideals of the Soviet Union. Ruffley analyzes the ethos of this generation via the prism of domination-resistance studies to offer unique insight into a generation largely ignored by conventional historical inquiry.

In Middle-Class Pentecostalism in Argentina: Inappropriate Spirits Jens Koehrsen offers an intriguing account of how the middle class relates to Latin Americas most vibrant religious movement. Based on pervasive field research, this study suggests that Pentecostalism stands in tension with the social imaginary of the middle class and is perceived as an inappropriate lower class practice. As such, middle class Pentecostals negotiate the appropriateness of their religious belonging by demonstrating distinctive tastes and styles of Pentecostalism. Abstaining from the expressiveness, emotionality, and strong spiritual practice that have marked the movement, they create a milder and socially more acceptable form of Pentecostalism. Increasingly turning into a middle class movement, this style has the potential to embody the future shape of Pentecostalism.

This study focuses on a sample of occupational groups representative of the Mittelstand in the city of Hamburg - white-collar workers, artisans, retailers, civil servants and house owners - and examines the strains imposed by the infaltionary conditions on each group, seriously questioning the commonly-held interpretation of the Infaltion's effects and chronology.

The volumes in this set, originally published between 1933 and 1988, come from sociology, politics, philosophy, economics, health and education. They: Explore a particular level at which the concept of equality must be applied if educational equality is to be realised. Present a philosophical analysis of the principle of equality. Provide a detailed examination of the correlation between health and wealth, or ill-health and deprivation in Britain. Include an important contribution to the study of social mobility in Australia. Evaluate the effects of converting rental housing into owner occupancy in the USA, the UK and Germany. Presents a detailed empirical analysis of the key dimensions of inequality and poverty in Wales.

Donald Woods Winnicott started his career as a pediatrician and later became a psychoanalyst and child psychiatrist. His legacy includes some of the most highly regarded books in the literature on child care and development. Alexander Newman's book provides an accessible, in-depth and comprehensive analysis, the result of twenty years work. This companion to Winnicott provides a glossary of terms commonly referred to in Winnicott's writings in alphabetical order for the reader's convenience, making it a valuable reference and teaching tool. Offering a stunning opportunity to travel into worlds of great imaginative interest, "Non Compliance in Winnicott's Words" is sure to be of interest to those studying early emotional development and the world of D.W. Winnicott.

High-risk youth are rarely able to succeed in school, on the job, in their family relationships, or in society at large. They often express hopelessness, frustration, anger. Even after they have acquired skills and have begun to work, they tend to lose jobs, fail again in schools, and become involved in crimes. There is a noted connection between youth who come from dysfunctional families and have low academic skills, nonexistent career goals, poor work history, drug and/or alcohol abuse, and involvement with the juvenile justice system.

Ivan C. Frank explains the need for longer term alternative educational programs in highly supportive environments for high-risk youth. He describes the features and coverage of programs in Israel and in some American cities that have rehabilitated high-risk youth.

Handbook of the Psychology of Aging, Eighth Edition, tackles the biological and environmental influences on behavior as well as the reciprocal interface between changes in the brain and behavior during the course of the adult life span. The psychology of aging is important to many features of daily life, from workplace and the family, to public policy matters. It is complex, and new questions are continually raised about how behavior changes with age. Providing perspectives on the behavioral science of aging for diverse disciplines, the handbook explains how the role of behavior is organized and how it changes over time. Along with parallel advances in research methodology, it explicates in great detail patterns and sub-patterns of behavior over the lifespan, and how they are affected by biological, health, and social interactions. New topics to the eighth edition include preclinical neuropathology, audition and language comprehension in adult aging, cognitive interventions and neural processes, social interrelations, age differences in the connection of mood and cognition, cross-cultural issues, financial decision-making and capacity, technology, gaming, social networking, and more.

[T]he book is splendid. Wortzel combines his expertise in Sinology with his meticulous attention to epistemology and methodology in studying the class structure and stratification in Maoist China, accomplishing the rare feat of freeing himself from ideological bias and parochial ethnic subjectivity. . . . It is indeed refreshing to read Wortzel's realistic book. Journal of Third World Studies Although the hierarchy of class is said to have been replaced with distinctions between the friends and enemies of Communism, Larry Wortzel argues that the Chinese Communist Party has in reality evolved into a ruling class which serves its own interests. Drawing on literature from dissident Marxists and using analyses of writings from underground journals and the Beijing publication People's Literature, the author examines perceptions of social stratification and finds that the determinants of social and economic standing now appear to depend on lines of management and authority, residence in urban or rural areas, and Party membership, especially when combined with positions of authority This work presents one of the first comprehensive analyses of the class system in socialist China as it exists in practice rather as conceived in theory.

