One Neighborhood, Two Communities: The Public Archaeology of Class in a Gentrifying Urban Neighborhood

2009 ◽  
Vol 76 (1) ◽  
pp. 127-146 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert C. Chidester ◽  
David A. Gadsby
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Public Archaeology ◽  
Community Archaeology ◽  
Textile Mill ◽  
Urban Neighborhood ◽  
Public Dialogue ◽  
The Public ◽  
Run Up ◽  
Class Community

AbstractThe Hampden Community Archaeology Project (HCAP) is a public archaeology project in a former textile mill neighborhood in Baltimore, Maryland. Since the early 1990s the area has been transformed by gentrification. There are now two distinct communities (an older, working-class community and a newer, upper-middle-class community) in the neighborhood. The goal of HCAP is to create a critical public dialogue on issues of class and economic inequality relevant to the current issues facing the neighborhood. After three years of public archaeology in Hampden-Woodberry, the project has achieved some notable successes but has also run up against several roadblocks.

scholarly journals Digging up memories: Collaborations between archaeology and oral history to investigate the industrial housing experience

2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 61
Author(s):  
Kerry Massheder-Rigby
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Oral History ◽  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
Public Archaeology ◽  
Community Archaeology ◽  
Archaeological Investigation ◽  
The Public ◽  
The North ◽  
Research Relationship ◽  
The Uk

This paper forms part of a wider PhD project exploring whether there can be an informative research relationship between archaeology and oral history. Its focus is on the working class housing experience in the North of England during the Industrial Revolution period. Oral history as a discipline applied within archaeological investigation is growing in popularity and in application in the UK as a form of ‘community archaeology’. Evidence suggests that there is potential for combining the memories of oral history testimonies and the physical archaeological evidence from excavation to enhance our understanding of an event, person, time and place. However, establishing what evidence of the housing experience survives in an archaeological context and what survives in memory is crucial to the success of a combined investigative approach. This paper will use the example of The Public Archaeology Programme of the site Dixon’s Blazes as a relevant example in which to explore this, with evidence of sanitation, overcrowding and architecture surviving in both.

The public's view of public health in mid-Victorian Britain

Urban History ◽  
1994 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 237-250 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Sigsworth ◽  
Michael Worboys
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Health Reform ◽  
Great Majority ◽  
Personal Hygiene ◽  
The Public ◽  
Victorian Britain ◽  
Physical Conditions ◽  
Public Health Reform

What did the public think about public health reform in mid-Victorian Britain? Historians have had a lot to say about the sanitary mentality and actions of the middle class, yet have been strangely silent about the ideas and behaviour of the working class, who were the great majority of the public and the group whose health was mainly in question. Perhaps there is nothing to say. The working class were commonly referred to as ‘the Great Unwashed’, purportedly ignorant and indifferent on matters of personal hygiene, environmental sanitation and hence health. Indeed, the writings of reformers imply that the working class simply did not have a sanitary mentality. However, the views of sanitary campaigners should not be taken at face value. Often propaganda and always one class's perception of another, in the context of the social apartheid in Britain's cities in the mid-nineteenth century, sanitary campaigners' views probably reveal more about middle-class anxieties than the actual social and physical conditions of the poor. None the less many historians still use such material to portray working-class life, but few have gone on to ask how public health reform was seen and experienced ‘from below’. Historians of public health have tended to portray the urban working class as passive victims who were rescued by enlightened middle-class reformers. This seems to be borne out at the political level where, unlike with other popular movements of the 1840s and after, there is little evidence of working-class participation in, or support for, the public health movement.

The Politics of Middle-Class Success in an Inner-City Public School

1982 ◽  
Vol 164 (1) ◽  
pp. 30-47 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. Timothy Sieber
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Inner City ◽  
Structural Factors ◽  
Patterns Of Failure ◽  
Class Culture ◽  
The Public ◽  
Class Stratification ◽  
Political Struggles

Recent ethnography of minority and working-class schooling has shown how wider structural factors like class stratification, poverty, and racism influence observable patterns of failure and under achievement in the classroom. In contrast, ethnography in middle-class schools and classrooms has not seriously probed similar structural bases of middle-class children's success, instead attributing this success to a presumed equivalence between the “middle-class culture” of the children's homes and the culture of the school and its staff. This study traces the history and effects of middle-class involvement in the public elementary school of a gentrifying inner-city neighborhood in New York City. Segregated into their special classrooms with distinctive curriculum and organization, the school's middle-class children were more successful than their poor and working-class peers. Their success was not the result, in Bourdieu's terms, of the “cultural capital” afforded by their middle-class upbringing. The school staff, in fact, disapproved of many elements of the children's class culture. Rather, the children's successful standing within the school had been the object, and achievement, of their parents' long-standing political struggles against the school's staff and other parents. This case illustrates that school success is as much an active social construction—both inside and outside the school—as school failure has been shown to be.

