History (4,531 posts)

Recent bouts of gentrification and investment in Detroit have led some to call it the greatest turnaround story in American history. Meanwhile, activists point to the city’s cuts to public services, water shutoffs, mass foreclosures, and violent police raids.

Born in England, Joanna Crawshaw trained as a social worker at Edinburgh University between 1955 and 1956, then in 1957 completed a one year Almoners’ Course through what became The Institute of Medical Social Workers in London.

Eduard Josef Wimmer-Wisgrill: Design for Maskenspiele (Masquerades), 1907

President Lyndon B. Johnson signing the Medicare Bill at the Harry S. Truman Library in Independence, Missouri, with President Truman seated next to him. Twenty years earlier, President Truman proposed his idea for nationwide health care.

The Infirmary, Dispensary and Lunatic Asylum, Manchester.

Working-class parents in America, for their part, lack the wherewithal to engage in such intensive parenting. As a result, social divisions from one generation to the next are set to widen. Not so long ago the “American dream” held out the prospect that everyone, however humble their background, could succeed if they tried hard enough. But a recent report by the World Bank showed that intergenerational social mobility (the chance that the next generation will end up in a different social class from the previous one) in the land of dreams is now among the lowest in all rich countries. And that is before many of the social effects of the new parenting gap have had time to show up yet.

The church is responsible for a litany of injustices — and today Christian rhetoric is used to defend a violent neoliberal capitalism. But the glorious tradition of liberation theology can’t be forgotten.

In 1940s North Carolina, a Communist-led union of tobacco workers fought to bring democracy to the Jim Crow South. Above: An R. J. Reynolds supervisor watches workers during a 1947 strike by Local 22.

Thomas Paine, the great American revolutionary, proposed the world’s first realistic plan to abolish poverty. What he devised were universal social insurance and stakeholder grants, outlined in the 1797 pamphlet Agrarian Justice. Above: Portrait of Paine, by Laurent Dabos, c. 1791