Social Mobility in the Twentieth Century in Europe and the United States

2020 ◽  
pp. 251-296
Author(s):  
Richard Breen ◽  
Walter Müller
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Structural Change ◽  
Social Mobility ◽  
The United States ◽  
Educational Expansion ◽  
Strong Indication ◽  
Downward Mobility ◽  
The Us ◽  
European Economies ◽  
Social Fluidity

Summarizing the findings of the country chapters, this chapter addresses the question: How did intergenerational social mobility change over cohorts born in the first two-thirds of the twentieth century? What role, if any, did education play in this? As education expanded, its association to class origins weakened, especially among earlier-born cohorts—a strong indication that growing education equalization may have been important in increasing social fluidity. There is also a strong link between upward mobility and social fluidity, the former mostly driven by the expansion of higher-level white-collar jobs. Educational expansion, equalization, and rapid structural change in the US and European economies all contributed to greater social fluidity among people born before the middle of the century. For people born later, rates of downward mobility have increased: however, despite the lack of further educational equalization and less-pronounced structural change, social fluidity has remained unchanged.

scholarly journals Education and intergenerational social mobility in the US and four European countries

2019 ◽  
Vol 35 (3) ◽  
pp. 445-466 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Breen
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Structural Change ◽  
Social Mobility ◽  
Upward Mobility ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Educational Expansion ◽  
Downward Mobility ◽  
The Us ◽  
Social Fluidity ◽  
Second World

Abstract I draw on the findings of a recently completed comparative research project to address the question: how did intergenerational social mobility change over cohorts of men and women born in the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, and what role, if any, did education play in this? The countries studied are the US, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Sweden. Notwithstanding the differences between them, by and large they present the same picture. Rates of upward mobility increased among cohorts born in the second quarter of the century and then declined among those born later. Among earlier born cohorts, social fluidity increased (that is, the association between the class a person was born into and the class he or she came to occupy as an adult declined) and then remained unchanged for those born after mid-century. The association between class origins and educational attainment followed much the same trend as social fluidity. This suggests that growing equalization in education may have contributed to the increase in social fluidity. In our analyses we find that this is so, but educational expansion also led to greater fluidity in some countries. There is also a strong link between upward mobility and social fluidity. Upward mobility was mostly driven by the expansion of higher-level white-collar jobs, especially in the 30 years after the end of the Second World War. This facilitated social fluidity because people from working class and farming origins could move into the service or salariat classes without reducing the rate at which children born into those classes could remain there. Educational expansion, educational equalization, and rapid structural change in the economies of the US and Europe all contributed to greater social fluidity among people born in the second quarter of the twentieth century. For people born after mid-century, rates of downward mobility have increased: however, despite the lack of further educational equalization and less pronounced structural change, social fluidity has remained unchanged.

scholarly journals 9/11 as False Flag: Why International Law Must Dare to Care

2017 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 371-392 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amy Baker Benjamin
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
United Nations ◽  
International Law ◽  
The United States ◽  
September 11 ◽  
African History ◽  
The Us ◽  
The United Nations ◽  
International War

At the heart of contemporary international law lies a paradox: the attacks on the United States of September 11, 2001 have justified 16 years of international war, yet the official international community, embodied principally in the United Nations, has failed to question or even scrutinise the US government's account of those attacks. Despite the emergence of an impressive and serious body of literature that impugns the official account and even suggests that 9/11 may have been a classic (if unprecedentedly monstrous) false-flag attack, international statesmen, following the lead of scholars, have been reluctant to wade into what appears to be a very real controversy. African nations are no strangers to the concept of the false flag tactic, and to its use historically in the pursuit of illegitimate geopolitical aims and interests. This article draws on recent African history in this regard, as well as on deeper twentieth-century European and American history, to lay a foundation for entertaining the possibility of 9/11-as-false-flag. This article then argues that the United Nations should seek to fulfil its core and incontrovertible ‘jury’ function of determining the existence of inter-state aggression in order to exercise a long-overdue oversight of the official 9/11 narrative.

scholarly journals Theater Without a Script—Improvisation and the Experimental Stage of the Early Mid-Twentieth Century in the United States

Text Matters ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 374-392
Author(s):  
Magdalena Szuster
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Performing Arts ◽  
The United States ◽  
Actor Training ◽  
Experimental Theater ◽  
The Us ◽  
Look Back ◽  
Experimental Stage

It was in the mid-twentieth century that the independent theatrical form based entirely on improvisation, known now as improvisational/improvised theatre, impro or improv, came into existence and took shape. Viola Spolin, the intellectual and the logician behind the improvisational movement, first used her improvised games as a WPA worker running theater classes for underprivileged youth in Chicago in 1939. But it was not until 1955 that her son, Paul Sills, together with a college theater group, the Compass Players, used Spolin’s games on stage. In the 1970s Sills made the format famous with his other project, the Second City. Since the emergence of improv in the US coincides with the renaissance of improvisation in theater, in this paper, I will look back at what may have prepared and propelled the emergence of improvised theater in the United States. Hence, this article is an attempt to look at the use of improvisation in theater and performing arts in the United States in the second half of the 20th century in order to highlight the various roles and functions of improvisation in the experimental theater of the day by analyzing how some of the most influential experimental theaters used improvisation as a means of play development, a component of actor training and an important element of the rehearsal process.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-15
Author(s):  
Charlie Laderman
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
The United States ◽  
Great Powers ◽  
Great Power ◽  
World Power ◽  
The Us ◽  
Eastern Question

This introductory chapter outlines why the American response to the destruction of the Ottoman Armenians offers such critical insights into the US rise to world power, its evolving relationship with Britain, and the development of ideas on humanitarian intervention and global order at the turn of the twentieth century. It introduces the Armenian question, setting it within the larger Eastern question, and explains why the Ottoman Empire became a target for outside intervention by the European great powers in the nineteenth century. It explains why the United States, which had traditionally avoided political entanglement in the Near East even while its missionaries established an exceptional role there, began to take a greater interest in the region as its emergence as a great power coincided with the first large-scale Armenian massacres.

