History (2,429 posts)

‘William Beveridge’s universal safety net was a great leap forward – though never quite what it claimed to be: there are no silver bullets.’

Westbrook Farm Home for Boys in Queensland, Australia, existed in various forms for over 100 years.

“1 in 5” is one of the most high-profile and contested statistics in the media today. Referring to the number of women who experience sexual assault during their time in college, “1 in 5” is frequently invoked by activists to intensify public efforts to identify, prevent, and prosecute sexual assault. At the same time, it is roundly critiqued by those who feel it is an inflated, politically motivated number that creates mass hysteria rather than sound policy.

President Johnson signing the Food Stamp Act of 1964

A critical history, fifty years after the Social Work (Scotland) Act 1968

The decade of the 1950s is well known among historians of psychiatry for the unprecedented shift toward psychopharmacological solutions to mental health problems. More psychiatric medications were introduced than ever before or since (Healy, 2002). While psychiatric researchers later credited these drugs, in part, for controlling psychotic, depressive, and anxious symptoms—and subsequently for emptying decaying psychiatric institutions throughout the Western world—psychiatrists also produced a number of other theories that relied on a more delicate and nuanced blending of psychotherapy and psychopharmacology.

Homeless Man, Brick Lane, 1970s.

Martin and Hildegarde Couney with a young boy observe an incubator baby in the Couneys’ care.

Emblem of the United States Committee for the Care of European Children, ca. 1941-1945.

The last photograph of Salvador Allende inspecting the presidential palace shortly before his death. He was killed 45 years ago today in a US-backed coup.

Elizabeth Jennings Graham.

Social workers provided the young women with little or no information about their choices once their babies arrived. Despite the creation of CAP in 1966 to provide cost-sharing to provinces for social assistance programs meant to support needy mothers, social workers did not inform young women of such programs, according to mothers who testified. Instead, they described being coerced into accepting what was described as “best for the child” options, meaning relinquishing parental rights and surrendering their babies for adoption. Social workers provided legal forms to these women to sign, often with no legal representation.

Photographer Tish Murtha created a series of projects in the 1970s and 80s offering a tender and frank perspective on social deprivation in Britain. Above: Angela and Starky, 1976

A Labor Day parade on Main Street in Buffalo in 1900. President Grover Cleveland made Labor Day a national holiday in June 1894, as he faced a crisis of railway workers striking in Chicago.