History (4,560 posts)

Over its 59 years of existence, the Social Welfare History Group has consistently encouraged the teaching of history and the value of doing historical research on social work and social welfare through presentations at conferences, publication of bibliographies and articles and dissertations.

Museum of Social Justice

Dissent | LoC

As chair of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation and then of the NYSE, Emil Schram (pictured at right, 1939) helped shape tax policy to serve his peers.

The workhouse was a major feature in the lives of the poor, whether or not they were ever inmates themselves.

University Affairs | Social Innovation Research Group

Francis Perkins Center

From her earliest days in the Roosevelt cabinet, Frances Perkins was a forceful advocate for massive public works programs to bring the nation’s unemployed back to work. Within a month of Roosevelt’s inauguration, Congress enacted legislation establishing the Civilian Conservation Corps, which Roosevelt asked Perkins to implement. Roosevelt also asked her to present a plan for an emergency relief program, and she delivered a young social worker from New York named Harry Hopkins who had visited Frances in Washington with his own proposal.

Since the inception of the ‘modern’ prison system in the mid-nineteenth century to the current day, the relationship between mental illness and the prison has been hotly debated, in terms of why so many prisons came to contain large numbers of mentally ill people, as well as their tendency as institutions to produce or exacerbate mental disease.

At approximately 8:45 a.m. on 6 December 1917, the Belgian Relief vessel IMO struck the munitions-laden freighter Mont-Blanc in Halifax Harbour. The Mont-Blanc exploded in a devastating 2.9 kiloton blast, which killed 2,000 people and injured 9,000. More than 6,000 people were made homeless, and an additional 12,000 were left without shelter.

Mountjoy Prison, Dublin 1850

BCPS

A project Joan Y. Harris, ACSW