|
Showing 1 - 15 of
15 matches in All Departments
At 1:27 on the morning of August 4, 2005, Herbert Manes fatally
stabbed Robert Monroe, known as Shorty, in a dispute over five
dollars. It was a horrific yet mundane incident for the poor,
heavily African American neighborhood of North Philadelphia-one of
seven homicides to occur in the city that day and yet not make the
major newspapers. For Michael B. Katz, an urban historian and a
juror on the murder trial, the story of Manes and Shorty
exemplified the marginalization, social isolation, and indifference
that plague American cities. Introduced by the gripping narrative
of this murder and its circumstances, Why Don't American Cities
Burn? charts the emergence of the urban forms that underlie such
events. Katz traces the collision of urban transformation with the
rightward-moving social politics of late twentieth- and early
twenty-first-century America. He shows how the bifurcation of black
social structures produced a new African American inequality and
traces the shift from images of a pathological black "underclass"
to praise of the entrepreneurial poor who take advantage of new
technologies of poverty work to find the beginning of the path to
the middle class. He explores the reasons American cities since the
early 1970s have remained relatively free of collective violence
while black men in bleak inner-city neighborhoods have turned their
rage inward on one another rather than on the agents and symbols of
a culture and political economy that exclude them. The book ends
with a meditation on how the political left and right have come to
believe that urban transformation is inevitably one of failure and
decline abetted by the response of government to
deindustrialization, poverty, and race. How, Katz asks, can we
construct a new narrative that acknowledges the dark side of urban
history even as it demonstrates the capacity of government to
address the problems of cities and their residents? How can we
create a politics of modest hope?
For Michael B. Katz, the term "welfare state" describes the
intricate web of government programs, employer-provided benefits,
and semiprivate organizations intended to promote economic security
and to guarantee the basic necessities of life for all citizens:
food, shelter, medical care, protection in childhood, and support
in old age. In this updated edition of his seminal work "The Price
of Citizenship," Katz traces the evolution of the welfare state
from colonial relief programs through the war on poverty and into
our own age, marked by the "end of welfare as we know it."Katz
argues that in the last decades, three great forces--a ferocious
war on dependence, which has singled out the most vulnerable; the
devolution of authority within both government and the private
sector; and the application of market models to social policy--have
permeated all aspects of the social contract. "The Price of
Citizenship" shows how these changes have propelled America toward
a future of increased inequality and decreased security as
individuals compete for success in an open market with ever fewer
protections against misfortune, power, and greed. A new chapter,
written for this edition, explains how these trends continue in the
post-9/11 era and how the response to Hurricane Katrina exposed the
weaknesses of America's social safety net.Offering grounds for
modest optimism, the new chapter also points to countervailing
trends that may modify and even partially reverse the effects of
recent welfare history.
Proponents of education reform are committed to the idea that
all children should receive a quality education, and that all of
them have a capacity to learn and grow, whatever their ethnicity or
economic circumstances. But though recent years have seen numerous
reform efforts, the resources available to children in different
municipalities still vary enormously, and despite landmark cases of
the civil rights movement and ongoing pushes to enact diverse and
inclusive curricula, racial and ethnic segregation remain
commonplace. "Public Education Under Siege" examines why public
schools are in such difficult straits, why the reigning ideology of
school reform is ineffective, and what can be done about it."Public
Education Under Siege" argues for an alternative to the
test-driven, market-oriented core of the current reform agenda.
Chapters from education policy experts and practitioners critically
examine the overreliance on high-stakes testing, which narrows the
content of education and frustrates creative teachers, and consider
how to restore a more civic-centered vision of education in place
of present dependence on questionable economistic models. These
short, jargon-free essays cover public policy, teacher unions,
economic inequality, race, language diversity, parent involvement,
and leadership, collectively providing an overview of the present
system and its limitations as well as a vision for the fulfillment
of a democratic, egalitarian system of public
education.Contributors: Joanne Barkan, Maia Cucchiara, Ansley T.
