Uncovered

Uncovered
Author: Katherine Hempstead
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 393
Release: 2024-06-18
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0190094176

Historically, the insurance industry in America has been fragmented. As a result, there have been debates and conflicts over the proper roles of federal and state governments, business, and the responsibilities of individuals. Who should cover the risks of loss? And to what extent should risk be shared and by whom? In Uncovered, Katherine Hempstead answers these questions by exploring the history of the insurance business and its regulation in the United States from the 1870s through the twentieth century. Specifically, she focuses on the friction between the public demand for insurance and the private imperatives of insurers. Tracing the history of the industry from the early days of life, fire, and casualty insurance to the development of state regulation in the late nineteenth century, Hempstead examines the role that insurers initially played in the largely voluntary social safety net and how this changed over time. After the Great Depression, the federal government assumed a greater role in the provision of insurance, while insurers enthusiastically pursued the growing business of employee benefits. As the twentieth century progressed, insurers and government have become interdependent, with insurers participating in publicly funded markets. As Hempstead shows, periodic crises in life, fire, health, auto, and liability insurance highlighted gaps between the coverage that insurers were willing to provide and what the public demanded. Highlighting how the major part states play in insurance regulation has made it harder to solve important problems, Uncovered fundamentally changes our understanding of the crucial role that insurance has always played in American politics.

How Our Days Became Numbered

How Our Days Became Numbered
Author: Dan Bouk
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 325
Release: 2018-02-06
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 022656486X

Classing -- Fatalizing -- Writing -- Smoothing -- A modern conception of death -- Valuing lives, in four movements -- Failing the future.

The Accidental Republic

The Accidental Republic
Author: John Fabian Witt
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 322
Release: 2009-07-01
Genre: Law
ISBN: 0674045270

In the five decades after the Civil War, the United States witnessed a profusion of legal institutions designed to cope with the nation’s exceptionally acute industrial accident crisis. Jurists elaborated the common law of torts. Workingmen’s organizations founded a widespread system of cooperative insurance. Leading employers instituted welfare-capitalist accident relief funds. And social reformers advocated compulsory insurance such as workmen’s compensation. John Fabian Witt argues that experiments in accident law at the turn of the twentieth century arose out of competing views of the loose network of ideas and institutions that historians call the ideology of free labor. These experiments a century ago shaped twentieth- and twenty-first-century American accident law; they laid the foundations of the American administrative state; and they occasioned a still hotly contested legal transformation from the principles of free labor to the categories of insurance and risk. In this eclectic moment at the beginnings of the modern state, Witt describes American accident law as a contingent set of institutions that might plausibly have developed along a number of historical paths. In turn, he suggests, the making of American accident law is the story of the equally contingent remaking of our accidental republic.

Osiris, Volume 39

Osiris, Volume 39
Author: Jaipreet Virdi
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 418
Release: 2024-09-02
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0226835626

Presents a powerful new vision of the history of science through the lens of disability studies. Disability has been a central—if unacknowledged—force in the history of science, as in the scientific disciplines. Across historical epistemology and laboratory research, disability has been “good to think with”: an object of investigation made to yield generalizable truths. Yet disability is rarely imagined to be the source of expertise, especially the kind of expertise that produces (rational, neutral, universal) scientific knowledge. This volume of Osiris places disability history and the history of science in conversation to foreground disability epistemologies, disabled scientists, and disability sciencing (engagement with scientific tools and processes). Looking beyond paradigms of medicalization and industrialization, the volume authors also examine knowledge production about disability from the ancient world to the present in fields ranging from mathematics to the social sciences, resulting in groundbreaking histories of taken-for-granted terms such as impairment, infirmity, epidemics, and shōgai. Some contributors trace the disabling impacts of scientific theories and practices in the contexts of war, factory labor, insurance, and colonialism; others excavate racial and settler ableism in the history of scientific facts, protocols, and collections; still others query the boundaries between scientific, lay, and disability expertise. Contending that disability alters method, authors bring new sources and interpretation techniques to the history of science, overturn familiar narratives, apply disability analyses to established terms and archives, and discuss accessibility issues for disabled historians. The resulting volume announces a disability history of science.

