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.

Concentrates on the historical, statutory, judicial, and administrative aspects of philanthropic foundations.  It begins with a general survey of the rise of foundations, particularly as a legal concept, and examines existing provisions for state registration and supervision, with special atention to the role of the attorney general.  There are field reports on ten states with programs aimed at following charitable activities closely.  

The concluding chapter provides appraisals and recommendations, and appendices include state legal requirements for charitable trusts and corporations, selected state acts, rules, reporting forms, and a list of cases.

MARION R. FREMONT-SMITH is a practicing attorney in Boston.

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

An effective democratic society depends on the confidence citizens place in their government. Payment of taxes, acceptance of legislative and judicial decisions, compliance with social service programs, and support of military objectives are but some examples of the need for public cooperation with state demands. At the same time, voters expect their officials to behave ethically and responsibly. To those seeking to understand—and to improve—this mutual responsiveness, Trust and Governance provides a wide-ranging inquiry into the role of trust in civic life.

Trust and Governance asks several important questions: Is trust really essential to good governance, or are strong laws more important? What leads people either to trust or to distrust government, and what makes officials decide to be trustworthy? Can too much trust render the public vulnerable to government corruption, and if so what safeguards are necessary? In approaching these questions, the contributors draw upon an abundance of historical and current resources to offer a variety of perspectives on the role of trust in government. For some, trust between citizens and government is a rational compact based on a fair exchange of information and the public's ability to evaluate government performance. Levi and Daunton each examine how the establishment of clear goals and accountability procedures within government agencies facilitates greater public commitment, evidence that a strong government can itself be a source of trust. Conversely, Jennings and Peel offer two cases in which loss of citizen confidence resulted from the administration of seemingly unresponsive, punitive social service programs.

Other contributors to Trust and Governance view trust as a social bonding, wherein the public's emotional investment in government becomes more important than their ability to measure its performance. The sense of being trusted by voters can itself be a powerful incentive for elected officials to behave ethically, as Blackburn, Brennan, and Pettit each demonstrate. Other authors explore how a sense of communal identity and shared values make citizens more likely to eschew their own self-interest and favor the government as a source of collective good. Underlying many of these essays is the assumption that regulatory institutions are necessary to protect citizens from the worst effects of misplaced trust. Trust and Governance offers evidence that the jurisdictional level at which people and government interact—be it federal, state, or local—is fundamental to whether trust is rationally or socially based. Although social trust is more prevalent at the local level, both forms of trust may be essential to a healthy society.

Enriched by perspectives from political science, sociology, psychology, economics, history, and philosophy, Trust and Governance opens a new dialogue on the role of trust in the vital relationship between citizenry and government.

VALERIE BRAITHWAITE is associate director of the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University, Canberra, Australia. She is also coordinator of the Trust Strand of the Reshaping Australian Institutions Project in the Research School of Social Sciences.

MARGARET LEVI is professor of political science and Harry Bridges Chair in Labor Studies, University of Washington, Seattle. She is also director of the University of Washington Center for Labor Studies.

A Volume in the Russell Sage Foundation's Series on Trust

“Truth-seeking social policymakers and serious students of social policy and social policy research will read and reread this book. Fighting for Reliable Evidence does not provide a permanent truth but it describes a forty-five year quest to understand what works and what does not work.”
—PAUL O’NEILL, former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury

“Fighting for Reliable Evidence is a fascinating review of the development of the commitment to use randomized experiments for learning about the effectiveness of current and proposed social welfare programs. It is written from two necessary perspectives: that of a pioneering government official striving to institutionalize experiments, and that of an innovator committed to developing an organization able to implement high-quality experiments. Between them, Judy Gueron and Howard Rolston demonstrate how feasible and useful experiments can be and have been. The history they tell is riveting, and the lessons they draw are compelling. No one else from inside the community of random assignment pioneers could have told it better. One day historians of science will use different assumptions to tell their version of the history of random assignment in the social sciences. But until then, this accessibly written book is THE history.”
—THOMAS D. COOK, Joan and Sarepta Harrison Chair of Ethics and Justice and Professor of Sociology, Psychology, and Education and Social Policy, Northwestern University

Once primarily used in medical clinical trials, random assignment experimentation is now accepted among social scientists across a broad range of disciplines. The technique has been used in social experiments to evaluate a variety of programs, from microfinance and welfare reform to housing vouchers and teaching methods. How did randomized experiments move beyond medicine and into the social sciences, and can they be used effectively to evaluate complex social problems? Fighting for Reliable Evidence provides an absorbing historical account of the characters and controversies that have propelled the wider use of random assignment in social policy research over the past forty years.