The immigration of Muslims to Europe and the integration of later generations presents many challenges to European societies. Unwanted builds on five years of ethnographic research with a group of fifty-five second-generation Muslim immigrant drug dealers in Frankfurt, Germany to examine the relationship between immigration, social exclusion, and the informal economy. Having spent countless hours with these young men, hanging out in the streets, in cafes or bars and at the local community center, Sandra Bucerius explores the intimate aspects of their, one of the most discriminated and excluded populations in Germany. Bucerius looks at how the young men negotiate their participation in the drug market while still trying to adhere to their cultural and religious obligations and how they struggle to find a place within German society. The young men considered their involvement in the drug trade a response to their exclusion at the same time that it provides a means of forging an identity and a place within German society. The insights into the lives, hopes, and dreams of these young men, who serve as an example for many Muslim and otherwise marginalized immigrant youth groups in Western countries, provides the context necessary to understand their actions while never obscuring the many contradictory facets of their lives.

This book analyses the decollectivization reform in China during the early 1980s in order to gauge the impact of post-Mao decentralization on central control and provincial discretion. The volume challenges the notion that the decision to decentralize administrative authority ipso facto produces local discretion properly keyed to local conditions. In fact, outcomes often differ from the intended goals. While, generally, local interests and central-local clientilistic networks determine the policy responses of the provinces, bureaucratic careerism also plays a crucial role. In the case of post-Mao decollectivization, national-level analyses suggest that a majority of provinces adopted household farming neither too quickly nor too slowly, since both 'pioneering' and 'resisting' entailed potentially enormous political risks. Once Beijing's preference appeared firmly fixed, however, they all quickly bandwagoned by popularizing the policy as swiftly as possible. Three detailed case studies of Anhui as a pioneer, Shandong as a bandwagoner, and Heilongjiang as a resister further highlight the evolutionary process in which provincial variations came to be replaced by uniform compliance imposed by Beijing. Theoretically, this study contends that the overall scope of local discretion is circumscribed by the dominant norms and incentive relations embedded in the implementation dynamics. Methodologically, the book employs a combination of aggregate analyses and comparative case studies. Empirically, on the basis of newly available materials (including classified documents) and interviews, it challenges the 'peasant-power' school which has somehow allowed local governments to evaporate in its descriptions of post-Mao decollectivization.

This book focuses on urban crime and policing in Turkey since the steady economic decline of the 1990s. Concentrating on the attempts to 'modernize' the policing of Izmir, Zeynep Gonen highlights how the police force expanded their territorial control over the urban space, specifically targeting the poor and racialized segments of the city. Through in-depth interviews and ethnographic observations of these 'targeted' populations, as well as rare ethnographic data from the Turkish police, surveys of the media and politicians' rhetoric, Gonen shows how Kurdish migrants have been criminalized as dangerous 'enemies' of the order. In studying the ideological and material processes of criminalization, The Politics of Crime in Turkey makes the case for the neoliberal politics of crime that uses the notion of 'security' to legitimize violence and authoritarianism. The book will be of interest to criminologists, as well as those investigating the modern Turkish state and its relationship to the Kurds in the wider region. The multilayered methodology and conceptual approach sheds light on parallel developments in penal and security systems across the globe.

This volume presents a balanced survey of children and violence in the United States-specifically those children who commit acts such as murder, rape, and assault. The physical, cultural, social, economic, and legal aspects of this pressing issue are explored in detail in Violent Children. Topics include the causes of these acts and what is being done to cope with and prevent this violence. Statistical information, intervention programs, and a list of print and nonprint resources are provided. This is an important reference work for students, parents, child advocacy groups, educators, law enforcement personnel, legislators, and other policy makers.

The longstanding European conception that Roma and non-Roma are separated by unambiguous socio-cultural distinctions has led to the construction of Roma as "non-belonging others." Challenging this conception, Textures of Belonging explores how Roma negotiate and feel belonging at the everyday level. Inspired by material culture, sensorial anthropology, and human geography approaches, this book uses ethnographic research to examine the role of domestic material forms and their sensorial qualities in nurturing connections with people and places that transcend socio-political boundaries.

Coming Home to New Orleans documents grassroots rebuilding efforts in New Orleans neighborhoods after hurricane Katrina, and draws lessons on their contribution to the post-disaster recovery of cities. The book begins with two chapters that address Katrina's impact and the planning and public sector recovery policies that set the context for neighborhood recovery. Rebuilding narratives for six New Orleans neighborhoods are then presented and analyzed. In the heavily flooded Broadmoor and Village de L'Est neighborhoods, residents coalesced around communitywide initiatives, one through a neighborhood association and the second under church leadership, to help homeowners return and restore housing, get key public facilities and businesses rebuilt and create new community-based organizations and civic capacity. A comparison of four adjacent neighborhoods in the center of the city show how differing socioeconomic conditions, geography, government policies and neighborhood capacity created varied recovery trajectories. The concluding chapter argues that grassroots and neighborhood scale initiatives can make important contributions to city recovery in four areas: repopulation, restoring "complete neighborhoods " with key services and amenities, rebuilding parts of the small business economy and enhancing recovery capacity. It also calls for more balanced investments and policies to rebuild rental and owner-occupied housing and more deliberate collaboration with community-based organizations to undertake and implement recovery plans, and proposes changes to federal disaster recovery policies and programs to leverage the contribution of grassroots rebuilding and more support for city recovery.

