Winner of the 1991 Critics' Choice Award from the American Educational Studies Association

Winner of the 1991 Outstanding Book Award from the American Educational Research Association

Now available in paperback, this award-winning book provides a comprehensive history of gender policies and practices in American public schools. David Tyack and Elisabeth Hansot explore the many factors that have shaped coeducation since its origins. At the very time that Americans were creating separate spheres for adult men and women, they institutionalized an education system that brought boys and girls together. How did beliefs about the similarities and differences of boys and girls shape policy and practice in schools? To what degree did the treatment of boys and girls differ by class, race, region, and historical period? Debates over gender policies suggest that American have made public education the repository of their hopes and anxieties about relationships between the sexes. Thus, the history of coeducation serves as a window not only on constancy and change in gender practices in the schools but also on cultural conflicts about gender in the broader society.

"Learning Together presents a rich and exhaustive search through [the] 'tangled history' of gender and education that links both the silences and the debates surrounding coeducation to the changing roles of women and men in our society....It is the generosity and capaciousness of Tyack and Hansot's scholarship that makes Learning Together so important a book." —Science

DAVID TYACK is Vida Jacks Professor of Education at Stanford University.

ELISABETH HANSOT is senior lecturer in political science at Stanford University.

In January 1980 a panel of distinguished social scientists and statisticians assembled at the National Academy of Sciences to begin a thorough review of the uses, reliability, and validity of surveys purporting to measure such subjective phenomena as attitudes, opinions, beliefs, and preferences. This review was prompted not only by the widespread use of survey results in both academic and non-academic settings, but also by a proliferation of apparent discrepancies in allegedly equivalent measurements and by growing public concern over the value of such measurements.

This two-volume report of the panel’s findings is certain to become one of the standard works in the field of survey measurement. Volume I summarizes the state of the art of surveying subjective phenomena, evaluates contemporary measurement programs, examines the uses and abuses of such surveys, and candidly assesses the problems affecting them. The panel also offers strategies for improving the quality and usefulness of subjective survey data. In volume II, individual panel members and other experts explore in greater depth particular theoretical and empirical topics relevant to the panel’s conclusions.

For social scientists and policymakers who conduct, analyze, and rely on surveys of the national state of mind, this comprehensive and current review will be an invaluable resource.

CHARLES F. TURNER is professor of Applied Social Research at the City University of New York.

ELIZABETH MARTIN is research associate at the National Research Council.

CONTRIBUTORS: Robert P. Abelson, Barbara A. Bailar, Marian Ballard, Theresa J. Demaio, Otis Dudley Duncan, Baruch Fischhoff, Lester R. Frankel, William H. Kruskal, Michael B. Mackuen, Catherine Marsch, Elizabeth Martin, Sara B. Nerlove, Howard Schuman, Tom W. Smith, Charles F. Turner

In a time when the American family has undergone dramatic evolution, change among African Americans has been particularly rapid and acute. African Americans now marry later than any other major ethnic group, and while in earlier decades nearly 95 percent of black women eventually married, today 30 percent are expected to remain single. The black divorcee rate has increased nearly five-fold over the last thirty years, and is double the rate of the general population. The result, according to The Decline in Marriage Among African Americans, is a greater share of family responsibilities being borne by women, an increased vulnerability to poverty and violence, and an erosion of community ties.

The original, often controversial, research presented in this book links marital decline to a pivotal drop in the pool of marriageable black males. Increased joblessness has robbed many black men of their economic viability, rendering them not only less desirable as mates, but also less inclined to take on the responsibility of marriage. Higher death rates resulting from disease, poor health care, and violent crime, as well as evergrowing incarceration rates, have further depleted the male population. Editors M. Belinda Tucker and Claudia Mitchell-Kernan and the contributors take a hard look at the effects of chronic economic instability and cultural attitudes toward the male role as family provider. Their cogent historical analyses suggest that the influence of external circumstances over marriage preferences stems in large part from the profoundly damaging experience of slavery.

