A survey of amateur and community theatrical productions and activity in the early twentieth century, in particular dramatics for children through public and private schools, playground and community centers, and various voluntary organizations. With a selected bibliography for amateur workers in drama.

Clarence Arthur Perry was the author of Wider Use of the School Plant, Housing for the Machine Age, and The Rebuilding of Blighted Areas.

The Department of Child Helping of the Russell Sage Foundation completed a detailed study of 151 public institutions for delinquent youth in the United States in 1924, including a few private institutions supported chiefly by public funds. The work of such schools is unique, technical, and vitally important, but up to the time that this study was undertaken no complete and detailed information regarding these institutions was available. The department undertook the study with the goal of informing the public and awakening its interest in these schools, and of assisting trustees and superintendents to improve the methods, standards, and conditions of their work. This book examines academics, physical care, and parole for delinquent girls, as well as building conditions, salaries in training schools, record-keeping, and community aspects of institutional life.

Margaret Reeves was field agent of the Russell Sage Foundation and director of the State Bureau of Child Welfare, Santa Fe, New Mexico.

This book aimed to bring about a wider public knowledge of social casework—to examine and report upon the ways in which social caseworkers and social casework agencies go about the task of securing public understanding, and the ways in which the usefulness of casework has grown through good understanding. It is directed particularly to the casework field, but its analysis of how casework is interpreted in one community has importance for all branches of social work.

Viola Paradise was research associate in the Department of Social Work Interpretation of the Russell Sage Foundation.

Part of a series documenting annual research and activity in the field of social work. It is a record of organized efforts in the United States to deal with social problems and social conditions. Topics include adult education, health, mental hygiene, crime and penal conditions, children, community organization, the disabled, and religious social work.

Fred S. Hall was joint author of American Marriage Laws.

Social Science and Psychotherapy for Children was a study undertaken jointly by the Russell Sage Foundation and the Jewish Board of Guardians under direction of Dr. Otto Pollak, a faculty member of the University of Pennsylvania, who was made available by the foundation as social science consultant to the Board’s Child Guidance Institute. With many specific cases as illustrations, Dr. Pollak and his collaborators show ways in which the social sciences may enrich child therapy. They examine the implications of family structure, social interaction, anxiety, extra-familial influences, culture conflicts, and age-sex factors. They also consider the effective use of volunteers in treatment and the occasional necessity for setting limited treatment goals.

Collaborators: Bertram J. Black, Dorothy Dunaeff, Yonata Feldman, Bernice Wolf Frechtman, Maurice R. Friend, Lia Knoepfmacher, Bettina Lehnert, Frederika Neumann, S. R. Slavson

Part of the Industrial Relations Series, a series by the Department of Industrial Studies of the Russell Sage Foundation investigating early twentieth-century experiments in the organization of relations between employers and employees in industrial enterprises in the United States. It examines the plan for employee representation of a mill in Wappingers Falls, New York, and the relationship between workers and management.

Ben M. Selekman, Department of Industrial Studies, Russell Sage Foundation

This 1961 book presents the findings of an empirical study that explored the attitudes and behaviors of patients who had experience with more than one way of organizing medical practice, and thereby sought to suggest some of the ways in which both lay and professional social structure figure in the utilization of medical care. The data are used to derive a tentative conceptual framework that takes account of structural as well as cultural factors in understanding the behavior of doctors and patients. The net result is a set of ideas that suggest the nature of the medical system that lies outside the walls of the hospitals, in direct contact with the community.

Eliot Freidson, New York University, and Montefiore Hospital

This 1937 report has to do with people in the Appalachian Mountain region whose chief concern with handicrafts was the income they would bring, as they offered the only means by which to earn money. One purpose was to show how indispensable handicrafts were in the economy of countless families throughout the region; a second was to show the other rewards handicrafts brought to these same people, what they added to the social and recreational life for the communities in which they carried on, their educational and cultural significance, the esthetic enjoyment they fostered, their help in the field of therapeutics, and the sense of emotional security they gave. Containing fifty-eight illustrations form photographs taken for the work by Doris Ulmann.

Allen H. Eaton was the author of Immigrant Gifts to American Life and part of the Department of Surveys of the Russell Sage Foundation.

This book examines the sociocultural dynamics behind food – dynamics such as access to foods at the domestic level, the cultural influences training tastes, or the micro-politics that govern its distribution – through the lenses of three communities: the Oglala, a Southern community, and an Italian-American community. Contributors: Mary Douglas, William K. Powers, Marla M.N. Powers, Tony Larry Whitehead, Judith G. Goode, Karen Curtis, Janet Theophano, and Jonathan Gross.

Mary Douglas was Avalon Foundation chair in the humanities at Northwestern University.

Cultural Difference and Medical Care, published in 1954, explores the difficulties inherent to U.S. medical practitioners in supplying health services and medical care to Spanish-speaking people living in the American Southwest. While its examples are drawn from this culturally distinct population, its principles apply as well to any cultural or subcultural group in any geographic setting. 

Lyle Saunders was associate professor of preventive medicine and public health (sociology), University of Colorado, School of Medicine.