Internationalism is generally considered to be a major feature of the labour movement, and to hold a far more powerful appeal for workers' organizations than national identity. However, this revisionist book argues that, in fact, it is the national dimension which is of utmost importance to workers' organizations, and that national questions have often compelled workers to engage in struggles on different levels. Through detailed case studies of trade union involvement in Northern Ireland, Italy, Spain, Belgium, Austria and Europe generally, contributors tackle subjects long neglected by labour historians and overturn the accepted wisdom that nationalism and the labour movement are irreconcilably opposed. This analysis of how international agendas are influenced by nationalist politics is unique, and the case-studies offer a dynamic description of the different ways in which nationalist values meet with trade union ideas and practices.The high standard of scholarship and the combination of historical and contemporary material make this book essential reading for students and researchers of labour history, politics, political theory and area studies.

Youth Identities and Social Transformations in Modern Indonesia addresses current struggles and opportunities facing Indonesia's youth across the archipelago. Contributions to this volume delve into youth aspirations and their everyday lives - education; friendship; work; leisure; sexuality; religion - described through the lens of the young people themselves.

The Natal Midlands was ravaged by conflict in the 1980s and 1990s between supporters of the United Democratic Front and Inkatha. The violence left thousands of people dead, injured, homeless and emotionally wounded. This book provides a historical study of the origins, causes and nature of political violence in the rural community of KwaShange in the Vulindlela district. This was one of the areas most affected by the political violence in the Natal Midlands, but it has been the subject of only patchy and partial investigation.

Mxolisi Mchunu threads individual and local factors with regional and national forces and, through a local study, explains to great effect the political violence that rocked parts of Natal in that period. The account offers the testimony of survivors and the effect of the violence on community members in the ensuing years. One central contention is that the influence of the violence was transmitted across generations and sexes, through whole families and communities. Mchunu tells a story of ordinary people caught up in the cycle of revenge and despair in the killing fields of the Natal Midlands.

The book compares different approaches to urban development in Singapore and Seoul over the past decades, by focusing on community participation in the transformation of neighbourhoods and its impact on the built environment and communal life. Singapore and Seoul are known for their rapid economic growth and urbanisation under a strong control of developmental state in the past. However, these cities are at a critical crossroads of societal transformation, where participatory and community-based urban development is gaining importance. This new approach can be seen as a result of a changing relationship between the state and civil society, where an emerging partnership between both aims to overcome the limitations of earlier urban development. The book draws attention to the possibilities and challenges that these cities face while moving towards a more inclusive and socially sustainable post-developmental urbanisation. By applying a comparative perspective to understand the evolving urban paradigms in Singapore and Seoul, this unique and timely book offers insights for scholars, professionals and students interested in contemporary Asian urbanisation and its future trajectories.

This volume contributes to the ongoing interdisciplinary controversies about the moral, legal and political status of children and childhood. It comprises essays by scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds on diverse theoretical problems and public policy controversies that bear upon different facets of the life of children in contemporary liberal democracies. The book is divided into three major parts that are each organized around a common general theme. The first part ("Children and Childhood: Autonomy, Well-Being and Paternalism") focusses on key concepts of an ethics of childhood. Part two ("Justice for Children") contains chapters that are concerned with the topics of justice for children and justice during childhood. The third part ("The Politics of Childhood") deals with issues that concern the importance of `childhood as a historically contingent political category and its relevance for the justification and practical design of political processes and institutions that affect children and families.

The world of modern capitalism is a global network both of corporations and of cities - 'world command cities' such as New York, London and Tokyo; 'specialized command cities' which concentrate on particular industries, such as Detroit; 'state command cities' such as Washington and Brasilia; and so on. These cities, linked by an organizational web of transnational corporations, are the pins holding the capitalist world economy together in the new international division of labour.
In The Capitalist City a group of eminent scholars analyzes the intricate relationships among cities, state policies and urban politics at a time of economic restructuring at global, national and local levels to provide an original and timely contribution to one of the most important areas of political and social science.

The subject of midlife has been dominated by the woes of aging--menopause, divorce, hormone replacement therapies, aging parents, and fleeing children. Now a broad-ranging new work by clinical psychologist Linda N. Edelstein, Ph.D., "The Art of Midlife," describes the freedom and authenticity that can be made a cornerstone of the middle years. She describes three healthy and predictable phases. First, women relinquish old ways, untying themselves from the past and mourning the losses of youth and its illusions. By placing less emphasis on the needs of others, women can live more creatively and enjoy the present. The women Dr. Edelstein studied have been able to move to the next step, in which they reconnect to themselves. They regain their authentic voices, simplify life, and allow long buried aspects of themselves to emerge. Finally, women refocus their futures. With courage, they embrace new people, ideas, activities, and work--and pursue adult dreams regardless of external rewards.