RACE, IMMIGRATION, AND PATTERNS OF INCORPORATION IN THE EARLY AMERICAN WELFARE STATE

2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 555-559
Author(s):  
Anthony S. Chen

Thanks to the work of numerous scholars, it is now well understood that African Americans were incorporated into the early twentieth-century welfare state—as it was then constituted—on a decidedly unequal basis. If African Americans were not altogether excluded by design from some programs, government officials were frequently less generous in determining the scope and extent of the benefits received by them compared to those received by Whites.

Author(s):  
Robert E. Weems

This chapter examines the “contested terrain” associated with the founding of Chicago’s Douglass National Bank in 1921. Anthony Overton, one of history’s most prominent African American entrepreneurs, is widely regarded as the founder of the second national bank organized by African Americans. Yet, the evidence indicates that this distinction should go to Pearl W. Chavers, a relatively obscure early twentieth-century black business person. The story of Anthony Overton’s ascent and P.W. Chavers’ descent in the Douglass National Bank’s administrative hierarchy reveals the power of money and influence. It also illuminates the nuances of both group and individual entrepreneur-based strategies for African American economic development.


Author(s):  
John M. Coggeshall

This chapter presents the story of Liberia during the early twentieth century, through the Depression and the world wars. As the nation’s economy changes, African Americans continue to abandon the region for better economic opportunities as they are also forced out by restrictive Jim Crow segregation and racialized attacks. Both Soapstone Baptist Church and Soapstone School continue, critical anchors for community identity. Some residents return to care for aging relatives. The story of Liberia is presented through the memories of elderly residents and some local historical sources, including obituaries.


Author(s):  
Mariely López-Santana

This chapter provides an overview of the emergence, consolidation, recalibration, and liberalization of employment policies in Spain. By identifying five developmental periods, it reviews transformations in the nature and regulation of labour market policies from the early 1900s to the mid-2010s. In addition, it explores changes in the territorial organization and governance of labour-market policies with a focus on decentralization, (re-) centralization, and delegation reforms. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the implications of the Great Recession on Spanish labour market policies and structures, including its dualized labour market. All in all, the chapter sheds much light on the nature and changes of the Spanish welfare state since the early twentieth century.


2015 ◽  
Vol 105 (2) ◽  
pp. 477-503 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dan A. Black ◽  
Seth G. Sanders ◽  
Evan J. Taylor ◽  
Lowell J. Taylor

The Great Migration—the massive migration of African Americans out of the rural South to largely urban locations in the North, Midwest, and West—was a landmark event in US history. Our paper shows that this migration increased mortality of African Americans born in the early twentieth century South. This inference comes from an analysis that uses proximity of birthplace to railroad lines as an instrument for migration. (JEL I12, J15, N31, N32, N91, N92, R23)


Author(s):  
Roger E. Backhouse ◽  
Bradley W. Bateman ◽  
Tamotsu Nishizawa

This chapter establishes that the British welfare state was the creation of Liberals as much as socialists. By the early twentieth century, the “New Liberalism” was moving the Liberal Party away from Gladstonian Liberalism, and the Asquith government took major steps toward a welfare state before World War I. The economists arguing for the welfare state included many Liberals, notably Alfred Marshall, J. A. Hobson, A. C. Pigou, William Beveridge, and John Maynard Keynes. British Liberalism was varied, and influential strands within it were strongly supportive of the welfare state. Beveridge and Keynes, in particular, were responsible for much of the intellectual architecture of the welfare state as it was implemented by the first postwar Labour government of Clement Attlee.


Author(s):  
Mikhail Simov

rule. Against the present geopolitical situation on the Balkans and in the context of Bulgarian-Russian relations, 3 March — the day when the San Stefano Peace Treaty of 1878 was signed which is also Bulgaria’s national holiday — customarily precipitates political comments and controversial statements of government officials. While Bulgarian-Russian political relations in the last quarter of the nineteenth century were rather complicated, they became the backdrop of the shaping of the tradition of celebrating the Liberation Day; the commemorative activities and interpretation of the day’s significance were closely interwoven with the political trends and the ambitions of the governments in Sofia. The paper examines the process of establishing the tradition of celebrating the Liberation Day in Bulgaria in the context of the dynamics of the Bulgarian-Russian political relations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century


Author(s):  
Sam See ◽  
Scott Herring ◽  
Heather Love ◽  
Wendy Moffat

Langston Hughes’s “Spectacles in Color” envisions Harlem culture as a drag performance. The Weary Blues records a lyric history of modernist Harlem in poems that perform in drag, an aesthetic of visual crossing. This aesthetic ironically coincides with and also countermands the identitarian stereotypes of African Americans and queers that were propagated by early-twentieth-century sexological science and degeneration theory.


Author(s):  
Catherine E. Rymph

The introduction describes aspects of the state of foster care today, noting that child welfare professionals in the early twentieth century had been optimistic that they could create a much better system than what has emerged. The introduction also surveys relevant work by historians that has addressed the history of inequality in the welfare state and the history of adoption, remarking that foster care is significant to both subjects but has not been systematically studied by historians.


PMLA ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 124 (3) ◽  
pp. 798-816 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sam See

The chapter “Spectacles in Color” in Langston Hughes's first autobiography, The Big Sea (1940), envisions modernist Harlem culture as a drag performance and offers a useful rubric for understanding Hughes's The Weary Blues (1926), a lyric history of that culture whose poems characteristically cross gender, sexual, racial, and even formal lines. The Weary Blues employs a low-down, or nature-based, and down-low, or queer, aesthetic of racial and gender crossing that I term “primitive drag,” an aesthetic that ironically coincides with the stereotypes of African Americans and queers that were propagated by early-twentieth-century sexological science and degeneration theory: namely, that blacks and queers were unnatural and degenerate because they, unlike whites and heterosexuals, exhibited a lack of racial and gender differentiation. Disidentifying with those stereotypes, the primitive drag in The Weary Blues depicts queer feeling as natural and nature as queer, thus offering a productive paradox for rethinking literary histories of modernism and theories of sexuality by the rather Darwinian notion that “the nature of the universe,” as Hughes calls it, is always subject to change, or queering.


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