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This article examines posthumanism and its relationship to humanism. First, it is argued that the term “posthumanism” relies upon an incomplete conception of humanism, and in a way that forecloses the possibility of looking to the humanist tradition for support.
Smith College Sophia Smith Collection
William Battie (1758)
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).
As of spring 2011, 150 years have passed since the death of one of the most famous neurological patients of the nineteenth century. A Frenchman, “Monsieur Leborgne” also known by the nickname “Tan,” was hospitalized due to an almost complete loss of speech.
This article explores how very old people in Northern Norway supported life before economic modernization, from nineteenth-century census registrations and ethnographic sources. Very few lived alone.
Chilean Protest Murals Photograph Collection, Widener Library.
Mural depicting a man and woman in a prison cell. Avenida Libertador General Bernardo O’Higgins, Santiago, Chile, ca. 1989. Andrés Romero Spethman, photographer.
Google | Daniel Defoe
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.
New Yorker
At an Army research facility, a soldier given a powerful mind-altering drug said, “I feel like my life is not worth a nickel here.”
archives.bps.org.uk | University of Hull photographic services, Brynmor Jones Library
Grace Rawlings: British Psychological Society
D Thomas: Royal Medico Psychological Association (RMPA)
Harvey Stevens: Chair, American Committee American Assoc.on Mental Deficiency
Alan Clarke: Joint Secretary
Google | Henry George
Google | Stanford University Press
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.
The second chapter of Augustus’ lex Iulia de adulteriis coercendis entitles the Roman father – under specific, narrowly defined circumstances – to kill his adulterous daughter and her lover. This paper focuses on three aspects.
<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.
In 1946, the Veterans Administration, now the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), underwent extensive organizational and professional changes to accommodate the health care needs of veterans returning from World War Two.
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.
archives.bps.org.uk | N.V.Int.Persefoto Bureau, Amsterdam P.H.Kade
University of Groningen, Netherlands 1926
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.
History of Psychology Centre
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.
BBC | Getty Images
Lloyd George and Winston Churchill, 1915
Prior to 1893, the Ontario government did not accept direct responsibility for the care of neglected and dependent infants. However, charitable infants’ homes received government grants for the infants and for their nursing mothers, and from 1874 were inspected annually or twice annually.
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.
While Canadian scholars have documented some of the beliefs and behaviours of student activists in the 1960s, little has been said of the ‘average’ Canadian university student.
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.
This article explores the peacock look in men’s fashion in the second half of the 1960s and the ways the style helped to reinvent the identities of white, middle-class, middle-age men.
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.
Commentators on American culture have always been struck by the thinness of the country’s social fabric. Tocqueville saw the young republic as a nation of strangers. Critics since have almost all feared for—or gloried in—the fragility of the bonds that have held us to one another.
James Lorimer Halliday (1897–1983) pioneered the development of the concept of psychosocial medicine in Britain in the 1930s and 1940s. He worked in Glasgow, first as a public health doctor, and then as part of the corporatist National Health Insurance scheme.
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.
At the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s, inflation in Israel exceeded 100 percent. Using the twenty percent samples of the 1972, 1983, 1995, and 2008 Israeli Census, we show that inflation had a substantial negative effect on the decision to marry.
This article details how the fund-raising efforts of Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference in the wake of the 1963 Birmingham protests transformed the finances of the SCLC. Having struggled to sustain itself prior to 1963, the SCLC experienced a massive influx of donations.
From the second half of the 19th century, eugenics claimed the medical and social need to intervene in human reproduction. During National Socialism, 300,000–400,000 people in Germany were subjected to compulsory sterilization because they had psychological diseases, impairments and social behavioural problems, which were regarded as genetically determined.
Among television programs of the late 1960s Star Trek was somewhat anomalous in tackling philosophical and political themes, and in doing so in a consistently liberal voice. Its statements, however, reveal not only the highest aspirations of the period’s liberal project, but also the limitations and unresolved tensions of that approach.
Casual sex has become a cultural commonplace since it was named in the 1960s and later became associated with the US college sex phenomenon of “hooking up”.
Although the compound adjective ‘psychosocial’ was first used by academic psychologists in the 1890s, it was only in the interwar period that psychiatrists, psychologists and social workers began to develop detailed models of the psychosocial domain. These models marked a significant departure from earlier ideas of the relationship between society and human nature.
This article examines the use of “socially inadequate” as a label for the dependent poor in the United States, 1910–40. It analyses the dense meanings that were given to this term and the political significance that the label “socially inadequate” gained in relation to sterilization and immigration policy.
During the 1970s, San Francisco was often characterized as the “Gay Mecca” of the United States. While it’s true that San Francisco was more supportive of the gay community during this period, this depiction often dismisses the problematic side of the increasing visibility of homosexuals.
This article investigates the contested boundaries of the political within the working-class movements in Leipzig and Lyon at the end of the Weimar Republic and during the Popular Front. What the appropriate issues and places of politics should be was a question that was highly contested among the organisations of the local working-class movements in both cities.
LoC Prints and Photographs Division | Bloomberg
This refugee family lost its home in 1932, joining the millions of Americans displaced by the Great Depression.
In writing about working-class activism, scholars frequently study labor organizations and workplaces from which African Americans have been mostly excluded. Consequently, the uniqueness of black labor activism is not captured and is often misinterpreted. This article posits that black fraternal organizations, specifically the Improved, Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks of the World (IBPOEW), offer an alternative site for studying black workers and their struggles for employment during the 1930s and 1940s.
This is a book of many voices, all of them telling an important story – the history of ‘the Lothian mental health users movement’ from the vantage point of the ‘users’. The speakers and authors stand in an important tradition – one dedicated to emancipation.