Erickson, Eugene E. Garcia, Eva Gold, Jeffrey R. Henig, Tyrone C.
Howard, Richard D. Kahlenberg, Harvey Kantor, Michael B. Katz,
David F. Labaree, Julia C. Lamber, Robert Lowe, Deborah Meier,
Pedro Noguera, Rema Reynolds, Claire Robertson-Kraft, Jean C.
Robinson, Mike Rose, Janelle Scott, Elaine Simon, Paul
Skilton-Sylvester, Joi A. Spencer, Heather Ann Thompson, Tina
Trujillo, Pamela Barnhouse Walters, Kevin G. Welner, Sarah
Woulfin.
"There is unanimity among these historians and sociologists in
ascribing seminal importance to "The Philadelphia Negro.""--David
Levering Lewis, "Journal of American History" "A splendid
collection of essays."--"Times Literary Supplement" In 1896 W. E.
B. Du Bois began research that resulted three years later in the
publication of his great classic of urban sociology and history,
"The Philadelphia Negro." Today, a group of the nation's leading
historians and sociologists celebrate the centenary of his project
through a reappraisal of his book. Motivated by Du Bois's deeply
humane vision of racial equality, the contributors draw on
ethnography, intellectual and social history, and statistical
analysis to situate Du Bois and his pioneering study in the
intellectual milieu of the late nineteenth century, consider his
contributions to the subsequent social scientific and historical
studies of the city, and assess the contemporary meaning of his
work. Together these essays show that "The Philadelphia Negro"
remains as vital and relevant a book at the end of the twentieth
century as it was at the start. Contributors include Elijah
Anderson, Mia Bay, V. P. Franklin, Robert Gregg, Thomas C. Holt,
Tera W. Hunter, Jacqueline Jones, Antonio McDaniel, and Carl
Husemoller Nightingale. "This book not only reassesses the role of
W. E. B. Du Bois as a public intellectual but reappraises the
impact of his seminal study on interpretations of the
twentieth-century African-American experience. . . . It offers an
interdisciplinary critique that will shape scholarship in the
twenty-first century."--Joe W. Trotter, Mellon Bank Professor of
History, Carnegie Mellon University
Do ominous reports of an emerging "underclass" reveal an
unprecedented crisis in American society? Or are social
commentators simply rediscovering the tragedy of recurring urban
poverty, as they seem to do every few decades? Although social
scientists and members of the public make frequent assumptions
about these questions, they have little information about the
crucial differences between past and present. By providing a badly
needed historical context, these essays reframe today's
"underclass" debate. Realizing that labels of "social pathology"
echo fruitless distinctions between the "deserving" and
"undeserving" poor, the contributors focus not on individual and
family behavior but on a complex set of processes that have been at
work over a long period, degrading the inner cities and,
inevitably, the nation as a whole.
How do individuals among the urban poor manage to survive? How
have they created a dissident "infrapolitics?" How have social
relations within the urban ghettos changed? What has been the
effect of industrial restructuring on poverty? Besides exploring
these questions, the contributors discuss the influence of African
traditions on the family patterns of African Americans, the origins
of institutions that serve the urban poor, the reasons for the
crisis in urban education, the achievements and limits of the War
on Poverty, and the role of income transfers, earnings, and the
contributions of family members in overcoming poverty. The message
of the essays is clear: Americans will flourish or fail
together.
"There are places where history feels irrelevant, and America's
inner cities are among them," acknowledges Michael Katz, in
expressing the tensions between activism and scholarship. But this
major historian of urban poverty realizes that the pain in these
cities has its origins in the American past. To understand
contemporary poverty, he looks particularly at an old attitude:
because many nineteenth-century reformers traced extreme poverty to
drink, laziness, and other forms of bad behavior, they tried to use
public policy and philanthropy to improve the character of poor
people, rather than to attack the structural causes of their
misery. Showing how this misdiagnosis has afflicted today's welfare
and educational systems, Katz draws on his own experiences to
introduce each of four topics--the welfare state, the "underclass"
debate, urban school reform, and the strategies of survival used by
the urban poor. Uniquely informed by his personal involvement, each
chapter also illustrates the interpretive power of history by
focusing on a strand of social policy in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries: social welfare from the poorhouse era through
the New Deal, ideas about urban poverty from the undeserving poor
to the "underclass," and the emergence of public education through
the radical school reform movement now at work in Chicago.