This book firmly positions declining marriage within an ominous cycle of economic and social erosion. The authors propose policies for relieving the problems associated the changing marital behavior, focusing on support for single parent families, public education, and increased employment for African American men.

M. BELINDA TUCKER is associate professor of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences at the University of California, Los Angeles and faculty associate of the Center for Afro-American Studies.

CLAUDIA MITCHELL-KERNAN is vice chancellor for academic affairs, dean of the graduate division, and professor of anthropology and of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences at the University of California, Los Angeles.

CONTRIBUTORS: Phillip J. Bowman, Lynn C. Burbridge, Sheldon Danziger, William A. Darity Jr., Elizabeth Douvan, Mark A. Fossett, Shirley J. Hatchett, David M. Heer, James S. Jackson, K. Jill Kiecolt, Marilyn Krogh, Claudia Mitchell-Kernan, Hector F. Myers, Samuel L. Myers Jr., Melvin L. Oliver, Robert J. Sampson, Robert Schoen, A. Wade Smith, Brenda Stevenson, Mark Testa, M. Belinda Tucker, and Joseph Veroff

Women, Politics, and Change, a compendium of twenty-three original essays by social historians, political scientists, sociologists, psychologists, and anthropologists, examines the political history of American women over the past one hundred years. Taking a broad view of politics, the contributors address voluntarism and collective action, women's entry into party politics through suffrage and temperance groups, the role of nonpartisan organizations and pressure politics, and the politicization of gender. Each chapter provides a telling example of how American women have behaved politically throughout the twentieth century, both in the two great waves of feminist activism and in less highly mobilized periods.

"The essays are unusually well integrated, not only through the introductory material but through a similarity of form and extensive cross-references among them....in raising central questions about the forms, bases, and issues of women's politics, as well as change and continuity over time, Tilly, Gurin, and the individual scholars included in this collection have provided us with a survey of the latest research and an agenda for the future." —Contemporary Sociology

"This book is a necessary addition to the scholar's bookshelf, and the student's curriculum." —Cynthia Fuchs Epstein, professor of sociology, City University of New York Graduate Center

LOUISE A. TILLY is professor of history and sociology at the New School for Social Research and chair of its Committee on Historical Studies. She is president of the American Historical Association.

PATRICIA GURIN is professor of psychology and women's studies and a faculty associate of the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan.

CONTRIBUTORS:  Kristi Anderson, Alida Brill,  Nancy F. Cott,  Elizabeth Faue,  M. Patricia Fernandez-Kelly,  Jo Freeman, Anna M. Garcia, Patricia Gurin, Nancy A. Hewitt, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Leonie Huddy, Herbert Jacob,  Jacqueline Jones,  M. Kent Jennings, Rebecca Klatch,  David Knoke,  Suzanne Lebsock, William Lehrman,  Jane Mansbridge, Ruth Milkman,  Barbara J. Nelson,  David O. Sears,  Kay Lehman Schlozmon,  Louise A. Tilly,  Sidney Verba, Susan Ware, Robert Wuthnow.

This bold and lively essay is one of those rarest of intellectual achievements, a big small book. In its short length are condensed enormous erudition and impressive analytical scope. With verve and self-assurance, it addresses a broad, central question: How can we improve our understanding of the large-scale processes and structures that transformed the world of the nineteenth century and are transforming our world today?

Tilly contends that twentieth-century social theories have been encumbered by a nineteenth century heritage of “pernicious postulates.” He subjects each misleading belief to rigorous criticism, challenging many standard social science paradigms and methodologies. As an alternative to those timeless, placeless models of social change and organization, Tilly argues convincingly for a program of concrete, historically grounded analysis and systematic comparison.

To illustrate the strategies available for such research, Tilly assesses the works of several major practitioners of comparative historical analysis, making skillful use of this selective review to offer his own speculative, often unconventional accounts of our recent past.

