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Cover image of the book Infant Mortality
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Infant Mortality

Its Relation to Social and Industrial Conditions
Author
Henry H. Hibbs, Jr.
Ebook
Publication Date
127 pages

About This Book

This series of papers is the outcome of a house-to-house investigation of infant mortality in four wards of Boston made in 1910-11 and 1911-12 by the Research Department of the Boston School for Social Workers under a grant from the Russell Sage Foundation.

HENRY H. HIBBS, JR., Department of Research of the Boston School for Social Workers and the Department of Sociology of the University of Illinois

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Cover image of the book The Steel Workers
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The Steel Workers

Author
John A. Fitch
Ebook
Publication Date
380 pages

About This Book

A look at the steel industry in Pittsburgh, this book is a volume of the Pittsburgh Survey, published in 1911. The Steel Workers deals with the work-relationships of the steel men, documenting their harsh working conditions and the union movement.

JOHN A. FITCH was a fellow at the University of Wisconsin and an expert at the New York State Department of Labor.

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Cover image of the book Homestead
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Homestead

The Households of a Mill Town
Author
Margaret F. Byington
Hardcover
Publication Date
292 pages

About This Book

This volume was published as part of The Pittsburgh Survey, edited by Paul Underwood Kellogg.

MARGARET F. BYINGTON was associate director of the Charity Organization Department of the Russell Sage Foundation.

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Cover image of the book Outline of Town and City Planning
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Outline of Town and City Planning

A Review of Past Efforts and Modern Aims
Author
Thomas Adams
Ebook
Publication Date
484 pages

About This Book

Outline of Town and City Planning, published in 1935, is a study of city planning both as an art and as public policy. The book is in one part a history of city planning, from early efforts in ancient Egypt, Asia, and the Americas, to modern day principles and the future of city planning in the United States. It is also an analysis of how changes in the character and size of cities have influenced the scope and practice of city planning.

THOMAS ADAMS was associate professor at the School of City Planning, Harvard University; special lecturer in city planning, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and consultant to Regional Plan Association of New York.

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Cover image of the book From Many Strands
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From Many Strands

Ethnic and Racial Groups in Contemporary America
Authors
Stanley Lieberson
Mary C. Waters
Paperback
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6.63 in. × 9.25 in. 304 pages
ISBN
978-0-87154-527-5
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The 1980 Census introduced a radical change in the measurement of ethnicity by gathering information on ancestry for all respondents, regardless of how long ago their forebears migrated to America, and by allowing respondents of mixed background to list more than one ancestry. The result, presented for the first time in this important study, is a unique and sometimes startling picture of the nation's ethnic makeup.

From Many Strands focuses on each of the sixteen principal European ethnic groups, as well as on major non-European groups such as blacks and Hispanics. The authors describe differences and similarities across a range of dimensions, including regional distribution, income, marriage patterns, and education. While some findings lend support to the "melting pot" theory of assimilation (levels of educational attainment have become more comparable and ingroup marriage is declining), other findings suggest the persistence of pluralism (settlement patterns resist change and some current occupational patterns date from the turn of the century).

In these contradictions, and in the striking number of respondents who report no ethnic background or report it incorrectly, Lieberson and Waters find evidence of considerable ethnic flux and uncover the growing presence of a new, "unhyphenated American" ethnic strand in the fabric of national life.

STANLEY LIEBERSON is professor of sociology at Harvard University.

MARY C. WATERS is assistant professor of sociology at Harvard University.

A Volume in the RSF Census Series

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Cover image of the book Nashville in the New Millennium
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Nashville in the New Millennium

Immigrant Settlement, Urban Transformation, and Social Belonging
Author
Jamie Winders
Paperback
$49.95
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Publication Date
6 in. × 9 in. 338 pages
ISBN
978-0-87154-933-4
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Beginning in the 1990s, the geography of Latino migration to and within the United States started to shift. Immigrants from Central and South America increasingly bypassed the traditional gateway cities to settle in small cities, towns, and rural areas throughout the nation, particularly in the South. One popular new destination—Nashville, Tennessee—saw its Hispanic population increase by over 400 percent between 1990 and 2000. Nashville, like many other such new immigrant destinations, had little to no history of incorporating immigrants into local life. How did Nashville, as a city and society, respond to immigrant settlement? How did Latino immigrants come to understand their place in Nashville in the midst of this remarkable demographic change? In Nashville in the New Millennium, geographer Jamie Winders offers one of the first extended studies of the cultural, racial, and institutional politics of immigrant incorporation in a new urban destination.