Drawing from their extensive experience evaluating welfare reform programs, noted scholar practitioners Judith M. Gueron and Howard Rolston portray randomized experiments as a vital research tool to assess the impact of social policy. In a random assignment experiment, participants are sorted into either a treatment group that participates in a particular program, or a control group that does not. Because the groups are randomly selected, they do not differ from one another systematically. Therefore any subsequent differences between the groups can be attributed to the influence of the program or policy. The theory is elegant and persuasive, but many scholars worry that such an experiment is too difficult or expensive to implement in the real world. Can a control group be truly insulated from the treatment policy? Would staffers comply with the random allocation of participants? Would the findings matter?

Fighting for Reliable Evidence recounts the experiments that helped answer these questions, starting with the income maintenance experiments and the Supported Work project in the 1960s and 1970s. Gueron and Rolston argue that a crucial turning point came during the 1980s, when Congress allowed states to experiment with welfare programs and foundations, states, and the federal government funded larger randomized trials to assess the impact of these reforms. As they trace these historical shifts, Gueron and Rolston discuss the ways that strategies for resolving theoretical and practical problems were developed, and they highlight the strict conditions required to execute a randomized experiment successfully. What emerges is a nuanced portrait of the potential and limitations of social experiments to advance empirical knowledge.

Weaving history, data analysis and personal experience, Fighting for Reliable Evidence offers valuable lessons for researchers, policymakers, funders, and informed citizens interested in isolating the effect of policy initiatives. It is an essential primer on welfare policy, causal inference, and experimental designs.

JUDITH M. GUERON is scholar in residence and President Emerita at MDRC.

HOWARD ROLSTON is principal associate at Abt Associates.

“Amid the current debates about immigration, highly skilled and unauthorized immigrants have taken the center stage. But in Catherine Lee’s carefully researched and written account, she reminds us that family unification remains the core of regular immigration policy. She traces family unification back to the nineteenth century and explains why families remain the core of policy and what the meaning of family is for racial and national issues. For those wanting to know what functions family unification serves for immigration policy, Fictive Kinship is required reading. Family unification will no doubt still be the core of policy. For, after all, what will become of the families of the undocumented who might become legal?”
—David M. Reimers, professor emeritus of history, New York University 

“Fictive Kinship is a fascinating examination of what family has meant in the history of U.S. immigration. Family reunification has facilitated the entry of many immigrants, and as Professor Lee shows, it has done so long before passage of the 1965 Hart-Cellar Act. The book’s key contribution is showing how family has been fictively constructed, with its meaning shifting to support inclusionary and exclusionary positions and linked to ideas about the nation-state, race, and gender. This is critical reading for all those interested in immigration—and it reveals the critical place that the family plays in this process.”
—Katharine M. Donato, professor and chair, Department of Sociology, Vanderbilt University

Today, roughly 70 percent of all visas for legal immigration are reserved for family members of permanent residents or American citizens. Family reunification—policies that seek to preserve family unity during or following migration—is a central pillar of current immigration law, but it has existed in some form in American statutes since at least the mid-nineteenth century. In Fictive Kinship, sociologist Catherine Lee delves into the fascinating history of family reunification to examine how and why our conceptions of family have shaped immigration, the meaning of race, and the way we see ourselves as a country.

Drawing from a rich set of archival sources, Fictive Kinship shows that even the most draconian anti-immigrant laws, such as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, contained provisions for family unity, albeit for a limited class of immigrants. Arguments for uniting families separated by World War II and the Korean War also shaped immigration debates and the policies that led to the landmark 1965 Immigration Act. Lee argues that debating the contours of family offers a ready set of symbols and meanings to frame national identity and to define who counts as “one of us.” Talk about family, however, does not inevitably lead to more liberal immigration policies. Welfare reform in the 1990s, for example, placed limits on benefits for immigrant families, and recent debates over the children of undocumented immigrants fanned petitions to rescind birthright citizenship. Fictive Kinship shows that the centrality of family unity in the immigration discourse often limits the discussion about the goals, functions and roles of immigration and prevents a broader definition of American identity.

Too often, studies of immigration policy focus on individuals or particular ethnic or racial groups. With its original and wide-ranging inquiry, Fictive Kinship shifts the analysis in immigration studies toward the family, a largely unrecognized but critical component in the regulation of immigrants’ experience in America.

CATHERINE LEE is associate professor of sociology and faculty associate at the Institute for Health, Health Care Policy, and Aging Research at Rutgers University.