Dalfsen

2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 187-198
Author(s):  
Henk M. van der Velde ◽  
Niels Bouma
Keyword(s):  
The Netherlands ◽  
Success Rate ◽  
Public Archaeology ◽  
Community Archaeology ◽  
Contract Archaeology ◽  
The Public ◽  
Archaeological Knowledge ◽  
The Way

ABSTRACTThis article discusses the way development-led archaeology in the Netherlands disseminates archaeological knowledge to and with the public using the way archaeological projects were designed in Dalfsen (Netherlands) as a case study. In the early days of contract archaeology, which in the Netherlands was designed after the Valetta Convention, archaeologists were primarily concerned with the financial and planning aspects of projects, and there was little room for public archaeology. We suggest that this caused archaeologists to forget to involve the public in their projects. In time, it became almost impossible to rectify this mistake because archaeological contractors became extremely bureaucratic. In the case of Dalfsen, a spectacular project was needed to change this situation. The project, and especially its media value, inspired the municipality to invest in community archaeology and make choices that an archaeologist would not primarily be concerned with. Thus, we discuss the effects of these choices and archaeologists’ actions in this process. We conclude that it is important for archaeologists to act as facilitators because it improves the success rate of community archaeology projects.

Land, Capital, and Race

Inland Shift ◽  
2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juan D. De Lara
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Development Project ◽  
Public Debate ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
The Public ◽  
Global Capital ◽  
Race And Class ◽  
The City

This chapter uses the Skechers megawarehouse development project in Moreno Valley to examine how the public debate about whether to allow megawarehouse development evolved into a much more profound struggle over who had a right to shape the city. The Skechers warehouse became a proxy struggle between groups who represented different lifestyles and approaches to what constituted a valued way of life. More specifically, the warehouse debate pitted a working-class Latinx population against a mostly white suburban middle class. The chapter concludes by interrogating how global capital must sometimes negotiate locally embedded histories of race and class when establishing new territory for development.

MANUFACTURING ACCIDENT: INDUSTRIALISM AND THE WORKER’S BODY IN EARLY VICTORIAN FICTION

2000 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 313-329
Author(s):  
Mike Sanders
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Industrial Capitalism ◽  
House Of Commons ◽  
Public Mind ◽  
The Public ◽  
Victorian Fiction

I refer to the health of millions who spend their lives in manufactories. . . I ask if these millions enjoy that vigour of body which is ever a direct good, and without which all other advantages are comparatively worthless? (The Effects of Arts, Trades, and Professions, and of civic states and habits of living, on health andlongevity, C. Turner Thackrah) [Factory reformers] wrote in the newspapers, and circulated pamphlets - they petitioned Parliament - exhibited diseased and crippled objects in London - and made such an impression on the public mind, that their measures were carried in the House of Commons almost by acclamation, notwithstanding the testimony of facts of a directly contrary nature. (Exposition of the Factory Question)THIS ARTICLE SEEKS to explore the significance of the injured working-class body in debates about the nature and meaning of industrial capitalism in the first half of the nineteenth century.1 It will argue that a growing awareness that the comforts of middle-class existence depended on processes that maimed working-class lives was profoundly unsettling to the bourgeois conscience as it threatened one of its most important narratives of legitimation. Finally, it will trace the emergence of the “accident” (as both concept and fictional trope) as a response to and resolution of this ideological crisis.

Obtaining French novels

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juliette Atkinson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
French Literature ◽  
Victorian Culture ◽  
The Public

French novels were associated throughout the nineteenth century with the infamous Holywell Street. However, they were far more widely obtainable, and readily consumed, than this suggests. Libraries such as the fairly exclusive London Library, Mudie’spopular Select Library, and working-class institutions, did their part to make them available; surviving archives paint a vivid picture of the public appetite for novels by writers such as Dumas and Paul de Kock. Booksellers such as Jeffs and Rolandi were important in supplying readers with contemporary trends, but they also took on additional roles as editors and members of Anglo-French networks. Periodicals, meanwhile, made French literature available to readers who had not necessarily been searching for it. Long serializations of the 1840s aimed predominantly at a less wealthy audience, and translations geared towards a growing middle-class (and often female) market in the 1860s, further demonstrate the omnipresence of French literature in Victorian culture.