Historically oriented social scientists will welcome this provocative essay and its wide-ranging agenda for comparative historical research. Other social scientists, their graduate and undergraduate students, and even the interested general reader will find this new work by a major scholar stimulating and eminently readable.

This is the second of five volumes commissioned by the Russell Sage Foundation to mark its seventy-fifth anniversary.

"In this short, brilliant book Tilly suggests a way to think about theories of historical social change....This book should find attentive readers both in undergraduate courses and in graduate seminars. It should also find appreciative readers, for Tilly is a writer as well as a scholar." —Choice

CHARLES TILLY is at the New School for Social Research.

Standard economic theory is built on the assumption that human beings act rationally in their own self interest. But if rationality is such a reliable factor, why do economic models so often fail to predict market behavior accurately? According to Richard Thaler, the shortcomings of the standard approach arise from its failure to take into account systematic mental biases that color all human judgements and decisions. Economics assumes behavior is consistently rational, when it is, in fact, only partially, or quasi-rational.

The papers collected in Quasi-Rational Economics represent a significant sampling of this innovative approach, written by a leader in the field along with co-authors Thomas Russell, H. M. Shefrin, Daniel Kahneman, Jack Knetsch, Werner De Bondt, Eric Johnson, Charles Lee, and Andrei Shleifer. Thaler and his colleagues challenge established economic theories in such areas as consumer choice and financial markets, offering empirical evidence and alternate models based on behavioral research about how economic decisions are actually made.

Quasi-Rational Economics deals with a number of intriguing questions. Why do people have trouble ignoring sunk costs and recognizing opportunity costs? How do people’s preferences for already endowed possessions suppress trading volume and keep markets from clearing? What are the effects on market behavior of consumer attitudes about fairness? How do people’s mental accounting procedures lead them to behave in economically inconsistent ways? Why do investors’ tendencies to overreact to past trends cause losing firms to outperform winners in the stock market?

In offering answers to these questions, Quasi-Rational Economics provides an essential introduction to a new field. It mounts a trenchant critique of current practice in economics and calls for richer, more realistic approaches to formulating and testing economic theory. More than just a call for reform, this book provides numerous illustrations of how the call can be answered.

"Richard Thaler's book offers great evidence for the importance of quasi rational behavior in economic settings, thus stimulating the reader. Its broad coverage makes an interesting introduction to a new field, as well as informing about further applications and methods." —Kyklos

RICHARD H. THALER is Henrietta Johnson Louis Professor of Economics and director of the Center for Behavioral Economics and Decision Research, Johnson Graduate School of Management, Cornell University. He is research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Modern financial markets offer the real world's best approximation to the idealized price auction market envisioned in economic theory. Nevertheless, as the increasingly exquisite and detailed financial data demonstrate, financial markets often fail to behave as they should if trading were truly dominated by the fully rational investors that populate financial theories.

These markets anomalies have spawned a new approach to finance, one which as editor Richard Thaler puts it, "entertains the possibility that some agents in the economy behave less than fully rationally some of the time." Advances in Behavioral Finance collects together twenty-one recent articles that illustrate the power of this approach. These papers demonstrate how specific departures from fully rational decision making by individual market agents can provide explanations of otherwise puzzling market phenomena.

To take several examples, Werner De Bondt and Thaler find an explanation for superior price performance of firms with poor recent earnings histories in the tendencies of investors to overreact to recent information. Richard Roll traces the negative effects of corporate takeovers on the stock prices of the acquiring firms to the overconfidence of managers, who fail to recognize the contributions of chance to their past successes. Andrei Shleifer and Robert Vishny show how the difficulty of establishing a reliable reputation for correctly assessing the value of long term capital projects can lead investment analysis, and hence corporate managers, to focus myopically on short term returns.

As a testing ground for assessing the empirical accuracy of behavioral theories, the successful studies in this landmark collection reach beyond the world of finance to suggest, very powerfully, the importance of pursuing behavioral approaches to other areas of economic life. Advances in Behavioral Finance is a solid beachhead for behavioral work in the financial arena and a clear promise of wider application for behavioral economics in the future.