Why have American governments proved unable to redesign a
welfare system that will satisfy anyone? Why has public policy
proved unable to eradicate poverty and prevent the deterioration of
major cities? What strategies have helped poor people survive the
poverty endemic to urban history? How did urban schools become
unresponsive bureaucracies that fail to educate most of their
students? Are there fresh, constructive ways to think about
welfare, poverty, and public education? Throughout the book Katz
shows how interpretations of the past, grounded in analytic
history, can free us of comforting myths and help us to reframe
discussions of these great public issues.
The revised and updated third edition of The Making of Urban
America includes seven new articles and a richly detailed
historiographical essay that discusses the vast urban history
literature added to the canon since the publication of the second
edition. The authors' extensively revised introductions and the
fifteen reprinted articles trace urban development from the
preindustrial city to the twentieth-century city. With emphasis on
the social, economic, political, commercial, and cultural aspects
of urban history, these essays illustrate the growth and change
that created modern-day urban life. Dynamic topics such as
technology, immigration and ethnicity, suburbanization, sunbelt
cities, urban political history, and planning and housing are
examined. The Making of Urban America is the only reader available
that covers all of U.S. urban history and that also includes the
most recent interpretive scholarship on the subject.
The Five is an captivating novel of the decadent fin-de-siecle
written by Vladimir Jabotinsky (1880-1940), a controversial leader
in the Zionist movement whose literary talents, until now, have
largely gone unrecognized by Western readers. The author deftly
paints a picture of Russia's decay and decline - a world permeated
with sexuality, mystery, and intrigue. Michael R. Katz has crafted
the first English-language translation of this important novel,
which was written in Russian in 1935 and published a year later in
Paris under the title Pyatero. The book is Jabotinsky's elegaic
paean to the Odessa of his youth, a place that no longer exists. It
tells the story of an upper-middle-class Jewish family, the
Milgroms, at the turn of the century. It follows five siblings as
they change, mature, and come to accept their places in a rapidly
evolving world. With flashes of humor, Jabotinsky captures the
ferment of the time as reflected in political, social, artistic,
and spiritual developments. He depicts with nostalgia the
excitement of life in old Odessa and comments poignantly on the
failure of the dream of Jewish assimilation within the Russian
empire.
First published in 1989, The Undeserving Poor was a critically
acclaimed and enormously influential account of America's enduring
debate about poverty. Taking stock of the last quarter century,
Michael B. Katz's new edition of this classic is virtually a new
book. As the first did, it will force all concerned Americans to
reconsider the foundations of our policies toward the poor,
especially in the wake of the Great Recession that began in 2008.
Katz highlights how throughout American history, the poor have been
regarded as undeserving: people who do not deserve sympathy because
they brought their poverty on themselves, either through laziness
and immorality, or because they are culturally or mentally
deficient. This long-dominant view sees poverty as a personal
failure, serving to justify America's mean-spirited treatment of
the poor. Katz reminds us, however, that there are other
explanations of poverty besides personal failure. Poverty has been
written about as a problem of place, of resources, of political
economy, of power, and of market failure. Katz looks at each idea
in turn, showing how they suggest more effective approaches to our
struggle against poverty. The Second Edition includes important new
material. It now sheds light on the revival of the idea of culture
in poverty research; the rehabilitation of Daniel Patrick Moynihan;
the resurgent role of biology in discussions of the causes of
poverty, such as in The Bell Curve; and the human rights movement's
intensified focus on alleviating world poverty. It emphasizes the
successes of the War on Poverty and Great Society, especially at
the grassroots level. It is also the first book to chart the rise
and fall of the "underclass" as a concept driving public policy. A
major revision of a landmark study, The Undeserving Poor helps
readers to see poverty-and our efforts to combat it-in a new light.
