The Unheralded Triumph

The Unheralded Triumph
Author: Jon C. Teaford
Publisher: JHU Press
Total Pages: 484
Release: 2019-12-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 142143525X

Originally published in 1984. In 1888 the British observer James Bryce declared "the government of cities" to be "the one conspicuous failure of the United States." During the following two decades, urban reformers would repeat Bryce's words with ritualistic regularity; nearly a century later, his comment continues to set the tone for most assessments of nineteenth-century city government. Yet by the end of the century, as Jon Teaford argues in this important reappraisal, American cities boasted the most abundant water supplies, brightest street lights, grandest parks, largest public libraries, and most efficient systems of transportation in the world. Far from being a "conspicuous failure," municipal governments of the late nineteenth century had successfully met challenges of an unprecedented magnitude and complexity. The Unheralded Triumph draws together the histories of the most important cities of the Gilded Age—especially New York, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, St. Louis, and Baltimore—to chart the expansion of services and the improvement of urban environments between 1870 and 1900. It examines the ways in which cities were transformed, in a period of rapid population growth and increased social unrest, into places suitable for living. Teaford demonstrates how, during the last decades of the nineteenth century, municipal governments adapted to societal change with the aid of generally compliant state legislatures. These were the years that saw the professionalization of city government and the political accommodation of the diverse ethnic, economic, and social elements that compose America's heterogeneous urban society. Teaford acknowledges that the expansion of urban services dangerously strained city budgets and that graft, embezzlement, overcharging, and payroll-padding presented serious problems throughout the period. The dissatisfaction with city governments arose, however, not so much from any failure to achieve concrete results as from the conflicts between those hostile groups accommodated within the newly created system: "For persons of principle and gentlemen who prized honor, it seemed a failure yet American municipal government left as a legacy such achievements as Central Park, the new Croton Aqueduct, and the Brooklyn Bridge, monuments of public enterprise that offered new pleasures and conveniences for millions of urban citizens."

Gender and American Social Science

Gender and American Social Science
Author: Helene Silverberg
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 345
Release: 2021-03-09
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0691227683

This collection of essays provides the first systematic and multidisciplinary analysis of the role of gender in the formation and dissemination of the American social sciences in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Other books have traced the history of academic social science without paying attention to gender, or have described women's social activism while ignoring its relation to the production of new social knowledge. In contrast, this volume draws long overdue attention to the ways in which changing gender relations shaped the development and organization of the new social knowledge. And it challenges the privileged position that academic--and mostly male--social science has been granted in traditional histories by showing how women produced and popularized new forms of social knowledge in such places as settlement houses and the Russell Sage Foundation. The book's varied perspectives, building on recent work in history and feminist theory, break from the traditional view of the social sciences as objective bodies of expert knowledge. Contributors examine new forms of social knowledge, rather, as discourses about gender relations and as methods of cultural critique. The book will create a new framework for understanding the development of both social science and the history of gender relations in the United States. The contributors are: Guy Alchon, Nancy Berlage, Desley Deacon, Mary Dietz, James Farr, Nancy Folbre, Kathryn Kish Sklar, Dorothy Ross, Helene Silverberg, and Kamala Visweswaran.

Crisis and Commission Government in Memphis

Crisis and Commission Government in Memphis
Author: Lynette Boney Wrenn
Publisher: Univ. of Tennessee Press
Total Pages: 264
Release: 1998
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780870499975

This centralization of political power in a small commission aided the efficient transaction of municipal business, but the public policies that resulted from it tended to benefit upper-class Memphians while neglecting the less affluent residents and neighborhoods.