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Welfare Reform and the Revitalization of Inner City Neighborhoods examines the institutional impact of welfare reform on community-based organizations. Unlike many studies that treat children and individuals of families as the units for analyzing the effects of public policy, Jennings uses a case-study approach involving three low-income neighborhoods in Massachusetts, which assesses the effects of welfare reform based on the neighborhood. The significance of Jennings’s work shows an inconsistency in the increasing call upon foundations and government for building social capital and civic participation as a response to problems faced by inner-city communities, as well as the institutional effects of welfare reform. ... Read more

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In the 70 years between the Civil War and World War II, the women of Boston changed the city dramatically. From anti-spitting campaigns and demands for police mothers to patrol local parks, to calls for a decent wage and living quarters, women rich and poor, white and black, immigrant and native-born struggled to make a place for themselves in the city. Now, in Women and the City historian Sarah Deutsch tells this story for the first time, revealing how they changed not only the manners but also the physical layout of the modern city. Deutsch shows how the women of Boston turned the city from a place with no respectable public space for women, to a city where women sat on the City Council and met their beaux on the street corners. The book follows the efforts of working-class, middle-class, and elite matrons, working girls and "new women" as they struggled to shape the city in their own interests. And in fact they succeeded in breathtaking fashion, rearranging and redefining the moral geography of the city, and in so doing broadening the scope of their own opportunities. But Deutsch reveals that not all women shared equally in this new access to public space, and even those who did walk the streets with relative impunity and protested their wrongs in public, did so only through strategic and limited alliances with other women and with men. A penetrating new work by a brilliant young historian, Women and the City is the first book to analyze women's role in shaping the modern city. It casts new light not only on urban history, but also on women's domestic lives, women's organizations, labor organizing, and city politics, and on the crucial connections between gender, space, and power.Amazon.com Review
In Women and the City: Gender, Power, and Space in Boston,1870-1940, SarahDeutsch examines the relationship between the city's evolvingstructure and the choices and strategies of various groups ofwomen. Her study follows the efforts of working-class, middle-class,and elite matrons as they struggled to shape the city to meet theirrespective needs. In succeeding, they redefined the moral geography ofthe city, and broadened Deutsch's own opportunities many decadeslater.

Deutsch orders her study topically. The first four chapters examinethe politics of everyday life, showing how the daily lives anddomestic spaces of women were intimately connected to the sorts ofclaims they made in and on public arenas. Her final three chaptersfollow women as they organize and institutionalize their efforts,demonstrating the complex ways in which the relationship between womenand the public terrain is specific to class, ethnicity, and historicalmoment. As the book makes clear, space "does not have independentagency." Its meaning and power are determined by how groups of peopleorganize their social, political, and economic interactions. For thewomen of Boston, the ability to lay claim to certain types of spaceand the power to shape place were crucial to meeting their basicneeds.

A promising young historian from the University of Arizona, Deutschbreaks new ground in her analysis of women's role in shaping themodern city. Her thoroughly researched study makes frequent referenceto individual biography, while illustrating a firm understanding ofBoston history. Although her enthusiasm for detail and third-personnarrative often obscures her larger claims, Women and the Cityclearly illustrates the ability of women to negotiate the urbanterrain on their own terms. --Bertina Loeffler Sedlack ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Adds depth to the history of a great city
Hard to know where to start praising this wonderful book. Chapter after chapter, Sarah Deutsch tosses off insights like a dog shaking water off its back. For historians coming up behind her, there is a thesis idea on virtually every page. In a section entitled "Protegees, Politics, and Class (1909-1931)," Deutsch identifies political partisanship and patronage networks as the kind of disruptive or countervailing forces that now, as then, may skew news reporting and divide individuals who might otherwise work together for a social good. An example: "When the headlines blared, 'Women Republicans Opposed [the appointment of] Miss Meehan,' women Republicans insisted that the issue, instead, was nonpartisanship. Meehan's was not the only patronage case being disputed after a decade of Republican hegemony so strong that the party's members had forgotten it was a party and not a nonpartisan organization. The women (and the fewer men) involved in the dispute deployed the language of expertise, political hackery, and gender to make their case. Meehan's supporters spoke, in addition, the language of class and party." Women and the City also has an excellent index.