One of the leading historians of education in the United States
here develops a powerful interpretation of the uses of history in
educational reform and of the relations among democracy, education,
and the capitalist state. Michael Katz discusses the reshaping of
American education from three perspectives. First is the
perspective of history: How did American education take shape? The
second is that of reform: What can a historian say about recent
criticisms and proposals for improvement? The third is that of
historiography: What drives the politics of educational history?
Katz shows how the reconstruction of America's educational past can
be used as a framework for thinking about current reform.
Contemporary concepts such as public education, institutional
structures such as the multiversity, and modern organizational
forms such as bureaucracy all originated as solutions to problems
of public policy. The petrifaction of these historical
products-which are neither inevitable nor immutable-has become,
Katz maintains, one of the mighty obstacles to change. The book's
central questions are as much ethical and political as they are
practical. How do we assess the relative importance of efficiency
and responsiveness in educational institutions? Whom do we really
want institutions to serve? Are we prepared to alter institutions
and policies that contradict fundamental political principles? Why
have some reform strategies consistently failed? On what models
should institutions be based? Should schools and universities be
further assimilated to the marketplace and the state? Katz's
iconoclastic treatment of these issues, vividly and clearly
written, will be of interest to both specialists and general
readers. Like his earlier classic, The Irony of Early School Reform
(1968), this book will set a fresh agenda for debate in the field.
American society today is hardly recognizable from what it was a
century ago. Integrated schools, an information economy, and
independently successful women are just a few of the remarkable
changes that have occurred over just a few generations. Still, the
country today is influenced by many of the same factors that
revolutionized life in the late nineteenth century immigration,
globalization, technology, and shifting social norms and is plagued
by many of the same problems economic, social, and racial
inequality. One Nation Divisible, a sweeping history of
twentieth-century American life by Michael B. Katz and Mark J.
Stern, weaves together information from the latest census with a
century s worth of data to show how trends in American life have
changed while inequality and diversity have endured. One Nation
Divisible examines all aspects of work, family, and social life to
paint a broad picture of the American experience over the long arc
of the twentieth century. Katz and Stern track the transformations
of the U.S. workforce, from the farm to the factory to the office
tower. Technological advances at the beginning and end of the
twentieth century altered the demand for work, causing large
population movements between regions. These labor market shifts fed
both the explosive growth of cities at the dawn of the industrial
age and the sprawling suburbanization of today. One Nation
Divisible also discusses how the norms of growing up and growing
old have shifted. Whereas the typical life course once involved
early marriage and living with large, extended families, Americans
today commonly take years before marrying or settling on a career
path, and often live in non-traditional households. Katz and Stern
examine the growing influence of government on trends in American
life, showing how new laws have contributed to more diverse
neighborhoods and schools, and increased opportunities for
minorities, women, and the elderly. One Nation Divisible also
explores the abiding economic paradox in American life: while many
individuals are able to climb the financial ladder, inequality of
income and wealth remains pervasive throughout society. The last
hundred years have been marked by incredible transformations in
American society. Great advances in civil rights have been tempered
significantly by rising economic inequality. One Nation Divisible
provides a compelling new analysis of the issues that continue to
divide this country and the powerful role of government in both
mitigating and exacerbating them."
|
You may like...
Finding Dory
Ellen DeGeneres, Albert Brooks, …
Blu-ray disc
(1)
R42
Discovery Miles 420
Merry Christmas
Mariah Carey, Walter Afanasieff, …
CD
R122
R112
Discovery Miles 1 120
Midnights
Taylor Swift
CD
R418
Discovery Miles 4 180
Loot
Nadine Gordimer
Paperback
(2)
R398
R330
Discovery Miles 3 300
|