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.
The category “Asian American” currently encompasses more than forty-five Asian-origin groups, from countries ranging from Bangladesh to Vietnam to South Korea. How did one label come to include such a wide range of ethnicities, national origins, and languages, and represent individuals across vastly different social and economic standings? In Redefining Race, a new book from the Russell Sage Foundation, sociologist Dina G. Okamoto traces the complex evolution of “Asian American” as a cohesive identity, emphasizing how it has been a deliberate social achievement negotiated by group members, rather than an organic and inevitable process.
As Okamoto explains, a combination of broad social conditions in the post-Civil Rights era created an environment for Asian American panethnicity to develop. While the expansion of immigration policies in the 1960s allowed greater numbers of Asian immigrants into the U.S., these new immigrant groups were subsequently subject to racial discrimination by the state and larger society. At the same time, movements led by African Americans, women, and students provided Asian groups with models for political organizing and sparked the push for greater political representation among minorities. These conditions laid the groundwork for a collective identity among Asian immigrants of different ethnicities:
From the Preface of the book: "The growing interest in cooperative credit as a possible solution of the problem of financing the farmer and eliminating the evils of the small loan business in cities, intensified by the investigations of the American and United States Commissions abroad and the publication of the reports of their findings, prompts the Russell Sage Foundation, through its Division of Remedial Loans, to publish this brief statement of the operations of the Cooperative People's Bank of Canada, written by a Canadian who has been correctly termed "The founder of cooperative banking on the American continent."
ALPHONSE DESJARDINS was president and manager of La Caisse Populaire de Levis and general director of L’Action Populaire Economique.
A pamphlet published in 1910 by what was the Department of Child Hygiene of the Russell Sage Foundation. Other research areas of the Child Hygiene department included "folk dancing," "athletics," and the "use of school buildings."
An address presented at one of 47 different sessions of the Forty-Second National Conference of Charities and Correction, held in Baltimore for a week in May 1915.
C. C. CARSTENS was secretary and general agent of the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.
This feature is part of an ongoing RSF blog series, Work in Progress, which highlights some of the ongoing research of our current class of Visiting Scholars.
As an affordable mode of transportation up and down the East Coast, the Chinatown bus lines operating out of New York City have become an increasingly popular service even for those outside of the Chinese immigrant community. Yet, a series of high-profile traffic accidents involving these buses over the last few years have raised concerns about their safety, and in 2012, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration began a crackdown on many of the Chinatown buses.
While the closure of such bus lines may present an inconvenience for those looking for cheap vacation transportation, these shutdowns, if continued, could have a far more serious impact on newly arrived Chinese immigrants. Zai Liang (SUNY Albany), who is currently writing a book on the patterns of employment and settlement among recent low-skilled Chinese immigrants, identifies the Chinatown bus lines as a vital component of the job networks for new immigrants. His current research examines the role of both these bus lines and Chinatown’s employment agencies in facilitating immigrant settlement in destinations outside of New York City.
In a new interview with the Foundation, Liang explained how the bus lines and employment agencies help new immigrants find jobs, support their families, and even begin their own businesses outside of New York.
Q. Your current research examines the settlement patterns of recent Chinese immigrants in the US, focusing in particular on the role of New York City Chinatown employment agencies and the Chinatown bus lines. How do these two institutions work together to influence or accommodate the movements of Chinese immigrants?
Andrew McAfee, co-founder of MIT’s Initiative on the Digital Economy, will join the Russell Sage Foundation as a Visiting Scholar for the spring term, starting in January 2015.
McAfee, who was previously a professor at Harvard Business School and a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, is currently a principal research scientist at the Center for Digital Business in the MIT Sloan School of Management. He is the author of the 2009 book Enterprise 2.0, and co-author of the 2014 the book The Second Machine Age. McAfee’s current research focuses on the influence of information technology (IT) on business and how IT changes the way companies perform, organize themselves, and compete.
During his time in residence at the Foundation, McAfee will work on a book about the economic and social implications of recent rapid progress in the field of artificial intelligence (AI). His study will trace the ways in which artificial intelligence is evolving, and analyze how these changes may impact jobs and wages, income inequality, and the health of individuals and communities.
This pamphlet, published in 1922, is a collection of data drawn from publications issued by various state and federal bureaus, which show some of the economic facts behind the unrest of the miners in the bituminous or soft coal industry. It aims to outline certain vital facts which affected the daily working life of the coal miner and explain the workers’ willingness to strike in defense of wages.
LOUIS BLOCH, Department of Industrial Studies, Russell Sage Foundation
This handbook, published in 1922, serves as an introduction to zoning, covering the spread of the movement, the reasons for zoning, the experiences of various zoned cities, and the legal pitfalls, with a discussion of the theory of community land planning legislation.
EDWARD M. BASSETT was chairman of the Zoning Committee of New York.