RICHARD H. THALER is Henrietta Johnson Louis Professor of Economics, and director of the Center for Behavioral Economics and Decision Research, Johnson Graduate School of Management, Cornell University.

CONTRIBUTORS: Lawrence M. Ausubel, Victor L. Bernard, Fischer Black, Navin Chopra, David M. Cutler, Werner F. M. De Bondt, J. Bradford De Long, Jeffrey A. Frankel, Kenneth R. French, Kenneth A. Froot, Josef Lakonishok, Charles M. C. Lee, James M. Poterba, Jay R. Ritter, Richard Roll, Hersh M. Shefrin, Robert J. Shiller, Andrei Shleifer, Meir Statman, Jeremy Stein, Lawrence H. Summers, Richard H. Thaler, Robert W. Vishny, and Robert J. Waldmann

Winner of the 2009 Otis Dudley Duncan Award for Outstanding Scholarship in Social Demography

Winner of the 2009 Distinguished Contribution to Research Award from the Latino/a Section of the American Sociological Association

Winner of the 2009 Pacific Sociological Association's Distinguished Scholarship Award

Honorable Mention 2009 Thomas and Znaniecki Award from the International Migration Section of the American Sociological Association

Foreword by Joan W. Moore

When boxes of original files from a 1965 survey of Mexican Americans were discovered behind a dusty bookshelf at UCLA, sociologists Edward Telles and Vilma Ortiz recognized a unique opportunity to examine how the Mexican American experience has evolved over the past four decades.  Telles and Ortiz located and re-interviewed most of the original respondents and many of their children.  Then, they combined the findings of both studies to construct a thirty-five year analysis of Mexican American integration into American society.  Generations of Exclusion is the result of this extraordinary project.

Generations of Exclusion measures Mexican American integration across a wide number of dimensions: education, English and Spanish language use, socioeconomic status, intermarriage, residential segregation, ethnic identity, and political participation. The study contains some encouraging findings, but many more that are troubling. Linguistically, Mexican Americans assimilate into mainstream America quite well—by the second generation, nearly all Mexican Americans achieve English proficiency. In many domains, however, the Mexican American story doesn’t fit with traditional models of assimilation. The majority of fourth generation Mexican Americans continue to live in Hispanic neighborhoods, marry other Hispanics, and think of themselves as Mexican. And while Mexican Americans make financial strides from the first to the second generation, economic progress halts at the second generation, and poverty rates remain high for later generations. Similarly, educational attainment peaks among second generation children of immigrants, but declines for the third and fourth generations.

Telles and Ortiz identify institutional barriers as a major source of Mexican American disadvantage. Chronic under-funding in school systems predominately serving Mexican Americans severely restrains progress. Persistent discrimination, punitive immigration policies, and reliance on cheap Mexican labor in the southwestern states all make integration more difficult. The authors call for providing Mexican American children with the educational opportunities that European immigrants in previous generations enjoyed. The Mexican American trajectory is distinct—but so is the extent to which this group has been excluded from the American mainstream.

Most immigration literature today focuses either on the immediate impact of immigration or what is happening to the children of newcomers to this country. Generations of Exclusion shows what has happened to Mexican Americans over four decades. In opening this window onto the past and linking it to recent outcomes, Telles and Ortiz provide a troubling glimpse of what other new immigrant groups may experience in the future.

EDWARD E. TELLES is professor of sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles.

VILMA ORTIZ is associate professor of sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Times Square, in its heyday, expressed American culture in the moment of vivid change. A stellar group of critics and scholars examines this transitional moment in Inventing Times Square, a study of the development of New York's central entertainment district. A fascinating visit to Times Square, from its christening in 1905 to its eventual decline after the Depression, the book explores the colorful configuration of institutions and cultural practices that propelled Times Square from a local and regional entertainment center to a national cultural marketplace.

