When President Roosevelt submitted his Social Security proposal to Congress in January 1935, he also transmitted draft legislation, entitled the Economic Security Bill. The Administration’s bill was introduced in the House by Congressmen Doughton and Lewis and in the Senate by Senator Wagner. This draft bill was the starting point for the legislative consideration of Social Security in 1935.
Of sentiment, science and myth: shifting metaphors of racial inclusion in twentieth-century Brazil
English pauper lunatics in the era of the old poor law
The Allure of Labor: Workers, Race, and the Making of the Peruvian State
Don’t be doped: An exposure of the state medical scheme
Freemasonry and psychiatry in Poland
The Greek Civil War and child migration to Australia: Aileen Fitzpatrick and the Australian Council of International Social Service
Extreme fasting among Daoist priestesses of the Tang Dynasty: an old Chinese variant of anorexia nervosa?
Assaults decrease more than one-fourth during prohibition
London Lives: Workhouses
Abstainers had one-third less accidents
Carney Landis and the psychosexual landscape of touch in mid-20th-century America.
In the last quarter of the 1930s, Carney Landis, an associate professor of psychology at Columbia University affiliated with the Psychiatric Institute of New York, headed a Committee for Research in Problems of Sex-funded research project in which he conducted interviews with 100 women between the ages of 18 and 35 who self-identified as physically disabled.
Social Work History at Johns Hopkins Hospital
Beyond Kinsey: The committee for research on problems of sex and American psychology.
Diets and Dieting: A History of Weight Loss in America
The Settlement Heritage
By Albert J. Kennedy
(from a speech Mr. Kennedy made in 1953 for the National Conference of Social Work. Mr. Kennedy was born in 1879 and was a chronicler of the settlement movement in the United States for which he compiled the 1911 Handbook of Settlements. He died in 1968 at the age of 89.)
Cognitive Bias: Interracial Homicide in New Orleans, 1921–1945
Draft Resisters, Left Nationalism, and the Politics of Anti-Imperialism
Sex Before the Sexual Revolution: Intimate Life in England 1918-1963. By Simon Szreter and Kate Fisher
Prostitution, Islamic Law and Ottoman Societies
‘Every boy ought to learn to shoot and to obey orders’: Guns, Boys, and the Law in English Canada from the late Nineteenth Century to the Great War
War against poverty
Better housing: The solution to infant mortality in the slums (1936)
“Hack, Pack, Sack”: Occupational Structure, Status, and Mobility of Jews in Amsterdam 1851–1941
Until the start of the twentieth century, the occupational structure of Jews in Amsterdam can be described as an ethnic-enclave economy, heavily concentrated in the trading and diamond industries. By 1941, however, Jews had taken advantage of other occupational opportunities, increasing their presence significantly within the new middle class that had begun to emerge during the Industrial Revolution.
Five Decades of Action for Children
All his ways are those of an idiot: The admission, treatment of and social reaction to two idiot children of the Northampton Pauper Lunatic Asylum, 1877-1883
Stalin’s Last Generation: Soviet Post-War Youth and the Emergence of Mature Socialism. By Juliane Furst (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. v plus 391 pp.)
The reform (!) of the Poor Law
History of the HIV Epidemic
Child Patients, Hospitals and the Home in Eighteenth-Century England
This article seeks to map out some of the principal pathways to medical care used by the parents of poor children. We focus on the most formal provider of healthcare in eighteenth-century towns, the voluntary general hospitals, but we use these institutions as a prism to consider the way that the treatment of child sickness was managed more generally in five local settings.
The scientific spirit and social work (1919)
I’ve Got to Make My Livin’: Black Women’s Sex Work in Turn of the Century Chicago
Rallying for repression: police terror, “law-and-order” politics, and the decline of Maine’s prisoners’ rights movement
This essay analyzes right-wing activism in Maine’s law enforcement community in relation to the state’s prisoners’ rights movement during the early 1970s. Viewing violent political repression as central to the decline of the radical prisoners’ rights organization, Statewide Correctional Alliance for Reform (SCAR), I argue that vigilante activity and police attacks on prison activists, including Portland Police Officer Edward Foster’s botched attempt to organize a police “death squad” to assassinate local ex-convicts during the summer of 1974, should be understood as the work of a right-wing social movement in 1970s Maine that included activist prison guards, police officers, law enforcement officials, and their supporters.
More Perfect Unions: The American Search for Marital Bliss. By Rebecca L. Davis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010. 317 pp.)
Making Up Koro: Multiplicity, Psychiatry, Culture, and Penis-Shrinking Anxieties
Koro is a syndrome in which the penis (or sometimes the nipples or vulva) is retracting, with deleterious effects for the sufferer. In modern psychiatry, it is considered a culture-bound syndrome (CBS). This paper considers the formation and development of psychiatric conceptions of koro and related genital retraction syndromes from the 1890s to the present.
The Baby Trains: Catholic Foster Care and Western Migration, 1873-1929
Instructions on social work
The Corporate Campaign against Homelessness: Class Power and Urban Governance in Neoliberal Atlanta, 1973-1988
Recollections of activism: Hampton Institute and Vassar College, 1967–72
Female Same-sex Desires: Conceptualizing a Disease in Competing Medical Fields in Nineteenth-century Europe
Diagnosis, Therapy, and Evidence: Conundrums in Modern American Medicine
Medical historian Gerald Grob and medical sociologist Alan Horwitz provide an important and carefully crafted interdisciplinary analysis of how numerous therapies are introduced into clinical practice in the absence of clear and compelling data and kept alive by a combination of faith, analogy, tradition, ideology, inertia, and politics.
Dirty Harry’s San Francisco
This article argues that Dirty Harry (Siegel, 1971) is first and foremost a San Francisco film, a perspective that has been ignored by current literature. The article merges a close reading of the film’s narrative, iconography, and semiotics with an analysis of the film’s representation and refraction of San Francisco’s history, politics, culture, and popular image.
The Flower of the Union: Leisure, Race, and Social Identity in Bangu, Rio de Janeiro (1904-1933)
“Confinement of the Higher Orders”: The Social Role of Private Lunatic Asylums in Ireland, c. 1820–60
Infection of the Innocents: Wet Nurses, Infants, and Syphilis in France, 1780-1900
Breaking the Chain of Poverty: Family Planning, Community Involvement, and the Population Council/Office of Economic Opportunity Alliance
Scientific Research and Corporate Influence: Smoking, Mental Illness, and the Tobacco Industry
Mentally ill individuals have always smoked at high rates and continue to do so, despite public health efforts to encourage smoking cessation. In the last half century, the tobacco industry became interested in this connection, and conducted and supported psychiatric and basic science research on the mental health implications of smoking, long before most mental health professionals outside the industry investigated this issue.