History (4,558 posts)

Kew Asylum around the time Catherine Hay Thomson went undercover there.

The history of unemployment and concepts surrounding it remain a mystery to many Americans. Frank Stricker believes we need to understand this essential thread in our shared past. American Unemployment is an introduction for everyone that takes aim at misinformation, willful deceptions, and popular myths to set the record straight.

Ex-Celtic Chuck Cooper (above), equipped with a master’s degree in social work, broke further color barriers in his hometown of Pittsburgh: becoming the first African American director in the City of Pittsburgh government’s history as the Director of Parks and Recreation and pushing affirmative action at the Pittsburgh National Bank as an urban affairs officer.

Grace Abbott and her sister Edith fought for social welfare reform on behalf of the urban lower classes, working with Jane Addams at Hull House in Chicago from 1908 to 1920.

A day to honor Alice Paul would be a good choice. Born in 1885, Paul earned a bachelor’s degree in biology from Swarthmore College, got a master’s degree in sociology from what is now Columbia University, and studied social work in England before getting her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania.

Reasoning against Madness: Psychiatry and the State in Rio de Janeiro, 1830-1944 examines the emergence of Brazilian psychiatry, looking at how its practitioners fashioned themselves as the key architects in the project of national regeneration. The book’s narrative involves a cast of varied characters in an unstable context: psychiatrists, Catholic representatives, spiritist leaders, state officials, and the mentally ill, all caught in the shifting landscape of modern state formation.

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.