Social Security Administration History Archives | www.socialwelfarehistory.com
Wilbur Cohen being sworn in as Secretary of HEW. Looking on are President Johnson (r), Vice-President Hubert Humphrey (l) and Cohen’s wife and three sons.
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While many Americans in the nineteenth century accepted death as a common and inevitable part of life, the experience and meaning of dying changed between 1880 and 1965 as the growing prestige of medicine led both patients and doctors to reject the inevitability of death and to emphasize the fight for recovery instead.
This study argues that re-formation of working-class identity was crucial for the construction of a cohesive labour movement in Sweden. Analysis of the materials used in trade union study circles in the 1920s and 1930s reveals that the organizational identity constructed by the leadership was closely linked to the organization as a phenomenon rather than to the class structure on which it was based.
Scholars have long documented changes in knowledge regimes and power relations characteristic of state-centric drives to pacify conflicts and govern populations. But the mechanisms through which social conflicts are “made legible” in routine policy processes – as well as the reasons why some ongoing conflicts are pacified and others are persistent – have remained less clear.
Fifty years ago civil servant John Vassall was sentenced to 18 years’ imprisonment for espionage. Vassall was homosexual, and whilst working at the British Embassy in Moscow, was caught in a Soviet Secret Service ‘honeytrap’, and blackmailed into passing secrets to the Soviet Union, receiving payments for his efforts.
This article uses a mixed method approach to analyse whether urban domestic service functioned as a diffusion channel in the fertility decline. The central hypothesis is that nineteenth century female, rural-born domestic servants were influenced by the reproductive habits of their middle and upper-class employers, who were vanguards in the adoption of family size limitation within marriage.
Based upon studies of thousands of couples, this podcast explains how, when and where people in past centuries married. Family historians just starting out will find advice on where ‘missing’ marriages are most likely to be found, while those already well advanced in tracing their family tree will be able to interpret their discoveries to better understand whether their ancestors actions and choices made them exceptional or normal for their day.
Among those physicians and scientists who pioneered the study of the nervous system and its diseases in Victorian Britain, few were as significant as William Richard Gowers (1845–1915). Although he is most famous for his two-volume Manuel of Nervous Diseases, his studies in spinal diseases and epilepsy still elicit the admiration of neurologists, psychiatrists, and medical psychologists today.
The myth of neglected sick children in the past was deconstructed during the last few decades by diverse authors of both medical and social history. Families saw children as worthwhile members, and assisted them in sickness and misery. Hannah Newton’s book The Sick Child in Early Modern England stands in this tradition. But she achieves more than to affirm the results of earlier research.
W.B. Gay/Gazetteer of Hampshire County, Mass. | UMass Amherst Libraries
The Northampton State Hospital was opened in 1858 to provide moral therapy to the “insane,” and under the superintendency of Pliny Earle, became one of the best known asylums in New England. Before the turn of the century, however, the Hospital declined, facing the problems of overcrowding, poor sanitation, and inadequate funding. The push for psychiatric deinstitutionalization in the 1960s and 1970s resulted in a steady reduction of the patient population, the last eleven of whom left Northampton State in 1993.
While numerous historiographical works have been written to shed light on Freud’s early theoretical education in biology, physiology, and medicine and on the influence of that education on psychoanalysis, this paper approaches Freud’s basic comprehension of science and methodology by focusing on his early research practice in physiology and neuranatomy.
Discussions regarding the use of hypnotism in dentistry featured prominently in dental journals and society proceedings during the decades around the turn of the twentieth century. Many dentists used hypnotic suggestion either as the sole anesthetic for extractions or in conjunction with local and general anesthetics for excavation and cavity filling.
The law on abortion in present-day Ireland was recently described as ‘medieval’; a word intended to convey the meaning that the law was unsophisticated and insufficiently considerate of the interests of pregnant women. This book, however, shows clearly that medieval law on abortion was far from unsophisticated, and nor was it always as ‘pro-life’ as one might have imagined.