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.
Backlash against American psychology: An indigenous reconstruction of the history of German critical psychology.
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.
Mapping Civilization: The Cultural Geography of Suicide Statistics in Russia
Family wages: The roles of wives and mothers in U.S. working-class survival strategies, 1880–1930
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.
Making the cut: The production of ‘self-harm’ in post-1945 Anglo-Saxon psychiatry
Sociology’s “One Law”: Moral Statistics, Modernity, Religion, and German Nationalism in the Suicide Studies of Adolf Wagner and Alexander von Oettingen
Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds
Magic Bullets for Mental Disorders: The Emergence of the Concept of an “Antipsychotic” Drug
Married and single; or, Marriage and celibacy contrasted: in a series of domestic pictures
The Niagara Frontier Defense League’s patriotic war on labor: the case of Curtiss Aeroplane, 1917–1918
Initially formed by Buffalo businessmen to monitor the region’s sizeable German population, by Fall 1917, the NFDL turned its attention to tackling the region’s labor problems, developing an array of covert mechanisms designed to stop unionization and regain control over Buffalo’s wartime labor market.
New York City Welfare Boss
‘A Prostitution of the Profession’? Forcible Feeding, Prison Doctors, Suffrage and the British State, 1909-1914
Historians have castigated the British medical profession for endorsing forcible feeding during the suffragette hunger strike campaigns of 1909 to 1914. This article reconsiders the importance of medical opposition to forcible feeding by closely analysing its agendas and, importantly, by positing that the medico-ethical debates sparked in that period set the stage for ethical discourses that have recurrently resurfaced ever since.
The Chlorpromazine Enigma
Two revolutionary drugs were introduced into psychiatry in the early 1950s for the treatment of agitated mental patients — reserpine and chlorpromazine. These drugs initiated the modern era of drug treatment for schizophrenia and other psychoses. Early research revealed that, although the pharmacological profiles of the two drugs overlapped considerably, they had different mechanisms of action.
Exposing Humanism: Prudence, Ingenium, and the Politics of the Posthuman
Main building of Delhi School of Social Work, 1985
A treatise on madness
Herbert Hill and the Federal Bureau of Investigation
This article points to previously undetected evidence demonstrating that Herbert Hill, labor director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) from the 1950s to the 1970s, informed for the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) on his former political associates in the Socialist Workers Party (SWP).
Mysterious “Monsieur Leborgne”: The Mystery of the Famous Patient in the History of Neuropsychology is Explained
Life Support in High Age: Northern Norway 1865-1900
Chilean Protest Murals
Proposals for Imploying the Poor in and about the City of London (1886)
Dr. Frances Fox Piven
Smith College Sophia Smith Collection | Boston Sunday Globe/G Vasquez
Social theorist, welfare rights activist, and political science professor Frances Fox Piven was born in 1932 in Calgary, Alberta. Raised in New York, she was naturalized in 1953, the same year she received a BA in city planning from the University of Chicago. After receiving an MA (1956) and a Ph.D. (1962) from that institution, she moved to New York where she worked as a city planner and then as a research associate for one of the country’s first antipoverty agencies, Mobilization for Youth (MFY) on New York’s Lower East Side. In 1965 Piven and her MFY colleague Richard Cloward began a career of formulating the theoretical underpinnings of anti-poverty and welfare rights movements with the publication of a paper entitled “Mobilizing the Poor: How It Can Be Done”
Personal note: I found Dr. Piven to be the most compelling presence I have ever encountered in a classroom.
“Operation Delirium”
Opening ceremony of the London Conference on the Scientific Study of Mental Deficiency, Tavistock Square London July 1960.
The Crime of Poverty (1885)
Social Welfare in the Soviet Union (1968)
Scientific History and Experimental History
The promise of scientific history and scientifically informed history is more modest today than it was in the nineteenth century, when a number of intellectuals hoped to transform history into a scientific mode of inquiry that would unite the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences, and reveal profound truths about human nature and destiny.
