Download Free The History Of Public Welfare In New York State 1867 1940 Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online The History Of Public Welfare In New York State 1867 1940 and write the review.

Between the Civil War and World War II, Catholic charities evolved from volunteer and local origins into a centralized and professionally trained workforce that played a prominent role in the development of American welfare. Dorothy Brown and Elizabeth McKeown document the extraordinary efforts of Catholic volunteers to care for Catholic families and resist Protestant and state intrusions at the local level, and they show how these initiatives provided the foundation for the development of the largest private system of social provision in the United States. It is a story tightly interwoven with local, national, and religious politics that began with the steady influx of poor Catholic immigrants into urban centers. Supported by lay organizations and by sympathetic supporters in city and state politics, religious women operated foundling homes, orphanages, protectories, reformatories, and foster care programs for the children of the Catholic poor in New York City and in urban centers around the country. When pressure from reform campaigns challenged Catholic child care practices in the first decades of the twentieth century, Catholic charities underwent a significant transformation, coming under central diocesan control and growing increasingly reliant on the services of professional social workers. And as the Depression brought nationwide poverty and an overwhelming need for public solutions, Catholic charities faced a staggering challenge to their traditional claim to stewardship of the poor. In their compelling account, Brown and McKeown add an important dimension to our understanding of the transition from private to state social welfare. Table of Contents: Acknowledgments Introduction 1. The New York System 2. The Larger Landscape 3. Inside the Institutions: Foundlings, Orphans, Delinquents 4. Outside the Institutions: Pensions, Precaution, Prevention 5. Catholic Charities, the Great Depression, and the New Deal Conclusion Sources Notes Index Reviews of this book: [The Poor Belong to Us] raise[s] important questions about American social welfare history. [It] is particularly significant in that it restores Catholic charity to its rightful place at the center of that history. As the authors point out, Catholics represented the majority of dependent and delinquent children in most American cities for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Their book convincingly demonstrates that Catholic charities' massive efforts to aid their own needy had long-term ramifications for the entire modern American system of welfare provision...The book is an impressive achievement and should be required reading for all social welfare historians. --Susan L. Porter, Journal of American History Reviews of this book: Brown and McKeown provide a richly documented narrative that incorporates the insights and scholarship of American Catholic history and social history...The Poor Belong to Us represents an ambitious foray into territory within the history of Catholic social activism that has been neglected for too long. It provides an important counterpoise and supplement to the burgeoning scholarship on individual congregations of women religious and the Catholic Worker movement, two area adjacent to this study that have received considerable attention in the past three decades...In The Poor Belong to Us, readers gain a new understanding of the complexities and internal tensions within the world of Catholic social welfare during the century of growth and change chronicled by Brown and McKeown...They show us how, for most American Catholics of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, questions of class and social and economic responsibility can only be understood with reference to the faith, a pervasive yet elusive presence that Brown and McKeown illuminate for us in carefully pruned, contextualized examples from archival sources. --Debra Campbell, Church History Reviews of this book: This book documents the role of Catholics in the development of American welfare and shows strong parallels between situations and attitudes prevalent in the 19th century and those common today...Following the enactment of the 1996 welfare reform law, some of these same questions are being raised afresh today...That situation makes Brown and McKeown's historical account timely and relevant...Brown and McKeown neither try to sugarcoat nor to dramatize the role of Catholic charities in American welfare. The story is interesting enough in itself...This is an excellent work...For anyone wanting to better understand the role of Catholic charities in the American welfare system or even the development of charities and welfare in general, it is invaluable. --Diana Etindi, Indianapolis Star Reviews of this book: Thoroughly researched and meticulous in its reasoning...[this book] shows how Catholic charities helped poor people in America between the 1870s and 1930s...[It] remind[s] us how 'Catholic' poverty seemed for half a century, and how effectively a generation of more prosperous Catholics reacted to it. It also shows how the idea of caring for the poor, for centuries a religious duty, was rapidly secularized in America...The Poor Belong to Us takes its place as a study and reference work of permanent value. --Patrick Allitt, Books and Culture Reviews of this book: An interesting history of Catholic charitable institutions in the 20th century. The Poor Belong to Us traces the development of Catholic charities from a collection of ill-funded volunteer organizations in the 19th century into the largest private provider of social services in the country. Crisp writing and a keen eye for relevant detail carries the story along nicely...The authors display a deft hand in assembling their material, and impress the reader with their grasp of the large picture as well as the detail. This is a highly readable account of an important element of the history of the Church in America. --Robert Kennedy, National Catholic Register Reviews of this book: This institutional history is valuable for underscoring the importance of the private sector in American welfare and for adding a Catholic dimension to recent welfare scholarship. --S.L. Piott, Choice Reviews of this book: Historian Dorothy Brown and theologian Elizabeth McKeown analyze the evolution of Catholic Churches between the Civil War and World War II from its local volunteer origins to a centralized and professionalized workforce that played a prominent role in the development of the American welfare system that is now under attack. In this fascinating contribution to contemporary welfare scholarship, the authors' study is grounded in concerns and care for the children of the poor. --Dorothy Van Soest, Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare
Years before the Dust Bowl exodus raised America’s conscience to the plight of its migratory citzenry, an estimated one to two million homeless, unemployed Americans were traversing the country, searching for permanent community. Often mistaken for bums, tramps, hoboes or migratory laborers, these transients were a new breed of educated, highly employable men and women uprooted from their middle- and working-class homes by an unprecedented economic crisis. The Homeless Transient in the Great Depression investigates this population and the problems they faced in an America caught between a poor law past and a social welfare future. The story of the transient is told from the perspective of the federal, state, and local governments, and from the viewpoint of the social worker, the community, and the transient. In narrowing the focus of the study from the national to the state level, Joan Crouse offers a close and sensitive examination of each. The choice of New York as a focal point provides an important balance to previous literature on migrancy by shifting attention from the Southwest to the Northeast and from a preoccupation with rejection on the federal level to the concerted effort of the state to deal with the non-resident poor in a humane yet fiscally responsible manner.
The Irish-Catholic Sisters accomplished tremendously successful work in founding charitable organizations in New York City from the Irish famine through the early twentieth century. Maureen Fitzgerald argues that their championing of the rights of the poor--especially poor women--resulted in an explosion of state-supported services and programs. Parting from Protestant belief in meager and means-tested aid, Irish Catholic nuns argued for an approach based on compassion for the poor. Fitzgerald positions the nuns' activism as resistance to Protestantism's cultural hegemony. As she shows, Roman Catholic nuns offered strong and unequivocal moral leadership in condemning those who punished the poor for their poverty and unmarried women for sexual transgression. Fitzgerald also delves into the nuns' own communities, from the class-based hierarchies within the convents to the political power they wielded within the city. That power, amplified by an alliance with the local Irish Catholic political machine, allowed the women to expand public charities in the city on an unprecedented scale.
By the early 1900s, the poor farm had become a ubiquitous part of America's social welfare system. Megan Birk's history of this foundational but forgotten institution focuses on the connection between agriculture, provisions for the disadvantaged, and the daily realities of life at poor farms. Conceived as an inexpensive way to provide care for the indigent, poor farms in fact attracted wards that ranged from abused wives and the elderly to orphans, the disabled, and disaster victims. Most people arrived unable rather than unwilling to work, some because of physical problems, others due to a lack of skills or because a changing labor market had left them behind. Birk blends the personal stories of participants with institutional histories to reveal a loose-knit system that provided a measure of care to everyone without an overarching philosophy of reform or rehabilitation. In-depth and innovative, The Fundamental Institution offers an overdue portrait of rural social welfare in the United States.
Mental Institutions in America: Social Policy to 1875 examines how American society responded to complex problems arising out of mental illness in the nineteenth century. All societies have had to confront sickness, disease, and dependency, and have developed their own ways of dealing with these phenomena. The mental hospital became the characteristic institution charged with the responsibility of providing care and treatment for individuals seemingly incapable of caring for themselves during protracted periods of incapacitation. The services rendered by the hospital were of benefit not merely to the afflicted individual but to the community. Such an institution embodied a series of moral imperatives by providing humane and scientific treatment of disabled individuals, many of whose families were unable to care for them at home or to pay the high costs of private institutional care. Yet the mental hospital has always been more than simply an institution that offered care and treatment for the sick and disabled. Its structure and functions have usually been linked with a variety of external economic, political, social, and intellectual forces, if only because the way in which a society handled problems of disease and dependency was partly governed by its social structure and values. The definition of disease, the criteria for institutionalization, the financial and administrative structures governing hospitals, the nature of the decision-making process, differential care and treatment of various socio-economic groups were issues that transcended strictly medical and scientific considerations. Mental Institutions in America attempts to interpret the mental hospital as a social as well as a medical institution and to illuminate the evolution of policy toward dependent groups such as the mentally ill. This classic text brilliantly studies the past in depth and on its own terms.
Présentation de l'éditeur: "Expelling the Poor' argues that immigration policies in nineteenth-century New York and Massachusetts, driven by cultural prejudice against the Irish and more fundamentally by economic concerns about their poverty, laid the foundations for American immigration control."