Changes in the economy, in religion, in leisure culture, and in aesthetics gave birth to a geographical space that fostered Vaudeville and Tin Pan Alley, Flo Ziegfeld and Billy Rose, the spectacle of the Hippodrome and the bright lights of the Great White Way. Out of this same place eventually came national network radio and many Hollywood films. Though conceived as a public space, Times Square was quickly transformed into a commercial center. Power brokers wielded their influence on a public ready to succumb to consumerism. Theatrical entertainment  became a large-scale national business based in, and operated out of, Times Square. A new commercial aesthetic travelled with Joseph Urban from Vienna to Times Square to Palm Beach, bringing to society a sophisticated style that will forever say "Broadway."

Times Square as the "center of the universe" had its darker sides as well, for it was the testing ground for a new morality. The packaging of sexuality on the stage gave it legitimacy on the streets, as hotels and sidewalks became the province of female prostitution, male hustling, and pornography.

At the center of New York City, Times Square's commercial activities gave full rein to urban appetites and fantasies, and challenged and defied the norms of behavior that prevailed elsewhere in the city. Cultural history at its finest, Inventing Times Square portrays the vibrant convergence of social and economic forces on Forty-second Street.

WILLIAM R. TAYLOR teaches history at State University of New York at Stony Brook and is program director of the New York Institute for the Humanities at New York University.

CONTRIBUTORS: Jean-Christophe Agnew, Betsy Blackmar, Peter Buckley, George Chauncey Jr., Peter A. Davis, Lewis A. Erenberg, Richard Wightman Fox, Philip Furia, Timothy J. Gilfoyle, Gregory Gilmartin, David Hammack, Ada Louise Huxtable, Margaret Knapp, Eric Lampard, William R. Leach, Brooks McNamara, William Wood Register Jr., Laurence Senelick, Robert W. Snyder, William R. Taylor.

The social survey has become an essential tool in modern society, providing crucial measurements of social change, describing social life, and guiding government policy. But the validity of surveys is fragile and depends ultimately upon the accuracy of answers to survey questions. As our dependence on surveys grows, so too have questions about the accuracy of survey responses.

Authored by a group of experts in cognitive psychology, linguistics, and survey research, Questions About Questions provides a broad review of the survey response problem. Examining the cognitive and social processes that influence the answers to questions, the book first takes up the problem of meaning and demonstrates that a respondent must share the survey researcher’s intended meaning of a question if the response is to be revealing and informative. The book then turns to an examination of memory. It provides a framework for understanding the processes that can introduce errors into retrospective reports, useful guidance on when those reports are more or less trustworthy, and investigates techniques for the improvement of such reports. Questions about the rigid standardization imposed on the survey interview receive a thorough airing as the authors show how traditional survey formats violate the usual norms of conversational behavior and potentially endanger the validity of the data collected.

Synthesizing the work of the Social Science Research Council’s Committee on Cognition and Survey Research, Questions About Questions emphasizes the reciprocal gains to be achieved when insights and techniques from the cognitive sciences and survey research are exchanged.

"these chapters provide a good sense of the range of survey problems investigated by the cognitive movement, the methods and ideas it draws upon, and the results it has yielded." —American Journal of Sociology

JUDITH M. TANUR is professor of sociology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. She is co-chairperson of the Social Science Research Council Committee on Cognition and Survey Research.

CONTRIBUTORS: Robert P. Abelson,  Herbert H. Clark,  Robert T. Croyle, Robyn M. Dawes,  Cathryn S. Dippo, Jack F. Dovidio,  Russell H. Fazio,  Judith Fiedler,  Ronald P. Fisher,  Nancy H. Fultz,  Anthony G. Greenwald,  Robert Groves,  Brigitte Jordan,  Mark Klinger,  Jon A. Krosnik,  Elizabeth F. Loftus,  Elizabeth Martin,  Janet L. Norwood,  Robert W. Pearson,  Kathryn L. Quigley,  Michael Ross,  Michael F. Schober,  Kyle D. Smith,  Lucy Suchman, Judith M. Tanur.