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Benefiting from Montreal's remarkable archival records, Sherry Olson and Patricia Thornton use an ingenious sampling of twelve surnames to track the comings and goings, births, deaths, and marriages of the city's inhabitants. The book demonstrates the importance of individual decisions by outlining the circumstances in which people decided where to move, when to marry, and what work to do. Integrating social and spatial analysis, the authors provide insights into the relationships among the city's three cultural communities, show how inequalities of voice, purchasing power, and access to real property were maintained, and provide first-hand evidence of the impact of city living and poverty on families, health, and futures. The findings challenge presumptions about the cultural "assimilation" of migrants as well as our understanding of urban life in nineteenth-century North America. The culmination of twenty-five years of work, Peopling the North American City is an illuminating look at the humanity of cities and the elements that determine whether their citizens will thrive or merely survive.
For most of the first half of the twentieth century, tuberculosis ranked among the top three causes of mortality among urban African Americans. Often afflicting an entire family or large segments of a neighborhood, the plague of TB was as mysterious as it
Through the example of Baltimore, Maryland, David Taft Terry explores the historical importance of African American resistance to Jim Crow laws in the South’s largest cities. Terry also adds to our understanding of the underexplored historical period of the civil rights movement, prior to the 1960s. Baltimore, one of the South largest cities, was a crucible of segregationist laws and practices. In response, from the 1890s through the 1950s, African Americans there (like those in the South’s other major cities) shaped an evolving resistance to segregation across three themes. The first theme involved black southerners’ development of a counter-narrative to Jim Crow’s demeaning doctrin...
Black women have traditionally represented the canvas on which many debates about poverty and welfare have been drawn. For a quarter century after the publication of the notorious Moynihan report, poor black women were tarred with the same brush: "ghetto moms" or "welfare queens" living off the state, with little ambition or hope of an independent future. At the same time, the history of the civil rights movement has all too often succumbed to an idolatry that stresses the centrality of prominent leaders while overlooking those who fought daily for their survival in an often hostile urban landscape. In this collective biography, Rhonda Y. Williams takes us behind, and beyond, politically exp...
This collection concentrates on the story of immigration through ports of entry to the United States other than Ellis Island, including Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Miami, New Orleans, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. The ethnic development of these cities is described.
The many regiments that fought in the Civil War each had their own stories to tell about what they saw, smelled, tasted, heard and felt while serving in war. The Second Vermont Volunteer Infantry Regiment saw its first combat at the Battle of Bull Run and fought on to Lee's surrender. This richly illustrated work draws from service, pension and court-martial records, and personal letters and diaries to portray the junior officers, noncommissioned officers, and privates of the regiment as they were in battle, on the march, and in camp. Some were heroes, like Private William W. Noyes, awarded the Medal of Honor, and others were not, like Private George E. Blowers, executed for desertion. A roster of the 1,858 men who served in the regiment is provided.
"American Forests is an interdisciplinary collection of essays that explore the impact of forestry on natural and human landscapes since the mid-nineteenth century. It has two main goals: to present some of the most compelling arguments that have guided our understanding of the complex and evolving relationship between trees and people in the United States, and to point out those aspects of this tangled interaction that we have yet fully to understand or to articulate."--Preface, ix.
The Making of Federal Coal Policy provides a unique record of--as well as important future perspectives on--one of the most significant ideological conflicts in national policymaking in the last decade. The management of federally owned coal, almost one-third of the U.S.'s total coal resources, has furnished an arena for the contest between energy development and environmental protection, as well as between the federal government and the states. Robert H. Nelson has written an important historical document and a useful guide for policy analysts.
The selected correspondence of the great American abolitionist and reformer dating from the immediate post–Civil War years This third volume of Frederick Douglass’s Correspondence Series exhibits Douglass at the peak of his political influence. It chronicles his struggle to persuade the nation to fulfill its promises to the former slaves and all African Americans in the tempestuous years of Reconstruction. Douglass’s career changed dramatically with the end of the Civil War and the long-sought after emancipation of American slaves; the subsequent transformation in his public activities is reflected in his surviving correspondence. In these letters, from 1866 to 1880, Douglass continued to correspond with leading names in antislavery and other reform movements on both sides of the Atlantic, and political figures began to make up an even larger share of his correspondents. The Douglass Papers staff located 817 letters for this time period and selected 242, or just under 30 percent, of them for publication. The remaining 575 letters are summarized in the volume’s calendar.
Although there is in the United States a clear national consensus supporting the protection of the environment, advocates often profoundly disagree about the policies best designed to achieve this end. The traditional answer has been that government must intervene, through legislation and regulation of behavior, to preserve environmental values. Th