Great women's history
Not only the legal status but the personal outlooks of women changed immeasurably
in the period this book covers; the subtitle speaks of space and power, but Deutsch
has also given us a fine overview of intellectual change: what women thought, and
why they thought in those ways, during an era of astonishing industrial and social
development. Through her research, we can see why the women of Henry James
were not the same as those of F. Scott Fitzgerald--and they were very different.

We are used to sympathizing with the plight of working class women, and giving
great credit to the founders of the settlement houses and political groups that helped
them, but until now I had never realized how class differences affected attitudes, and
how perfectly reasonable women of either set found great difficulty in
understanding how those of the other thought and felt. This book has helped me get
a better understanding of both groups.

In recent months I've been reading heavily in Boston history and in women's history
of this period. This book is far and away the best thing I've found. Having done
historical research using primary sources, I can tell you this author has done an
immense amount of work, and it has paid off. She uses not only the minutes of
meetings and legal reports, but personal letters and contemporary novels to tell the
story. She writes clearly, and the book is well organized. If you want a real feel for
the lives of women during a period of tremendous change, this book is the best place
I know to get it. Deutsch straightens out a lot of misconceptions, and helps to clarify
an extremely complex period. ... Read more

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Winner of the Historic Preservation Book AwardWinner of an ASLA Merit AwardOriginally published in 1989, this book offers an insightful inquiry into the in-tellectual and cultural origins of Mount Auburn Cemetery, the first landscape in the United States to be designed in the picturesque style. Inspired by developments in England and France, and founded in 1831, Mount Auburn became the prototype for the "rural cemetery" movement and was an important precursor of many of America's public parks, beginning with New York City's Central Park.

This new edition has been completely redesigned in a larger format, with new photographs and a new epilogue that carries the story forward into the twentieth century. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

An excellent book for anyone interested and cemetery, early American and Boston history!
This book has been extremely influential for me as an art history student and scholar-in-training. I go to school in Boston and visited Forest Hills Cemetery on a whim. My captivation with this place led me to this book. Forest Hills Cemetery was founded by same man as Mount Auburn Cemetery- Henry A. S. Dearborn. This book was the starting place for my research on Dearborn. Read this book and you will learn the fascinating story of the beginning of the rural cemetery movement. Silent City on a Hill is an excellent piece of scholarship- well written and thoroughly researched! It is also well illustrated with photographs of the places and historical engravings, maps and portraits.

Mount Auburn Cemetery: The First U.S. Rural City of the Dead
Thousands of visitors annually visit America's first and best example of a rural cemetery. Mount Auburn Cemetery was consecrated in 1831. It came about as a practical, down-to-earth (no pun intended) solution to a pressing problem. Boston simply had no more room left in which to bury its dead citizens. A group of business men decided it was a good idea to develop a new burial ground well outside the city limits, but close enough for people to easily visit and pray for their departed family members. It was also suggested that the new burial ground should be a pleasant place to visit and where the living could be assured that the departed were residing in a pleasant and peaceful environment. It was decided to enlist the Horticultural Society to help achieve this new concept in rural burial grounds. Since Mount Auburn was the first such cemetery in the United States it was a forerunner of not only rural burying grounds but many landscaped, public parks within city limits. Central Park in New York City was one such result of this new beautiful park concept.
If one doesn't have the patience or interest in reading the rather dry 1861 annual report-like "History of Mount Auburn Cemetery" by Jacob Bigelow, the President of the Corporation and one of the founders of that National Landmark, this is the award-winning coffee table book for you. It's lavishly illustrated with colorful prints as well as photographs and is meticulously researched and well written. More importantly, it's interesting to read. The history of Mount Auburn is fascinating and for those who have actually visited the peaceful location, it will refresh many of their personal memories. In the 19th Century more visitors came to see Mount Auburn than went to see Niagara Falls. It was, and still is, world famous as a "City of the Dead."
The reader won't be disappointed with this volume. It's a publishing gem. ... Read more