THE INTELLECTUAL MIGRATION AND THE “OTHER WEIMAR”

2015 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 597-606
Author(s):  
NOAH B. STROTE
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Other ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
Weimar Germany ◽  
Jewish Heritage ◽  
The Us ◽  
History Of

These two books bring fresh eyes and much-needed energy to the study of the intellectual migration from Weimar Germany to the United States. Research on the scholars, writers, and artists forced to flee Europe because of their Jewish heritage or left-wing politics was once a cottage industry, but interest in this topic has waned in recent years. During the height of fascination with the émigrés, bookstores brimmed with panoramic works such as H. Stuart Hughes's The Sea Change: The Migration of Social Thought, 1930–1965 (1975), Lewis Coser's Refugee Scholars in America: Their Impact and Their Experiences (1984), and Martin Jay's Permanent Exiles: Essays on the Intellectual Migration from Germany to America (1985). Now, while historians still write monographs about émigré intellectuals, their focus is often narrowed to biographies of individual thinkers. Refreshingly, with Emily Levine's and Udi Greenberg's new publications we are asked to step back and recapture a broader view of their legacy. The displacement of a significant part of Germany's renowned intelligentsia to the US in the mid-twentieth century remains one of the major events in the intellectual history of both countries.

scholarly journals La educación bilingüe en los Estados Unidos: Programas, perspectivas, retos y lecciones

2020 ◽  
pp. 130
Author(s):  
David Nieto
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Bilingual Education ◽  
Critical Evaluation ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
The United States ◽  
Educational Programs ◽  
The Us ◽  
The U.S

The present paper engages in a historical analysis and interpretation of the policies that have contributed to develop bilingual education in the United States. Departing from the U.S. interpretation of bilingual education, this study examines each of the educational programs that have been implemented in the country since the twentieth century, its pedagogical underpinnings, and the critical evaluation of its outcomes. The paper concludes with an analysis of potential interpretations and lessons that the US case may have for other contexts.

Humanism and Class

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sikivu Hutchinson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
The United States ◽  
Class Analysis ◽  
White Population ◽  
World War ◽  
Class Politics ◽  
The Us ◽  
Changing Demographics

Although early twentieth century humanist discourse was informed by an explicit emphasis on class and socioeconomic redress, contemporary iterations within “organized humanism” have been less definitive. In the post–World War II era, humanist scholars and activists have taken diverse approaches to connecting organized humanism and humanist discourse with class politics and class analyses. Changing demographics in the United States, including the rise of “Religious Nones” and the US shift from a majority white population, may play a prominent role in clarifying the nexus between humanism and class analysis.

Regionalism, Imperialism, and Sovereignty: West Indies Federation and the Occupation of Haiti

2020 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-68
Author(s):  
Raphael Dalleo
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
West Indies ◽  
The United States ◽  
Haitian Revolution ◽  
Nation State ◽  
The West ◽  
Complex Roots ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Haitian Revolution ◽  
Economic Imperialism

Examining the West Indies Federation during the twentieth century against the backdrop of the US occupation of Haiti from 1915 to 1934 shows the complex roots of decolonization and helps us understand the occupation as a foundational event for the twentieth-century Caribbean imaginary, much as the Haitian Revolution was for the nineteenth. The occupation is usually considered only in relation to its impacts in Haiti and the United States, but Haiti’s symbolic significance meant that its occupation shaped the perspectives of Caribbean people throughout the region. Major thinkers of federation, particularly Richard B. Moore and George Padmore, developed their political perspectives through responses to the occupation. We can thus see the questioning of nation-state independence and the critique of neocolonialism (as a form of US economic imperialism allied with elites in the neocolony) emerge from the lessons of Haiti’s occupation.

How Mobile Is India?

Uneven Odds ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 121-170
Author(s):  
Divya Vaid
Keyword(s):  
Structural Change ◽  
Social Mobility ◽  
Upward Mobility ◽  
Indian Society ◽  
Relative Mobility ◽  
Opportunity Structures ◽  
The World ◽  
Low Levels ◽  
Social Fluidity

Social mobility includes absoulte mobility, that is, raw numbers of people who move up, down, or remain stable; and relative mobility, that is, mobility controlling for structural change. This chapter draws out the importance of both types of mobility. Further, the intriguing pattern for women’s mobility, where women display more stability than men intergenerationally, contrary to research in most of the world, is deconstructed. While we observe an enduring trend, preceding ‘liberalization’, of the expansion of the higher salariat, and a retrenchment in agriculture leading to some amount of net upward mobility in absolute terms, we also observe low levels of social fluidity which provide an indicator of the unequal opportunity structures in Indian society.

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