21 research outputs found
The GI Bill a new deal for veterans
No full textFrom the Publisher: On rare occasions in American history, Congress enacts a measure so astute, so far-reaching, so revolutionary, it enters the language as a metaphor. The Marshall Plan comes to mind, as does the Civil Rights Act. But perhaps none resonates in the American imagination like the G.I. Bill. In a brilliant addition to Oxford's acclaimed Pivotal Moments in American History series, historians Glenn C. Altschuler and Stuart M. Blumin offer a compelling and often surprising account of the G.I. Bill and its sweeping and decisive impact on American life. Formally known as the Serviceman's Readjustment Act of 1944, it was far from an obvious, straightforward piece of legislation, but resulted from tense political maneuvering and complex negotiations. As Altschuler and Blumin show, an unlikely coalition emerged to shape and pass the bill, bringing together both New Deal Democrats and conservatives who had vehemently opposed Roosevelt's social-welfare agendaFor the first time in American history returning soldiers were not only supported, but enabled to pursue success-a revolution in America's policy towards its veterans. Once enacted, the G.I. Bill had far-reaching consequences. By providing job training, unemployment compensation, housing loans, and tuition assistance, it allowed millions of Americans to fulfill long-held dreams of social mobility, reshaping the national landscape. The huge influx of veterans and federal money transformed the modern university and the surge in single home ownership vastly expanded America's suburbs. Perhaps most important, as Peter Drucker noted, the G.I. Bill "signaled the shift to the knowledge society." The authors highlight unusual or unexpected features of the law-its color blindness, the frankly sexist thinking behind it, and its consequent influence on race and gender relationsNot least important, Altschuler and Blumin illuminate its role in individual lives whose stories they weave into this thoughtful account. Written with insight and narrative verve by two leading historians, The G.I. Bill makes a major contribution to the scholarship of postwar Americ
New York by gaslight and other urban sketches
No full textFirst published in 1850, New York by Gas-Light explores the seamy side of the newly emerging metropolis: "the festivities of prostitution, the orgies of pauperism, the haunts of theft and murder, the scenes of drunkenness and beastly debauch, and all the sad realities that go to make up the lower stratum - the underground story - of life in New York!" The author of this lively and fascinating little book, which both attracted and offended large numbers of readers in Victorian America, was George G. Foster, reporter for Horace Greeley's influential New York Tribune, social commentator, poet, and man about town. Foster drew on his daily and nightly rambles through the city's streets and among the characters of the urban demi-monde to produce a sensationalized but extraordinarily revealing portrait of New York at the moment it was emerging as a major metropolis. Reprinted here with sketches from two of Foster's other books, New York by Gas-Light will be welcomed by students of urban social history, popular culture, literature, and journalism.Editor Stuart M. Blumin has provided a penetrating introductory essay that sets Foster's life and work in the contexts of the growing city, the development of the mass-distribution publishing industry, the evolving literary genre of urban sensationalism, and the wider culture of Victorian America. This is an important reintroduction to a significant but neglected work, a prologue to the urban realism that would flourish later in the fiction of Stephen Crane, the painting of George Bellows, and the journalism of Jacob Riis
The Center Cannot Hold: Historians and the Suburbs
No full textIn 1962 Sam Bass Warner, Jr., published an important book about suburbanization in late nineteenth-century Boston. Like most influential books, it was timely in its subject, and Warner's scholarly study might be supposed to have built upon the interest that was being generated by numerous popular analyses of contemporary suburbanization and suburban life in post—World War II America. One can indeed find in Streetcar Suburbs the same fundamental preoccupation with the shallowness of communal life and similar diagnoses of the sprawl of single-family homes in homogeneous and militantly residential areas on the periphery of the city, as one finds in say, William H. Whyte's 1956 critique, The Organization Man.' Yet Warner's book was not part of, and did not initiate, a new genre of historical suburban studies. Instead, it served as one of the essential founding texts of what came to be known as the “new urban history”—a large number of scholarly attempts to examine the character and structure of life at the center of the developing big cities of industrializing America. Not the “crabgrass frontier” but the “urban frontier” defined the territory of historical adventure during the 1960s. The metaphor is not, and was not then, entirely an academic one. In 1961 the new President of the United States had called for a “new frontier” of public initiative, and planner Charles Abrams helped his immediate successor expand and locate that initiative with his book, The City Is the Frontier. Without entirely losing interest in the suburbs, scholars, policymakers, and citizens of various kinds suddenly realized the importance of understanding the city and its history.</jats:p
Book Reviews: The Middle-Class City: Transforming Space and Time in Philadelphia, 1876-1926, by John Henry Hepp IV.
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