Product Description
This timely volume examines the influx immigrants from Southeast Asia to Lowell, Massachusetts, over the past thirty or so years. Numbering about 20,000 people--a very significant one-fifth of the city's population--these are primarily refugees and their offspring who fled genocide, war, and oppression in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam in the late 1970s and resettled in the United States. The Lowell experience is representative of a truly national phenomenon: communities in Long Beach, Orange County, and San Diego, California; Seattle, Washington; Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota; Houston and Dallas, Texas; New Orleans, Louisiana; Northern Virginia; and Southern Florida have experienced similar population growth.

The historical and contemporary essays chronicle the formidable efforts of Lowell's Southeast Asian community to recreate itself and its identity amid poverty, discrimination, and pressures to assimilate.
They also examine the transformation that has occurred of both newcomers and the community at large.
This process provides opportunities for growth but also challenges past practices in the city and state. In this volume, contributors approach the subject from points of view rooted in anthropology, political science, economics, sociology, education, and community psychology. Their work contributes to a broader understanding of U.S. refugee policy, migration, identity and group formation, political adaptation, social acculturation, and community conflict--major issues today in New England and the nation. ... Read more

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Four-fifths of Americans now live in the nation’s sprawling metropolitan areas, and half of the world’s population is now classified as "urban." As cities become the dominant living environment for humans, there is growing concern about how to make such places more habitable, more healthy and safe, more ecological, and more equitable—in short, more "humane."

This book explores the prospects for a more humane metropolis through a series of essays and case studies that consider why and how urban places can be made greener and more amenable. Its point of departure is the legacy of William H. Whyte (1917-1999), one of America’s most admired urban thinkers. From his eyrie high above Manhattan in the offices of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Whyte laid the foundation for today’s "smart growth" and "new urbanist" movements with books such as The Last Landscape (1968). His passion for improving the habitability of cities and suburbs is reflected in the diverse grassroots urban design and regreening strategies discussed in this volume.

Topics examined in this book include urban and regional greenspaces, urban ecological restoration, social equity, and green design. Some of the contributors are recognized academic experts, while others offer direct practical knowledge of particular problems and initiatives. The editor’s introduction and epilogue set the individual chapters in a broader context and suggest how the strategies described, if widely replicated, may help create more humane urban environments.

In addition to Rutherford H. Platt, contributors to the volume include Carl Anthony, Thomas Balsley, Timothy Beatley, Eugenie L. Birch, Edward J. Blakely, Colin M. Cathcart, Steven E. Clemants, Christopher A. De Sousa, Steven N. Handel, Peter Harnik, Michael C. Houck, Jerold S. Kayden, Albert LaFarge, Andrew Light, Charles E. Little, Anne C. Lusk, Thalya Parilla, Deborah E. Popper, Frank J. Popper, Mary V. Rickel, Cynthia Rosenzweig, Robert L. Ryan, Laurin N. Sievert, Andrew G. Wiley-Schwartz, and Ann Louise Strong.

Published in association with the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Perfect for classroom discussion
Essays and case studies consider why and how urban places can be made greener for those who live there, packing in a 22-minute film on DVD to accompany text examples of how more humane metropolises are built. College-level collections strong in urban studies will find this perfect for classroom discussion, assignment, and for college-level contemporary social issues reference libraries. ... Read more

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In the popular imagination, New York City's Greenwich Villagehas long been known as a center of bohemianism, home to avant-gardeartists, political radicals, and other nonconformists who challengedthe reigning orthodoxies of their time. Yet as Gerald W. McFarlandshows in this richly detailed study, a century ago the Village was amuch different kind of place: a mixed-class, multi-ethnic neighborhoodteeming with the energy and social tensions of a rapidly changingAmerica.

