An insightful collection of essays focused on American men, women, and children from a range of economic classes and ethnic backgrounds during the Great Depression. Who were the people waiting in the bread lines and living in Hoovervilles? Who were the migrants heading North and West? Did anyone survive the Depression relatively unscathed? Giving a voice to stories often untold, Great Depression: People and Perspectives covers the full spectrum of American life, portraying the experiences of ordinary citizens during the worst economic crisis in the nation's history. Great Depression shows how specific groups coped with the traumatic upheaval of the times, including rural Americans, women, children, African Americans, and immigrants. In addition, it offers revealing chapters on the conflict between social scientists and policymakers responding to the crisis, the impact of the Depression on the health of U.S. citizens, and the roles that American technology and Hollywood movies played in helping the nation survive. 11 expert contributors, including well-established scholars who bring new perspectives to the study of the Great Depression A wide range of primary sources such as news articles, photographs, diaries, and letters that provide a deeper understanding of daily life during the Depression

Addresses the relationships between what modern-day experts say to each other and to their constituencies Technical Knowledge in American Culture addresses the relationships between what modern-day experts say to each other and to their constituencies and whether what they say and do relates to the larger culture, society, and era. These essays challenge the social impact model by looking at science, technology, and medicine not as social activities but as intellectual activities.

Between the 1920s and the 1950s, the child welfare movement that had originated as a moral reform effort in the Progressive era evolved into the science of child development. In "Before Head Start," Hamilton Cravens chronicles this transformation, both on the national level and from the perspective of the field's best-known research center, the University of Iowa's Child Welfare Research Station. Addressing the changing role played by women and the importance of Rockefeller philanthropy, he shows how a women's reform movement became a male-dominated, conservative profession and demonstrates how lay pressure groups can influence the structures and processes of science.

Animated by the reformist goals of the child welfare movement, scientists at the Iowa Station challenged the pervasive idea that an individual's development was determined by such group traits as race, class, and gender. Instead, their research suggested that early social intervention could rescue a child from a grim future. Cravens argues that this individualistic perspective, rejected in the 1940s by a scientific community that mirrored society's deterministic notions, anticipated the national social reforms of the post-1950s era, including Head Start.

Americans have benefited from substantial improvements in health since the end of World War II. They live longer and grow taller; they have the safest and cheapest food supply on the planet; they have seen virtually all childhood diseases brought under control. Yet concerns about health remain widespread today. Cancer seems to be everywhere; autoimmune, nervous, and environmental diseases have reached pandemic proportions; medical malpractice suits have proliferated.

How can we have received so many benefits while still being as worried as ever about our health and the health care system established to ensure and extend those benefits? The historical perspective provided by the essays in this volume helps answer this question by identifying two points of significant change in health care policy. Beginning in the 1950s there emerged a subtle yet critical reconceptualization as the individual rather than the group came to figure prominently as the central policy-making unit. Then in the late 1960s a palpable sense of limits rendered the individualism of the previous decade into a Malthusian formulation: the greater the access or benefits that any one person received, the less others could get. Besides tracing these patterns in health care development, the essays also show how traditional notions of expertise have been affected by the changes. Contributors are Amy Sue Bix, Hamilton Cravens, Gerald N. Grob, Alan I Marcus, Diane Paul, David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz, and James Harvey Young.