State of Immunity

State of Immunity
Author: James Colgrove
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 358
Release: 2006-10-05
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 9780520932784

This first comprehensive history of the social and political aspects of vaccination in the United States tells the story of how vaccination became a widely accepted public health measure over the course of the twentieth century. One hundred years ago, just a handful of vaccines existed, and only one, for smallpox, was widely used. Today more than two dozen vaccines are in use, fourteen of which are universally recommended for children. State of Immunity examines the strategies that health officials have used—ranging from advertising and public relations campaigns to laws requiring children to be immunized before they can attend school—to gain public acceptance of vaccines. Like any medical intervention, vaccination carries a small risk of adverse reactions. But unlike other procedures, it is performed on healthy people, most commonly children, and has been mandated by law. Vaccination thus poses unique ethical, political, and legal questions. James Colgrove considers how individual liberty should be balanced against the need to protect the common welfare, how experts should act in the face of incomplete or inconsistent scientific information, and how the public should be involved in these decisions. A well-researched, intelligent, and balanced look at a timely topic, this book explores these issues through a vivid historical narrative that offers new insights into the past, present, and future of vaccination.

We Kept Our Towns Going

We Kept Our Towns Going
Author: Phyllis Michael Wong
Publisher: MSU Press
Total Pages: 316
Release: 2022-03-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1628954523

WITH A FOREWORD BY LISA M. FINE, MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY—Michigan’s Upper Peninsula is known for its natural beauty and severe winters, as well as the mines and forests where men labored to feed industrial factories elsewhere in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But there were factories in the Upper Peninsula, too, and women who worked in them. Phyllis Michael Wong tells the stories of the Gossard Girls, women who sewed corsets and bras at factories in Ishpeming and Gwinn from the early twentieth century to the 1970s. As the Upper Peninsula’s mines became increasingly exhausted and its stands of timber further depleted, the Gossard Girls’ income sustained both their families and the local economy. During this time the workers showed their political and economic strength, including a successful four-month strike in the 1940s that capped an eight-year struggle to unionize. Drawing on dozens of interviews with the surviving workers and their families, this book highlights the daily challenges and joys of these mostly first- and second-generation immigrant women. It also illuminates the way the Gossard Girls navigated shifting ideas of what single and married women could and should do as workers and citizens. From cutting cloth and distributing materials to getting paid and having fun, Wong gives us a rare ground-level view of piecework in a clothing factory from the women on the sewing room floor.

The California Idea and American Higher Education

The California Idea and American Higher Education
Author: John Aubrey Douglass
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 618
Release: 2007-01-03
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1503617106

Throughout the twentieth century, public universities were established across the United States at a dizzying pace, transforming the scope and purpose of American higher education. Leading the way was California, with its internationally renowned network of public colleges and universities. This book is the first comprehensive history of California's pioneering efforts to create an expansive and high-quality system of public higher education. The author traces the social, political, and economic forces that established and funded an innovative, uniquely tiered, and geographically dispersed network of public campuses in California. This influential model for higher education, "The California Idea," created an organizational structure that combined the promise of broad access to public higher education with a desire to develop institutions of high academic quality. Following the story from early statehood through to the politics and economic forces that eventually resulted in the 1960 California Master Plan for Higher Education, The California Idea and American Higher Education offers a carefully crafted history of public higher education.

Street Meeting

Street Meeting
Author: Mark Wild
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 312
Release: 2008-06-02
Genre: History
ISBN: 0520256352

"This insightful analysis of ethnoracial contact and social networks among immigrants and racial groups in the central districts of Los Angeles is the product of new thinking. Wildís conclusions are fresh and sound."—Tom Sitton, coeditor of Metropolis in the Making: Los Angeles in the 1920s "This stimulating and exciting book is a work of synthesis that draws on dozens of previous theses and studies, as well as reminiscences, oral histories, testimony, and other first-person accounts. The result is an original and persuasive interpretation of the West's most important city."—Carl Abbott, author of The Metropolitan Frontier: Cities in the Modern American West

Shaped by the State

Shaped by the State
Author: Brent Cebul
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 405
Release: 2019-02-21
Genre: History
ISBN: 022659646X

American political history has been built around narratives of crisis, in which what “counts” are the moments when seemingly stable political orders collapse and new ones rise from the ashes. But while crisis-centered frameworks can make sense of certain dimensions of political culture, partisan change, and governance, they also often steal attention from the production of categories like race, gender, and citizenship status that transcend the usual break points in American history. Brent Cebul, Lily Geismer, and Mason B. Williams have brought together first-rate scholars from a wide range of subfields who are making structures of state power—not moments of crisis or partisan realignment—integral to their analyses. All of the contributors see political history as defined less by elite subjects than by tensions between state and economy, state and society, and state and subject—tensions that reveal continuities as much as disjunctures. This broader definition incorporates investigations of the crosscurrents of power, race, and identity; the recent turns toward the history of capitalism and transnational history; and an evolving understanding of American political development that cuts across eras of seeming liberal, conservative, or neoliberal ascendance. The result is a rich revelation of what political history is today.

