Ending Discrimination, Legitimating Debt: The Political Economy of Race, Gender, and Credit Access in the 1960s and 1970s

2011 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 200-232 ◽  
Author(s):  
Louis Hyman

Today, in the aftermath of the subprime crisis, there is a foreboding sense that it is too easy for Americans to borrow. Living beyond our means on our cards and our mortgages, Americans borrowed at an unsustainable pace, and what put us here, the logic goes, was the unfortunate collision of lenders' greed and borrower's cupidity. Yet free-for-all borrowing defined another moment's economy as well, but without the ill consequences: the postwar period. After World War II, cheap credit underpinned the suburban prosperity, through government-insured loans, auto financing, and even department store Charga-Plates.

2013 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Antti Pajala

In a parliamentary system it is by definition justified to assume the government parties voting almost always in a unitary manner in plenary votes. In a multiparty system it is, however, hard to predict how the opposition groups vote. Few studies analysing government-opposition voting in the Finnish parliament Eduskunta were published during the 1960s and 1970s. This study provides similar analyses regarding the parliamentary years of 1991-2012. Combined the studies provide an insight into the government-opposition relations since World War II. The results show that before the 1990s the government-opposition division in plenary votes appeared rather clear and the political party groups’ positions followed the traditional left-right dimension. Since the 1990s, the government-opposition division has become greater. The governing coalition acts almost as a bloc while the opposition groups are divided into moderate and hard opposition. The opposition groups, however, appear in a more or less random order. Consequently, since the 1990s the left-right dimension has disappeared with respect to plenary voting.


2018 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 1-34
Author(s):  
Lorne D. Bruce

This article undertakes a historical survey of university and college library developments in Canada between 1945 and 1960. It examines contemporary accounts in relation to library architecture, the acquisition and organization of collections, administrative library structures and staffing, services for faculty and students, and efforts by librarians to realize professional standing. A national review of academic libraries and librarianship expands our knowledge beyond the typical themes applied to this era: "growth" and "progress." The architectural redefinition of libraries, the impetus to establish research collections, the maturation of academic librarianship, and the increasing complexity of library operations were prominent features in the postwar period. The gradual evolution of academic libraries towards more-uniform organizational purposes and structures on a national basis following World War II can be considered a period of “midcentury modernization” that preceded the more memorable and better documented decades of the 1960s and later.


Author(s):  
Helen Ennis

Australian photographer Max Dupain distinguished himself as a professional and artistic presence from the 1930s well into the 1970s. His earliest works were in the Pictorialist style, but by the mid-1930s he had become an ardent modernist—using sharp focus, bold and geometric compositions, and contemporary subject matter. Dupain was strongly influenced by vitalist philosophy, the work of Australian artist Norman Lindsay, the photography of Man Ray, Margaret Bourke-White, and Edward Steichen, as well as writer D.H. Lawrence. The son of Ena and George Dupain, Max Dupain lived in Sydney his entire life. He joined the studio of Cecil Bostock in 1930, taking night classes at East Sydney Technical College and the Julian Ashton School of Art. In 1934 he opened his own studio and quickly established his reputation in fashion, advertising, and celebrity portraiture. After World War II he reoriented his practice towards industry and government assignments, favoring a documentary approach. During the 1960s and 1970s, he specialized in architectural photography. Dupain’s photography is distinguished by its physicality and embrace of Australian sunlight and conditions (as seen in Sunbaker, his best-known work). He also regularly wrote on photography, contributing spirited reviews to the Sydney Morning Herald. His work was widely exhibited and published and is held in numerous public collections.


Author(s):  
Nicola Phillips

This chapter focuses on the political economy of development. It first considers the different (and competing) ways of thinking about development that have emerged since the end of World War II, laying emphasis on modernization, structuralist, and underdevelopment theories, neo-liberalism and neo-statism, and ‘human development’, gender, and environmental theories. The chapter proceeds by exploring how particular understandings of development have given rise to particular kinds of development strategies at both the national and global levels. It then examines the relationship between globalization and development, in both empirical and theoretical terms. It also describes how conditions of ‘mal-development’ — or development failures — both arise from and are reinforced by globalization processes and the ways in which the world economy is governed.


2019 ◽  
Vol 46 (3) ◽  
pp. 494-499
Author(s):  
Destin Jenkins

This essay revisits Making the Second Ghetto to consider what Arnold Hirsch argued about the relationship between race, money, and the ghetto. It explores how Hirsch’s analysis of this relationship was at once consistent with those penned by other urban historians and distinct from those interested in the political economy of the ghetto. Although moneymaking was hardly the main focus, Hirsch’s engagement with “Vampire” rental agencies and panic peddlers laid the groundwork for an analysis that treats the post–World War II metropolis as a crucial node in the history of racial capitalism. Finally, this essay offers a way to connect local forms of violence to the kinds of constraints imposed by financiers far removed from the city itself.


Author(s):  
Megan Asaka

The Japanese American Redress Movement refers to the various efforts of Japanese Americans from the 1940s to the 1980s to obtain restitution for their removal and confinement during World War II. This included judicial and legislative campaigns at local, state, and federal levels for recognition of government wrongdoing and compensation for losses, both material and immaterial. The push for redress originated in the late 1940s as the Cold War opened up opportunities for Japanese Americans to demand concessions from the government. During the 1960s and 1970s, Japanese Americans began to connect the struggle for redress with anti-racist and anti-imperialist movements of the time. Despite their growing political divisions, Japanese Americans came together to launch several successful campaigns that laid the groundwork for redress. During the early 1980s, the government increased its involvement in redress by forming a congressional commission to conduct an official review of the World War II incarceration. The commission’s recommendations of monetary payments and an official apology paved the way for the passage of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 and other redress actions. Beyond its legislative and judicial victories, the redress movement also created a space for collective healing and generated new forms of activism that continue into the present.


2020 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 97-127
Author(s):  
Tao Leigh Goffe

This essay examines the political economy of Caribbean cultural capital and the formation of reggae in Jamaica in the 1950s. Through study of the Afro-Asian intimacies and tensions embedded in the sound of preindependence Jamaica, the essay traces the birth of the “sound-system” to the networks of local small-retail grocery shops, ubiquitous across Jamaica, that were owned and operated by Jamaican Chinese shopkeepers and examines how they formed material infrastructures. In charting the hardwiring of speakers and how the sociality of the shop housed the production of a new sound, the essay argues that sonic innovation was derived from Afro-Jamaican servicepeople who returned from World War II with military technological expertise, which they applied to sound engineering, and from entrepreneurial guilds of Jamaican merchants and shopkeepers of Chinese, Afro-Chinese, and Indo-Chinese descent, who helped form the conditions of possibility for the production and global distribution of reggae. Thus the networks of Jamaican Chinese diasporic capital and talent, producing and performing, helped to engineer the electrical flows of reggae to rural areas and urban dancehall parties.


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