scholarly journals The dynamics of class self-identification in Ukraine within the context of discursive and structural changes

2021 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. 3-17
Author(s):  
Yuliya Solodko ◽  
Svitlana Oksamytna
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Structural Changes ◽  
Multiple Choice ◽  
Social Survey ◽  
Survey Question ◽  
Global Perspectives ◽  
The Public ◽  
Current State ◽  
Identity Class

The subjective aspects of class, such as class identity, class awareness, or Bourdieu’s “sense of one’s place”, compound the whole cluster of modern class studies. A sufficient amount of empirical data on subjective class issues has allowed Ukrainian scholars to define major class categories that are subjectively salient for Ukrainians, as well as to follow its dynamics throughout the period of Independence. This paper continues the tradition of such studies while using the data from the latest International Social Survey Programme 2019 and previous research. It depicts the current state of subjective stratification as it is viewed and constructed by Ukrainians.We use two methodological approaches here to define and measure classes with which Ukrainians identify themselves: one implies a single-answer multiple-choice survey question and the other is based on an open-ended question. That allows us to compare and verify the results received from the two approaches. Then, we analyze and describe the connection between the dynamics of class self-identification and bigscale changes of the Ukrainian transformation period. The working class and the middle class continue to dominate the landscape of the subjective class structure in Ukraine. These two class identities are the most popular ones whether being chosen by respondents in a multiple-choice question or being mentioned in an open-ended question. However, the dynamics of the two classes differ. While the public request for the middle class increases steadily, the popularity of the working class declines.We suggest addressing these trends, taking into account the conditions of time and place, both from local and global perspectives, and factoring in economic, social, and discursive changes of the period researched.

Middle-Class Victorian Street Arabs: Modern Re-creations of the Baker Street Irregulars

2012 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 36-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dominic Cheetham
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Children's Literature ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Street Children ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
The United States ◽  
Sherlock Holmes ◽  
Upward Shift

In three of Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories there are brief appearances of the Baker Street Irregulars, a group of ‘street Arabs’ who help Holmes with his investigations. These children have been re-imagined in modern children's literature in at least twenty-seven texts in a variety of media and with writers from both Britain and the United States. All these modern stories show a marked upward shift in the class of the Irregulars away from the lower working class of Conan-Doyle's originals. The shift occurs through attributing middle-class origins to the leaders of the Irregulars, through raising the class of the Irregulars in general, and through giving the children life environments more comfortable, safe, and financially secure than would have been possible for late-Victorian street children. Because of the variety in texts and writers, it is argued that this shift is not a result of the conscious political or ideological positions of individual writers, but rather reflects common unconscious narrative choices. The class-shift is examined in relation to the various pressures of conventions in children's literature, concepts of audience, and common concepts of class in society.

What’s Good for George Sánchez Is Good for Boyle Heights: Regenerative Scholarship, Urban Racism, Gentrification, and East LA Interchange

2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Gilbert Estrada
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Urban Pollution ◽  
Metropolitan Regions ◽  
The Past ◽  
Award Winning ◽  
Boyle Heights ◽  
Good For ◽  
Primary Focus ◽  
Deed Restrictions ◽  
Class Community

The inclusive ideals of George Sánchez have helped shape a new generation of academics who have promoted connections with nonacademic organizations. This article discusses how Sánchez has continued these efforts through his pivotal contributions to an award-winning documentary focusing on the multiethnic, working-class community of Boyle Heights: Betsy Kalin’s film East LA Interchange (2015). East LA Interchange’s greatest contribution to the generative scholarship Sánchez emphasizes is its critical analysis of modern urban problems, utilizing history as a tool for social change. The story of Boyle Heights is not just a history of a single working-class community with a diverse culture. It is also a tale of a neighborhood trying to solve real world problems such as gentrification, unaffordable housing, community displacement, and urban pollution. The film portrays these difficulties in the present while showing that they originated decades ago. Sánchez and East LA Interchange are at their best when they provide the historical contexts of contemporary problems, emphasizing that history is not only the study of the past. Rather, history is the unending dialogue between the past, present, and future, and any significant discourse on today’s urban ills must be rooted in the past. For students and others interested in the diverse communities common in many US metropolitan regions, East LA Interchange has much to offer regarding the issues of immigration, redlining, deed restrictions, political activism, freeway construction, living with racially and ethnically diverse community members, and the nationwide problem of gentrification. These themes, especially gentrification, are the primary focus of this article.

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