The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction, 3 Volume Set

The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction, 3 Volume Set
Author: Brian W. Shaffer
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 1581
Release: 2011-01-18
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1405192445

This Encyclopedia offers an indispensable reference guide to twentieth-century fiction in the English-language. With nearly 500 contributors and over one million words, it is the most comprehensive and authoritative reference guide to twentieth-century fiction in the English language. Contains over 500 entries of 1000-3000 words written in lucid, jargon-free prose, by an international cast of leading scholars Arranged in three volumes covering British and Irish Fiction, American Fiction, and World Fiction, with each volume edited by a leading scholar in the field Entries cover major writers (such as Saul Bellow, Raymond Chandler, John Steinbeck, Virginia Woolf, A.S. Byatt, Samual Beckett, D.H. Lawrence, Zadie Smith, Salman Rushdie, V.S. Naipaul, Nadine Gordimer, Alice Munro, Chinua Achebe, J.M. Coetzee, and Ngûgî Wa Thiong’o) and their key works Examines the genres and sub-genres of fiction in English across the twentieth century (including crime fiction, Sci-Fi, chick lit, the noir novel, and the avant-garde novel) as well as the major movements, debates, and rubrics within the field, such as censorship, globalization, modernist fiction, fiction and the film industry, and the fiction of migration, diaspora, and exile

The U.S.-Mexican Border in the Twentieth Century

The U.S.-Mexican Border in the Twentieth Century
Author: David E. Lorey
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 212
Release: 1999
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780842027564

The 2,000-mile-long international boundary between the United States and Mexico gives shape to a unique social, economic, and cultural entity. David Lorey here offers the first comprehensive treatment of the fascinating evolution of the region over the past century. Exploring the evolution of a distinct border society, Lorey traces broad themes in the region's history, including geographical constraints, boom-and-bust cycles, and outside influences. He also examines the seminal twentieth-century events that have shaped life in the area, such as Prohibition, World War II, and economic globalization. Bringing the analysis up to the present, the book considers such divisive issues as the distinction between legal and illegal migration, trends in transboundary migrant flows, and North American free trade. Informative and accessible, this valuable study is ideal for courses on the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, Chicano studies, Mexican history, and Mexican-American history.

Between Citizens and the State

Between Citizens and the State
Author: Christopher P. Loss
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 341
Release: 2014-04-07
Genre: History
ISBN: 0691163340

This book tracks the dramatic outcomes of the federal government's growing involvement in higher education between World War I and the 1970s, and the conservative backlash against that involvement from the 1980s onward. Using cutting-edge analysis, Christopher Loss recovers higher education's central importance to the larger social and political history of the United States in the twentieth century, and chronicles its transformation into a key mediating institution between citizens and the state. Framed around the three major federal higher education policies of the twentieth century--the 1944 GI Bill, the 1958 National Defense Education Act, and the 1965 Higher Education Act--the book charts the federal government's various efforts to deploy education to ready citizens for the national, bureaucratized, and increasingly global world in which they lived. Loss details the myriad ways in which academic leaders and students shaped, and were shaped by, the state's shifting political agenda as it moved from a preoccupation with economic security during the Great Depression, to national security during World War II and the Cold War, to securing the rights of African Americans, women, and other previously marginalized groups during the 1960s and '70s. Along the way, Loss reappraises the origins of higher education's current-day diversity regime, the growth of identity group politics, and the privatization of citizenship at the close of the twentieth century. At a time when people's faith in government and higher education is being sorely tested, this book sheds new light on the close relations between American higher education and politics.

The 20th Century: A Retrospective

The 20th Century: A Retrospective
Author: Choi Chatterjee
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 449
Release: 2018-10-08
Genre: History
ISBN: 0429965443

This book is a collage of human experiences made from overlapping pieces and woven together by themes of crises, revolution, and change, aiming to raise issues that people in the twentieth-century world tried to address.

A Golden State

A Golden State
Author: Marlene Smith-Baranzini
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 532
Release: 1999
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780520217706

A collection of essays on mining and economic development in California from the Gold Rush through the end of the 19th century. This is the second in a series of four volumes comemmorating the state's sesquicentennial.