Moving from schools to neighborhoods to Nashville’s wider civic institutions, Nashville in the New Millennium details how Nashville’s long-term residents and its new immigrants experienced daily life as it transformed into a multicultural city with a new cosmopolitanism. Using an impressive array of methods, including archival work, interviews, and participant observation, Winders offers a fine-grained analysis of the importance of historical context, collective memories and shared social spaces in the process of immigrant incorporation. Lacking a shared memory of immigrant settlement, Nashville’s long-term residents turned to local history to explain and interpret a new Latino presence. A site where Latino day laborers gathered, for example, became a flashpoint in Nashville’s politics of immigration in part because the area had once been a popular gathering place for area teenagers in the 1960s and 1970s. Teachers also drew from local historical memories, particularly the busing era, to make sense of their newly multicultural student body. They struggled, however, to help immigrant students relate to the region’s complicated racial past, especially during history lessons on the Jim Crow era and the Civil Rights movement. When Winders turns to life in Nashville’s neighborhoods, she finds that many Latino immigrants opted to be quiet in public, partly in response to negative stereotypes of Hispanics across Nashville. Long-term residents, however, viewed this silence as evidence of a failure to adapt to local norms of being neighborly.

Filled with voices from both long-term residents and Latino immigrants, Nashville in the New Millennium offers an intimate portrait of the changing geography of immigrant settlement in America. It provides a comprehensive picture of Latino migration’s impact on race relations in the country and is an especially valuable contribution to the study of race and ethnicity in the South.

JAMIE WINDERS is associate professor of geography at Syracuse University.

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Cover image of the book New Destinations
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New Destinations

Mexican Immigration in the United States
Editors
Víctor Zúñiga
Rubén Hernández-León
Paperback
$31.95
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Publication Date
320 pages
ISBN
978-0-87154-989-1
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Mexican immigration to the United States—the oldest and largest immigration movement to this country—is in the midst of a fundamental transformation. For decades, Mexican immigration was primarily a border phenomenon, confined to Southwestern states. But legal changes in the mid-1980s paved the way for Mexican migrants to settle in parts of America that had no previous exposure to people of Mexican heritage. In New Destinations, editors Víctor Zúñiga and Rubén Hernández-León bring together an inter-disciplinary team of scholars to examine demographic, social, cultural, and political changes in areas where the incorporation of Mexican migrants has deeply changed the preexisting ethnic landscape.

New Destinations looks at several of the communities where Mexican migrants are beginning to settle, and documents how the latest arrivals are reshaping—and being reshaped by—these new areas of settlement. Contributors Jorge Durand, Douglas Massey, and Chiara Capoferro use census data to diagram the historical evolution of Mexican immigration to the United States, noting the demographic, economic, and legal factors that led recent immigrants to move to areas where few of their predecessors had settled. Looking at two towns in Southern Louisiana, contributors Katharine Donato, Melissa Stainback, and Carl Bankston III reach a surprising conclusion: that documented immigrant workers did a poorer job of integrating into the local culture than their undocumented peers. They attribute this counterintuitive finding to documentation policies, which helped intensify employer control over migrants and undercut the formation of a stable migrant community among documented workers. Brian Rich and Marta Miranda detail an ambivalent mixture of paternalism and xenophobia by local residents toward migrants in Lexington, Kentucky. The new arrivals were welcomed for their strong work ethic so long as they stayed in “invisible” spheres such as fieldwork, but were resented once they began to take part in more public activities like schools or town meetings. New Destinations also provides some hopeful examples of progress in community relations. Several chapters, including Mark Grey and Anne Woodrick’s examination of a small Iowa town, point to the importance of dialogue and mediation in establishing amicable relations between ethnic groups in newly multi-cultural settings.

New Destinations is the first scholarly assessment of Mexican migrants’ experience in the Midwest, Northeast, and deep South—the latest settlement points for America’s largest immigrant group. Enriched by perspectives from demographers, anthropologists, sociologists, folklorists, and political scientists, this volume is an essential starting point for scholarship on the new Mexican migration.

VÍCTOR ZÚÑIGA is dean of the School of Education and Humanities at the Universidad de Monterrey.

RUBÉN HERNÁNDEZ-LEÓN is assistant professor of sociology at the University of California at Los Angeles.

CONTRIBUTORS: Ana Maria Aragones, Carl L. Bankston III, Chiara Capoferro, Miguel A. Carranza, Jasney Cogua, Katharine M. Donato, Timothy J. Dunn, Jorge Durand, Lourdes Gouveia, Mark A. Grey, David C. Griffith, Douglas S. Massey, Marta Miranda, Brian L. Rich, George Shivers, Debra Lattanzi Shutika, Robert Courtney Smith, Melissa Stainback, Anne C. Woodrick.

