The Ugly Laws

The Ugly Laws PDF

Author: Susan M. Schweik

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2010-08-30

Total Pages: 446

ISBN-13: 0814783619

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In the culture of the modern West, we see ourselves as thinking subjects, defined by our conscious thought, autonomous and separate from each other and the world we survey. Current research in neurology and cognitive science shows that this picture is false. We think with our bodies, and in interaction with others, and our thought is never completed. The Fiction of a Thinkable World is a wide-ranging exploration of the meaning of this insight for our understanding of history, ethics, and politics Ambitious but never overwhelming, carrying its immense learning lightly, The Fiction of a Thinkable World shows how the Western conception of the human subject came to be formed historically, how it contrasts with that of Eastern thought, and how it provides the basic justification for the institutions of liberal capitalism. The fiction of a world separated from each of us as we are separated from each other, from which we make our choices in solitary thought, is enacted by the voter in the voting booth and the consumer at the supermarket shelf. The structure of daily experience in capitalist society reinforces the fictions of the Western intellectual tradition, stunt human creativity, and create the illusion that the capitalist order is natural and unsurpassable. Steinberg’s critique of the intellectual world of Western capitalism at the same time illuminates the paths that have been closed off in that world. It draws on Chinese ethics to show how our actions can be brought in accord with the world as it is, in its ever-changing interaction and mutual transformation, and sketches a radical political perspective that sheds the illusions of the Western model. Beautifully conceived and written, The Fiction of a Thinkable World provides new ways of thinking and opens new horizons.

Cultivating Health

Cultivating Health PDF

Author: Jennifer Koslow

Publisher: Rutgers University Press

Published: 2009-07-13

Total Pages: 221

ISBN-13: 0813548500

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At the dawn of the Progressive Era, when America was experiencing an industrial boom, many working families often ate contaminated food, lived in decaying urban tenements, and had little access to medical care. In a city that demanded change, Los Angeles women, rather than city officials, championed the call to action. Cultivating Health, an interdisciplinary chronicle, details women's impact on remaking health policy, despite the absence of government support. Combining primary source and municipal archival research with comfortable prose, Jennifer Lisa Koslow explores community nursing, housing reform, milk sanitation, childbirth, and the campaign against venereal disease in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Los Angeles. She demonstrates how women implemented health care reform and civic programs while laying the groundwork for a successful transition of responsibility back to government. Koslow highlights women's home health care and urban policy-changing accomplishments and pays tribute to what would become the model for similar service-based systems in other American centers.

Public Los Angeles

Public Los Angeles PDF

Author: Don Parson

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 2019-11-15

Total Pages: 271

ISBN-13: 0820356212

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Public Los Angeles is a collection of unpublished essays by scholar Don Parson focusing on little-known characters and histories located in the first half of twentieth-century Los Angeles. An infamously private city in the eyes of outside observers, structured around single-family homes and an aggressively competitive regional economy, Los Angeles has often been celebrated or caricatured as the epitome of an American society bent on individualism, entrepreneurialism, and market ingenuity. But Don Parson presents a different vision for the vast Southern California metropolis, one that is deftly illustrated by stories of sustained struggles for social and economic justice led by activists, social workers, architects, housing officials, and a courageous judge. Public Los Angeles presents insights into LA’s historic collectivism, networks of solidarity, and government policy. A follow-up to Parson’s seminal Making a Better World: Public Housing, the Red Scare, and the Direction of Modern Los Angeles (2005), this volume helps shape our understanding of public housing, gender and housework, judicial activism, and race and class in modernday Los Angeles and asks us if history is repeating. Parson’s work anchors a collection of nine essays by friends and mentors who deepen the discussion of his themes: Dana Cuff, Mike Davis, Steven Flusty, Greg Goldin, Jacqueline Leavitt, Laura Pulido, Sue Ruddick, Tom Sitton, Edward W. Soja, and Jennifer Wolch. The book is richly illustrated. Biographical and curatorial essays by the book’s editors, Roger Keil and Judy Branfman, provide background material and a coherent storyline for a mosaic of fresh Los Angeles research.

Three Worlds of Relief

Three Worlds of Relief PDF

Author: Cybelle Fox

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2012-04-29

Total Pages: 413

ISBN-13: 1400842581

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Three Worlds of Relief examines the role of race and immigration in the development of the American social welfare system by comparing how blacks, Mexicans, and European immigrants were treated by welfare policies during the Progressive Era and the New Deal. Taking readers from the turn of the twentieth century to the dark days of the Depression, Cybelle Fox finds that, despite rampant nativism, European immigrants received generous access to social welfare programs. The communities in which they lived invested heavily in relief. Social workers protected them from snooping immigration agents, and ensured that noncitizenship and illegal status did not prevent them from receiving the assistance they needed. But that same helping hand was not extended to Mexicans and blacks. Fox reveals, for example, how blacks were relegated to racist and degrading public assistance programs, while Mexicans who asked for assistance were deported with the help of the very social workers they turned to for aid. Drawing on a wealth of archival evidence, Fox paints a riveting portrait of how race, labor, and politics combined to create three starkly different worlds of relief. She debunks the myth that white America's immigrant ancestors pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, unlike immigrants and minorities today. Three Worlds of Relief challenges us to reconsider not only the historical record but also the implications of our past on contemporary debates about race, immigration, and the American welfare state.

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