McFarland begins his reconstruction of turn-of-the-centuryGreenwich Village with vivid descriptions of the major groups thatresided within its boundaries: the Italian immigrants and AfricanAmericans to the south, the Irish Americans to the west, thewell-to-do Protestants to the north, and the New York Universitystudents, middle-class professionals, and artists and writers wholived in apartment buildings and boarding houses on or near WashingtonSquare. He then examines how these Villagers, so divided along classand ethnic lines, interacted with one another. He finds that clashingexpectations about what constituted proper behavior in theneighborhood's public spaces-especially streets, parks, andsaloons-often led to intergroup conflict, political rivalries, andcampaigns by the more privileged Villagers to impose middle-classmores on their working-class neighbors. Occasionally, however, acrisis or common problem led residents to overlook their differencesand cooperate across class and ethnic lines.

Throughout the book, McFarland connects the evolution of Village life to the profound transformations taking place in American society at large during the same years. While the emergence of a bohemian subculture within the Village attracted the most publicity, there were other changes with broader and more lasting implications, at once anticipating and helping to create the modern model for cosmopolitan community in urban America. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Excellent History of the Village Pre-WWI
My grandfather grew up in the Irish West Village of this period.This book cracks open the experience of
the Village as an immigrant enclave for the generations who grew up thinking of the Village as a Bohemian/Folk Music/Gay mecca.Professor McFarland traces distinct elements that converged in the Village at once--immigrants, affluent Progressives, the wealthy Protestant "old guard" and the emerging artist and bohemian population.

Includes useful maps that illustrate various periods in Village history.This book makes walking those familiar streets a much more informed and historically rich experience.Well done.

The different era focus will make Inside Greenwich Village an invaluable exploration
Any with an affection for New York's famous Greenwich Village will want the lively social history Inside Greenwich Village: A New York City Neighborhood, 1898-1918. The Village has been the center of bohemians, artistry, radical politics and more - yet a century ago it was a mixed-class neighborhood reflecting a changing nation. It's this era which history professor Gerald McFarland focuses on, reconstructing its culture and history with a survey of the major groups who occupied Greenwich Village. The different era focus will make Inside Greenwich Village an invaluable exploration.
... Read more

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revisar el libro
quisiera ver el contenido del liro para saber si es posible adquirirl ... Read more

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A history of modernism in the teaching of architecture, landscape architecture, and city planning at Harvard. This book tells how modernism evolved in the most celebrated design school in America. Tracing developments at Harvard, whose Graduate School of Design was home from 1937 to 1952 of Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius, it shows that America had initiated its own modern agenda before the arrival of the European modernist ideology. 20 color and 250 black-and-white illustrations. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

A New Perspective on Modernism
Modernism in architecture is so closely identified with a handful of hero figures (like Walter Gropius and Mies van der Rohe) that we often forget that the real story behind its development is a complex and contentious one.In this wonderful and much-needed book, Anthony Alofsin deftly illustrates that the arrival of European architects in the U.S. in the 1930s cast a shadow over emerging progressive trends in American architectural design and education.At Harvard in particular, this led to an amnesia that convinced students and professors alike that it was Gropius who brought modern ideas to the Graduate School of Design when he began teaching there in 1937."The Struggle for Modernism" shows clearly, though, that the kernels of these modern ideas were present in the Harvard design programs from their beginnings in 1900.It was not from the Bauhaus that Harvard developed its interdisciplinary approach to design that insisted on collaboration amongst architects, landscape architects, and city planners.Instead, it was Americans like Herbert Langford Warren, Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., George Harold Edgell, and, most importantly, Joseph Hudnut who over decades created the influential and rigorous design programs.This is a fascinating and most welcome book that sheds much new light on a subject that many have incorrectly assumed was already well-understood.Highly recommended. ... Read more

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In the early nineteenth century, Lowell, Massachusetts, was widely studied and emulated as a model for capitalist industrial development. One of the first cities in the United States to experience the ravages of deindustrialization, it was also among the first places in the world to turn to its own industrial and ethnic history as a tool for reinventing itself in the emerging postindustrial economy. "The Lowell Experiment" explores how history and culture have been used to remake Lowell and how historians have played a crucial yet ambiguous role in that process.

