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Frequently characterised as ‘racial riots’, the uprisings of the 1980s in Bristol, Brixton, Toxteth and Moss Side were significant reactions to the politics of late 20th-century Britain. This discussion brought together key witnesses to reflect on the context and legacy of these events.
National Archives podcast
“Home for Heroes” is among the most famous promises ever made by a British Prime Minister and one that had a profound impact on the nation’s housing, nowhere more so than in London. Nearly one hundred years on though and the capital still faces an uphill battle to provide decent housing for its growing population.
National Archives
During the 1950s, the Ministry of Pensions was suddenly faced with a substantial number of requests by individuals to change their gender status on their employment and pension records. Why was this? How did the (slightly) bewildered men at the Ministry deal with these requests? What does this have to do with fashion models like Christine Jorgensen and April Ashley, and why does this 50-year-old problem still persist in 2011?
appalachiancenter.as.uky.edu
The Great Depression with its national reach exacerbated the already grim economy in the coalfields. Hennen writes that “[b]y late 1931, four thousand Harlan County miners, more than one in three, were out of work. Working miners made as little as eighty cents a day and worked only a few days a month.” Plagued by evictions from company houses, no other job possibilities, and even starvation, miners and their families were no longer able to rely on aid from the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA).
A new order of labour relations lay at the heart of the New Deal. This article seeks to re-evaluate a well-known heterodox argument about why this order emerged and an associated critique of its consequences that has now influenced our understanding of the New Deal for over a quarter of a century.
figure 1: Tincture of cannabis, manufactured by William Ransom and son ltd.
National Archives
National Archives podcast
The purpose of this paper is to offer evidence of his views regarding the exploration of those phenomena as well as the radical, yet alternative, solutions that James advanced to overcome theoretical and methodological hindrances.
During the heroic age of Antarctic exploration, there was much discussion on the role of alcohol. The explorers expected to be able to consume alcohol, and the expeditions were supported by companies producing alcoholic beverages that used the Antarctic connection in their advertising.
The French civil service managerial reform initiated in 2007 was supposed to establish a brand new professional world where civil servants would be called to use new public management (NPM) methodology and tools in order to be more efficient and accountable.
Historians have recognized that men with drinking problems were not simply the passive subjects of medical reform and urban social control in Gilded Age and Progressive Era America but also actively shaped the partial medicalization of habitual drunkenness. The role played by evangelical religion in constituting their agency and in the historical process of medicalization has not been adequately explored, however.
The article argues that we need to examine how the transformations of psychiatric practice in the post-war era affected individuals suffering from chronic mental disorder, via an analysis which encompasses the biomedical and social dimensions of intra- and extra-mural care. It focuses upon the development of industrial therapy units in British psychiatric hospitals, in which patients undertook industrial sub-contract work.
This article examines the phenomenon known as the “relevance debate” in South African psychology. It begins with a historical overview of the contours of the discipline in that country before describing the controversy’s international dimensions, namely, the revolutionary politics of 1960s higher education and the subsequent emergence of cognate versions of the debate in American, European, and “Third World” psychology.
Arland Deyett Weeks (1871–1936) was an American educator and social reformer who published The Psychology of Citizenship in 1917 with the intention of compiling the psychological, psychobiological, and psychosocial knowledge needed for governing modern democratic Western industrialized societies, as well as offering suggestions for intervention and social reform in the educational, legal, and occupational domains.
This article examines the position of the working environment within public health priorities and as a contributor to the health of a community. Using two Lancashire textile towns (Burnley and Blackburn) as case studies and drawing on a variety of sources, it highlights how, while legislation set the industry parameters for legal enforcement of working conditions, local public health priorities were pivotal in setting codes of practice
SSA
The original Social Security Act provided only retirement benefits, and only to the worker. The 1939 Amendments made a fundamental change in the Social Security program. The Amendments added two new categories of benefits: payments to the spouse and minor children of a retired worker (so-called dependents benefits) and survivors benefits paid to the family in the event of the premature death of a covered worker. This change transformed Social Security from a retirement program for workers into a family-based economic security program (the 1939 Amendments also increased benefit amounts and accelerated the start of monthly benefit payments to 1940). The 1939 Amendments thus became a pivotal turning-point. Indeed, the 1939 law is probably second in importance only to the original Act itself in shaping Social Security in America.
Becky Taylor discusses issues of entitlement, belonging and outsiderness for Britain’s Gypsy travellers in the 20th century, with a focus on housing, education and perception.
BBC
Ken Arnold explores how three European countries variously tell the history of mental illness. What do museums of madness tell us about who we were and who we are? Ken Arnold, Head of Public Programmes at the Wellcome Trust, visits three of Europe’s old ‘mad houses’ that are now museums in Aarhus in Denmark, Haarlem in the Netherlands and Ghent in Belgium. Two of these institutions still function as psychiatric hospitals.
London School of Economics Library
For over a century, melancholia has been linked to increased rates of morbidity and mortality. Data from two epidemiologically complete cohorts of patients presenting to mental health services in North Wales (1874–1924 and 1995–2005) have been used to look at links between diagnoses of melancholia in the first period and severe hospitalized depressive disorders today and other illnesses, and to calculate mortality rates.
Cornell University
This panel on child labor was part of the 100th anniversary remembrance of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, March 25, 2011.
News Journal
Esther Farquhar Kamp. A lifelong Quaker, Kamp devoted her life to service work, both in her capacity as an educator and as a social worker. She aimed to fulfill the Quaker testimonies of peace, justice, community, equality and simplicity.
