American Reformers, 1815-1860


Book Description

Focuses on pre-Civil War reform movements and notable reformers.




Robert Clifton Weaver and the American City


Book Description

From his role as Franklin Roosevelt’s “negro advisor” to his appointment under Lyndon Johnson as the first secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Robert Clifton Weaver was one of the most influential domestic policy makers and civil rights advocates of the twentieth century. This volume, the first biography of the first African American to hold a cabinet position in the federal government, rescues from obscurity the story of a man whose legacy continues to affect American race relations and the cities in which they largely play out. Tracing Weaver’s career through the creation, expansion, and contraction of New Deal liberalism, Wendell E. Pritchett illuminates his instrumental role in the birth of almost every urban initiative of the period, from public housing and urban renewal to affirmative action and rent control. Beyond these policy achievements, Weaver also founded racial liberalism, a new approach to race relations that propelled him through a series of high-level positions in public and private agencies working to promote racial cooperation in American cities. But Pritchett shows that despite Weaver’s efforts to make race irrelevant, white and black Americans continued to call on him to mediate between the races—a position that grew increasingly untenable as Weaver remained caught between the white power structure to which he pledged his allegiance and the African Americans whose lives he devoted his career to improving.




Still Time to Care


Book Description

At the start of the gay rights movement in 1969, evangelicalism's leading voices cast a vision for gay people who turn to Jesus. It was C.S. Lewis, Billy Graham, Francis Schaeffer and John Stott who were among the most respected leaders within theologically orthodox Protestantism. We see with them a positive pastoral approach toward gay people, an approach that viewed homosexuality as a fallen condition experienced by some Christians who needed care more than cure. With the birth and rise of the ex-gay movement, the focus shifted from care to cure. As a result, there are an estimated 700,000 people alive today who underwent conversion therapy in the United States alone. Many of these patients were treated by faith-based, testimony-driven parachurch ministries centered on the ex-gay script. Despite the best of intentions, the movement ended with very troubling results. Yet the ex-gay movement died not because it had the wrong sex ethic. It died because it was founded on a practice that diminished the beauty of the gospel. Yet even after the closure of the ex-gay umbrella organization Exodus International in 2013, the ex-gay script continues to walk about as the undead among us, pressuring people like me to say, "I used to be gay, but I'm not gay anymore. Now I'm just same-sex attracted." For orthodox Christians, the way forward is a path back to where we were forty years ago. It is time again to focus with our Neo-Evangelical fathers on care--not cure--for our non-straight sisters and brothers who are living lives of costly obedience to Jesus. With warmth and humor as well as original research, Still Time to Care will chart the path forward for our churches and ministries in providing care. It will provide guidance for the gay person who hears the gospel and finds themselves smitten by the life-giving call of Jesus. Woven throughout the book will be Richard Lovelace’s 1978 call for a "double repentance" in which gay Christians repent of their homosexual sins and the church repents of its homophobia--putting on display for all the power of the gospel.




The Other School Reformers


Book Description

The idea that American education has been steered by progressivism is accepted as fact by liberals and conservatives alike. Adam Laats shows that this belief is wrong. Calling to center stage conservatives who shaped America’s classrooms, he shows that in the long march of American public education, progressive reform has been a beleaguered dream.




Illiberal Reformers


Book Description

The pivotal and troubling role of progressive-era economics in the shaping of modern American liberalism In Illiberal Reformers, Thomas Leonard reexamines the economic progressives whose ideas and reform agenda underwrote the Progressive Era dismantling of laissez-faire and the creation of the regulatory welfare state, which, they believed, would humanize and rationalize industrial capitalism. But not for all. Academic social scientists such as Richard T. Ely, John R. Commons, and Edward A. Ross, together with their reform allies in social work, charity, journalism, and law, played a pivotal role in establishing minimum-wage and maximum-hours laws, workmen's compensation, antitrust regulation, and other hallmarks of the regulatory welfare state. But even as they offered uplift to some, economic progressives advocated exclusion for others, and did both in the name of progress. Leonard meticulously reconstructs the influence of Darwinism, racial science, and eugenics on scholars and activists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, revealing a reform community deeply ambivalent about America's poor. Illiberal Reformers shows that the intellectual champions of the regulatory welfare state proposed using it not to help those they portrayed as hereditary inferiors but to exclude them.




Ernest Flagg


Book Description

This study of one of the most innovative practitioners of the Beaux-Arts movement in America covers Flagg's early training and Beaux-Arts works, his town and country houses, his commercial and utilitarian buildings, the Singer Tower, urban housing reform, and his small houses of modular design.




Moralists and Modernizers


Book Description

Moralists and Modernizers tells the fascinating story of America's first age of reform, combining incisive portraits of leading reformers and movements with perceptive analyses of religion, politics, and society.




American Reformers, 1870–1920


Book Description

In this new engaging work, historian Steven L. Piott explores the fascinating and provocative lives of twelve influential American reformers of the Gilded Age, Populist, and Progressive eras. From Ida B. Wells to Louis Brandeis, Jane Addams to Charles Macune, Piott examines the diversity of ideas and approaches that characterized this dynamic period. He links these men and women together in the greater context of the reform era and explores the social ideologies that united the reform spirit in America following Reconstruction. Designed with students in mind, American Reformers provides a thought-provoking introduction to some of the most influential and forward-thinking minds of the reform era.




Agrarian Crossings


Book Description

Parallel agrarian societies : the U.S. South and Mexico, 1870s-1920s -- Sharecroppers and campesinos : Mexican revolutionary agrarianism in the rural New Deal -- Haciendas and plantations : the agrarian New Deal in Cardenista Mexico -- Rockefeller rural development : from the U.S. cotton belt to Mexico -- Green revolutions : U.S. regionalism and the Mexican agricultural program -- Transplanting "El Tenesi" : New Deal hydraulic development in postwar Mexico




How the Other Half Lives


Book Description