The book focuses on Lowell National Historical Park, the flagship project of Lowell’s new cultural economy. When it was created in 1978, the park broke new ground with its sweeping reinterpretations of labor, immigrant, and women’s history. It served as a test site for the ideas of practitioners in the new field of public history—a field that links the work of professionally trained historians with many different kinds of projects in the public realm.

The Lowell Experiment takes an anthropological approach to public history in Lowell, showing it as a complex cultural performance shaped by local memory, the imperatives of economic redevelopment, and tourist rituals—all serving to locate the park’s audiences and workers more securely within a changing and uncertain new economy characterized by growing inequalities and new exclusions.

The paradoxical dual role of Lowell’s public historians as both interpreters of and contributors to that new economy raises important questions about the challenges and limitations facing academically trained scholars in contemporary American culture. As a long-standing and well-known example of "culture-led re-development," Lowell offers an outstanding site for exploring questions of concern to those in the fields of public and urban history, urban planning, and tourism studies. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

Some more well-deserved praise...
I'd like to second all the positive and well-deserved praise for Stanton's The Lowell Experiment. In clear and thoughtful prose, Stanton's study does indeed "tackle the blindspots" in public history. Willing to move outside her own comfort zone, Stanton places her anthropological lens on the public historians themselves.Among other projects, she examines the complex relationship that public historians at Lowell have with their newly found comfort zone in the New Economy, and theorizes how that relationship colors how they are ultimately able to interpret history in their "post-industrial" city (particularly with regards to interpretive offerings that critically link Past to Present).

This is a significant contribution to scholars/practitioners of Public History, but The Lowell Experiment should have an even wider readership.I would urge those in American Studies and Labor Studies to read this very important study and to consider teaching it in their graduate seminars.I used The Lowell Experiment in my graduate seminar, "Performing History" (in a History Department).Prior to reading Stanton's monograph, students read Kirshenblatt-Gimblett's Destination Culture, as well as Handler and Gable's The New History in an Old Museum - two texts that The Lowell Experiment self-consciously invokes."Dynamic" is how I would describe the discussion on the day we addressed Stanton's text.Students were impressed and inspired by her scholarship, and provoked by her ideas (even while at the end of the day many felt a bit defeated about the possibilities for a truly radical public history--but this, of course, is not Stanton's burden to bear).

A Must Read
The Lowell Experiment is a refreshing look at a public history site through an anthropological lens by examining the role public historians play at historic sites. Stanton explores complex questions of heritage, tourism and public history detailing how the past shapes the present and the present shapes the interpretation of the past. In addition, she unveils the many challenges and limitations public historians have being both interpreters and contributors to history at historic sites. Stanton's writing is smooth and graceful filled with thought and detail. I would highly recommend this book for both graduate courses as well as readers interested in the politics of historic sites. There is no wonder this book took home the National Council of Public History's book prize, for it is truly a winner.

The Lowell Experiment
Stanton's examination of the heritage industry combines an astute critique of the political economy of post-industrialization with a deeply empathetic analysis of the quandries and complexities public historians face when attempting to tell complicated and sometimes conflicted stories about the past to broad audiences who tend to come to historic sites seeking a past that is familiar to them.Stanton's achievement here is in her exposure of the silences in the Lowell story and in her gentle but insistent demand that the realities of contemporary post-industrial cities -- shrinking economic bases,poverty and unprecedented heterogeneity among them -- become part of the framework for interpreting the past, grappling with the present and charting the future.

Tackling blind spots in public history
Stanton's book richly deserved the National Council of Public History's annual book prize, because, leveling a anthropologist's gaze at the public history profession, she exposes one of its most serious blind spots -- the question of why and how history could matter in today's public world.Stanton's exceedingly provocative study looks at the way the habits and ambitions of public historians combine to create distance between what we know about the past and the questions that knowledge could prompt us to ask about today and tomorrow.As one of the landmarks of 20th century public history, Lowell is a great laboratory for Stanton's ideas, and she renders it with memorable texture and detail.An excellent book for graduate courses and for the bookshelves of anyone interested in why historic sites languish while public appetite for history grows. ... Read more