Readings in American Health Care

Readings in American Health Care
Author: William G. Rothstein
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
Total Pages: 442
Release: 1995
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780299145347

A collection of journal articles from the 1980s examining the historical development of current health care issues in American society and comparing them to related issues of the past. Articles by sociologists, historians, economists, physicians, and health researchers include introductions, bibliographies, and discussion questions, and brief explanations of relevant concepts and terms. Paper edition (unseen), $17.95. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Who's Who of Pulitzer Prize Winners

Who's Who of Pulitzer Prize Winners
Author: Elizabeth A. Brennan
Publisher: Greenwood
Total Pages: 696
Release: 1999
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN:

List Pulitzer Prize winners in thirty-nine different categories, arranged chronologically, with biographical and career information, selected works, other awards, and a brief commentary, along with material on Pulitzer.

Anglo-American Life Insurance, 1800–1914 Volume 2

Anglo-American Life Insurance, 1800–1914 Volume 2
Author: Timothy Alborn
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 453
Release: 2018-04-19
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1351576518

By the eve of the Great Depression, there existed in America the equivalent of a policy for every man, woman and child, and in Britain it grew from its narrow aristocratic base to cover all social classes. This primary resource collection is the first comparative history of British and American life insurance industries.

Facts of Life

Facts of Life
Author: George Emery
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
Total Pages: 260
Release: 1993-10-04
Genre: History
ISBN: 0773564241

Emery's central argument is that scholars must recognize the social historical character of the statistics before using them as a basis for research. He defines "social" broadly to include both an external component (the ideologies, concerns, and processes in society that influenced civil registration officials) and an internal component (the complex way officials organized civil registration, which greatly affected the statistics). Thus he treats statutes, regulations, the content of registration forms, and definition of significant terms as part of the social history of the statistics, not as technical background material. The issues treated include the incomplete registration of vital events, the influence of different definitions of "live birth" on statistics for infant deaths, the nature of statistics for death by cause, and the problem of "residence" - the difference between vital events occurring in a municipality and those involving its residents. Emery places Ontario's vital statistics in the context of the international statistics movement and the development of the province's registration system. He then provides empirical illustrations of how aspects of definition influence the data and suggests strategies for responding to such problems. The chapter providing a case study of the completeness of mortality registrations for 1869 to 1972 was prepared in collaboration with Kevin McQuillan.

The Papers of Jefferson Davis

The Papers of Jefferson Davis
Author: Jefferson Davis
Publisher: LSU Press
Total Pages: 767
Release: 2012-03-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 0807139084

Volume 13 of The Papers of Jefferson Davis follows the former president of the Confederacy as he becomes head of the Carolina Life Insurance Company of Memphis and attempts to gain a financial foothold for his newly reunited family. Having lost everything in the Civil War and spent two years immediately afterwards in federal prison, Davis faced a mounting array of financial woes, health problems, and family illnesses and tragedies in the 1870s. Despite setbacks during this decade, Davis also began a quest to rehabilitate his image and protect his historical legacy. Although his position with the insurance company provided temporary financial stability, Davis resigned after the Panic of 1873 forced the sale of the company and its new owners canceled payments to Carolina policyholders. He left for England the following year in search of employment and to recuperate from ongoing illnesses. In 1876, Davis became president of the London-based Mississippi Valley Society and relocated to New Orleans to run the company. Throughout the 1870s, Davis waged an expensive and seemingly endless legal battle to regain his prewar Mississippi plantation, Brierfield. He also began working on his memoirs at Beauvoir, the Gulf Coast estate of a family friend. Though disfranchised, Davis addressed the subject of politics with more frequency during this decade, criticizing the Reconstruction policies of the federal government while defending the South and the former Confederacy. The volume ends with Davis's inheritance of Beauvoir, which was his last home. The editors have drawn from over one hundred manuscript repositories and private collections in addition to numerous published sources in compiling Volume 13.

Triumph of Conservatism

Triumph of Conservatism
Author: Gabriel Kolko
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 362
Release: 2008-06-30
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1439118728

A radically new interpretation of the Progressive Era which argues that business leaders, and not the reformers, inspired the era’s legislation regarding business.