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Cover image of the book New People in Old Neighborhoods
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New People in Old Neighborhoods

The Role of Immigrants in Rejuvenating New York's Communities
Author
Louis Winnick
Hardcover
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6 in. × 9 in. 324 pages
ISBN
978-0-87154-952-5
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The recent wave of immigration into this country has given rise to myriad concerns—from the worries about the impact of immigration on the nation's economy to questions about whether multilingual education should be used in public schools. The resulting debates have overshadowed some very good news: this influx of New Immigrants has resulted in an astonishing rebirth of many of our older, decaying cities. Nowhere has this demographic renewal been more apparent than in New York City, as Louis Winnick demonstrates in New People in Old Neighborhoods, a timely and perceptive study of the effects of immigration in Brooklyn's Sunset Park.

Sunset Park was born of the late nineteenth century flood of immigrants who developed a prosperous waterfront commerce; by the end of World War I the community had achieved a thriving maturity. Yet the decades following World War II brought about a period of urban decay lifted only by the post-1965 influx of more than 20,000 immigrants, most notably from Asia and the Caribbean Basin. These New Immigrants not only revived the dying community but enriched it with greater ethnic diversity than it had ever known.

Winnick combines data on ethnic change and living patterns with data on employment, housing, school enrollment, and subway ridership to study the revitalization of Sunset Park. He discusses the ethnic composition and characteristics of the new immigrants; trends in self-employment and entrepreneurship ("microcapitalism"); immigrant impact upon retailing, manufacturing, and the lower echelons of the service industries; skill and education levels; and presence in the professions. Winnick also discusses the immigrants' positive effect on faltering New York systems, such as the subways and public schools, and places immigrant renewal within the larger context of overall housing and economic regeneration in New York City.

New People in Old Neighborhoods views today's immigrants as the historic heirs to the community builders of the last century, and offers important insights into the often-troubled yet transforming relationship between the nation and its foreign-born population. The future of these immigrants will be a yardstick to measure the quality and performance of our cities and their neighborhoods in the years ahead.

LOUIS WINNICK is a senior consultant for the Fund for the City of New York.

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Cover image of the book Landscape of Modernity
Books

Landscape of Modernity

Essays on New York City, 1900–1940
Editors
David Ward
Olivier Zunz
Hardcover
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6 in. × 9 in. 384 pages
ISBN
978-0-87154-900-6
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New York City stands as the first expression of the modern city, a mosaic of disparate neighborhoods born in 1898 with the amalgamation of the five boroughs and shaped by the passions of developers and regulators, architects and engineers, politicians and reformers, immigrant entrepreneurs and corporate builders. Through their labor, their ideals, and their often fierce battles, the physical and social dimensions—the landscape—of the modern city were forged. The original essays in The Landscape of Modernity tell the compelling story of the growth of New York City from 1900 to 1940, from the beginnings of its skyscraper skyline to the expanding reaches of suburbanization.

At the beginning of the century, New York City was already one of the world's leading corporate and commercial centers. The Zoning Ordinance of 1916, initially proposed by Fifth Avenue merchants as a means of halting the uptown spread of the garment industry, became the nation's first comprehensive zoning law and the proving ground for a new occupation—the urban planner. During the 1920s, frenzied development created a vertical metamorphosis in Manhattan's booming business district, culminating in its most spectacularly modern icon, the Empire State Building. The city also spread laterally, with the controversial development of subway systems and the creation of the powerful Port of New York Authority, whose new bridges and tunnels decentralized the population and industry of New York. New York's older ethnic enclaves were irrevocably altered by this new urban landscape: the Lower East Side's Jewish community was nearly dismantled by the flight of the garment industry and the attractiveness of new suburbs, while Little Italy fought government forces eager to homogenize commercial use of the streets by eliminating the traditional pushcart peddlers.

Illustrated with striking photographs and maps, The Landscape of Modernity links important scenes of growth and development to the larger political, economic, social, and cultural processes of the early twentieth century.

DAVID WARD is professor of geography and Vice-Chancellor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

OLIVIER ZUNZ is professor of history at the University of Virginia.

CONTRIBUTORS: Daniel Bluestone, Jameson W. Doig, Gail Fenske, Robert Fishman, Donna Gabaccia, Nancy L. Green, Deryck Holdsworth, Clifton Hood, Thomas Kessner, Deborah Dash Moore, David Nasaw, Keith D. Revel, David Ward, Marc A. Weiss, Carol Willis, Olivier Zunz.

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