What really happened to the 1960s: how mass media culture failed American democracy
On the Roman father’s right to kill his adulterous daughter
Crime and Punishment in Ottoman Times: Corruption and Fines
<br.Ruling for more than six centuries over lands that spanned three continents, the Ottomans developed a system of law enforcement that initially relied on fines collected by local agents. In the sixteenth century, much of the revenue from these fines went to the local officials in charge of identifying suspects and punishing criminals.
Patient care by VA psychologists in the 1950s and 1960s
Are Aging Baby Boomers Squeezing Young Workers Out of Jobs?
As life expectancy increases and the retirement in-come system contracts, households face an enormous challenge in ensuring a secure retirement. Working longer is often hailed as the best way to increase re-tirement incomes. But some suggest that more work by older persons reduces the job opportunities for younger persons.
Psychologists attending the eighth International Congress of Psychology (ICP)
Normalizing the Supernormal: The Formation of the Gesellschaft Fr Psychologische Forschung (Society for Psychological Research), c. 1886–1890
This paper traces the formation of the German “Gesellschaft für psychologische Forschung” (“Society for Psychological Research”), whose constitutive branches in Munich and Berlin were originally founded as inlets for alternatives to Wundtian experimental psychology from France and England, that is, experimental researches into hypnotism and alleged supernormal phenomena.
British Educational Psychology: The First Hundred Years
In 1913 the first applied psychologist took up his post with the London County Council. His job was to assess children for special educational programmes and develop tools to identify children who may need alternative kinds of education. With this post, the profession of educational psychology was born. The numbers of educational psychologists have steadily grown over the subsequent hundred years and the practices, roles and functions that they adopt have similarly developed.
Skivers versus strivers: The roots of the welfare state
Rethinking the American anti-war movement
The real things: photographing scenes of the 1960s
Ontario Government Funding and Supervision of Infants’ Homes 1875-1893
Plans to end the Great Depression from the American public
Thousands of letters proposing economic recovery plans were written by workers and by the public in general to the Roosevelt administration. A survey of the recovery plan letters indicates that almost all of the letters make sense from an economic point of view and that a large proportion made suggestions that had the possibility of having a positive effect on economic recovery.
Talkin’ Bout My Generation’: Political Orientations and Activities of a Cohort of Canadian University Students in the Mid-Sixties
Democratizing mental health: Motherhood, therapeutic community and the emergence of the psychiatric family at the Cassel Hospital in post-Second World War Britain
Shortly following the Second World War, and under the medical direction of ex-army psychiatrist T. F. Main, the Cassel Hospital for Functional Nervous Disorders emerged as a pioneering democratic ‘therapeutic community’ in the treatment of mental illness. This definitive movement away from conventional ‘custodial’ assumptions about the function of the psychiatric hospital initially grew out of a commitment to sharing therapeutic responsibility between patients and staff and to preserving patients’ pre-admission responsibilities and social identities.
Dedicated followers of fashion: peacock fashion and the roots of the new American man, 1960–70
Shutting down ‘Big Brown’: Reassessing the 1997 UPS strike and the fate of American labor
In the summer of 1997, organized labor won a major strike against United Parcel Service. Staying out for just over two weeks, more than 185,000 members of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) crippled UPS’s operations, securing pay increases and more full-time positions as a result. At the time, observers widely predicted that the strike would lead to a revival of organized labor’s fortunes, especially as it showed that American unions could still win public support.
Still Connected: Family and Friends in America since 1970
Quilts: Moral Economies and Matrilineages
Glasgow’s ‘sick society’?: James Halliday, psychosocial medicine and medical holism in Britain c.1920–48
Children and Agency: Religion as Socialisation in Late Antiquity and the Late Medieval West
The aim of the paper is to present a new approach to the study of pre-modern children and childhood. By exploiting concepts of modern childhood studies, particularly socialisation and agency, we intend to shift the focus from ‘childhood’ and parental attitudes to children’s own experience and action.