The study Suicide: An Essay on Comparative Moral Statistics by the Italian psychiatrist Enrico Agostino Morselli (1852-1929) is generally considered a major contribution to the European debate on suicide of the late decades of the nineteenth century and an important statistical source for Durkheim’s own Suicide.
Russell Sage Foundation | Google
The aim of this essay is to highlight the literary and scientific works of a Swedish psychiatrist, Josef Lundahl, an advocate of the mental hygiene concept. A close reading of his texts is used to provide an example of how the concept of mental hygiene was understood by a psychiatrist and practitioner of mental hygiene.
INternet Archive | Cornell University Library
pt. I. The approach to social case treatment: The opportunities of social case treatment, by K. de Schweinitz. Case work and social reform, by Mary Van Kleeck. The normal family, by Margaret F. Byington.–pt. II. Social case work with the physically or mentally handicapped: Offsetting the handicap of blindness, by Lucy Wright. The cripple and his place in the community, by Amy M. Hamburger. The sick, by Edna G. Henry. Principles of case work with the feeble-minded, by Catherine Brannick. Case work in the field of mental hygiene, by Elnora E. Thomson.–pt. III. Social case work with the socially handicapped: The fatherless family, by Helen G. Tyson. Desertion and non-support in family case work, by Joanna C. Colcord. The illegitimate family, by Amey E. Watson. The foster care of neglected and dependent children, by J.P. Murphy. Essentials of case treatment with delinquent children, by H.W. Thurston. The homeless, by S.A. Rice. Alcohol and social case work, by Mary P. Wheeler. The immigrant family, by Eva W. White. The soldiers’ and sailors’ families, by W.F. Persons
The medicalization of suicide has its history. This article explores one part of this history: the implementation of eighteenth-century lifesaving programs and their ramifications for the treatment of parasuicides and suicides. These programs are contextualized within early modern population politics.
London School of Economics Library
National Archives
How was the concept of obscenity governed in the absence of specific statutes that defined what was and was not obscene? To what extent was this governance an effect of the time and place in which it emerged? Drawing on early twentieth century case studies, all of which are compiled from files in the National Archives, Dr Louise Chambers investigates these questions in relation to the banning of novels whose narratives featured same sex relations between women.
This paper explores the notion that the writing of history has played a role in the making of modern suicide, and that it can have its uses in its “unmaking.” Examples of the making of modern suicide come from the writings of nineteenth century doctors concerned with formulating new medical truths of suicide, and who came to describe well-known historical “suicides” (e.g., that of Cato) in terms of pathology as part of this project.
Smith College Sophia Smith Collection | Frances Fox Piven Papers
Vol.1, No. 1
In the latter part of the nineteenth century, venereal diseases were seen not only as a problem in Germany, but also in its colonial empire. In Germany, doctors believed that through their scientific training and education they could be successful in fighting VD through the use of a biopolitics aimed to educate and regulate the bodies of targeted groups.
In the second half of the nineteenth century, the view that “[e]very case of melancholia should be looked upon as having a suicidal tendency” dominated among British asylum physicians. However, a generation earlier medical texts on melancholia contained only sporadic references to “suicide” and fewer still to the adjective “suicidal.”
This text develops three interwoven issues: first, a succinct comparative analysis of medical and psychiatric semiology, which proposes that the lack of referring relations between psychiatric symptoms and brain/psychic dysfunction is a fundamental distinction between medical and psychiatric semiology.
This paper explores the usage of suicide statistics and the emergence of suicidology in nineteenth-century Scandinavia and Finland. Drawing upon texts from Finland, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark—with a focus on Swedish language sources—it illustrates the significance that suicide statistics gained during this period, and pays attention to the question of how the Scandinavian discussion on suicide was linked to ideas from outside the geographic area.
1833
This article analyses representations of bourgeois femininity in early twentieth century newspaper coverage of the ceremonial Opening of the Legislature in Ontario, Canada’s largest and most populous province.
Since the 1980s, rates of unionization have been declining in Mexico, as they have in many Anglo- and Latin American countries, contributing to the marginalization of a once powerful political actor. It has been argued that labor revitalization in Mexico will require institutional reforms to the Federal Labor Law.
After suggesting that all psychologies contain indigenous qualities and discussing differences and commonalities between German and North American historiographies of psychology, an indigenous reconstruction of German critical psychology is applied. It is argued that German critical psychology can be understood as a backlash against American psychology, as a response to the Americanization of German psychology after WWII, on the background of the history of German psychology, the academic impact of the Cold War, and the trajectory of personal biographies and institutions.
This article charts the history of suicide statistics in Russia, exploring how multilayered associations between suicide and civilization were mapped upon perceived geographical, historical, and social fissures, both within Russia and between Russia and an abstract “west.”
The common image of a female wage earner in the U.S. in the decades around the turn of the 20th century is that of a young, single woman: the daughter of her family. However, the wives and mothers of these families also made important economic contributions to their families’ economies. This paper argues that we need to rethink our evaluation of the economic roles played by ever-married women in working-class families.
‘Deliberate self-harm’, ‘self-mutilation’ and ‘self-injury’ are just some of the terms used to describe one of the most prominent issues in British mental health policy in recent years.
From the onset, moral statistics were influenced by religious discourse. During the nineteenth century, Adolf Wagner discovered the “One Law” of sociology: Protestants always kill themselves more often than Catholics.