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Indians At Work (1934)

And suddenly the Navajos have been faced with a crisis which in some aspects is nothing less than a head-on collision between immediate advantages, sentiments, beliefs, affections and previously accepted preachments, as one colliding mass, and physical and statistical facts as the other….The crisis consists in the fact that the soil of the Navajo reservation is hurriedly being washed away into the Colorado river. The collision consists in the fact that the entire complex and momentum of Navajo life must be radically and swiftly changed to a new direction and in part must be totally reversed. …And the changes must be made—if made at all—through the choice of the Navajos themselves; a choice requiring to be renewed through months and years, with increasing sacrifices for necessarily remote and hypothetical returns, and with a hundred difficult technical applications.

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Health Conservation and WPA (1939)

The following address was delivered by Mrs. Florence Kerr, Assistant Commissioner, Work Projects Administration. “In our WPA project work, we have come to grips with the problem of public health on a number of important fronts…we are not just talking about the need for better sanitation the need for more medical, dental and nursing service, the need of school children for hot, well-balanced lunches, the need of home visits to underprivileged families in time of illness…We’re…doing something about them.”

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Women In Politics – Eleanor Roosevelt (1940)

We are about to have a collective coming of age! The women in the United States have been participants in government for nearly twenty years. I think it behooves us to look back on this period in which we have been serving our apprenticeship and decide what our accomplishments have been, how much good our education has done us, and whether we really are able to consider ourselves full-fledged citizens.

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de Schweinitz, Elizabeth McCord

Elizabeth McCord de Schweinitz – Social Worker, Teacher, Researcher and Author Elizabeth McCord deSchweinitz, like her husband, Karl deSchweinitz, devoted her life to social welfare. She was involved in social casework, conducted in-service training sessions, and held supervisory positions. She was born in Benton Harbor, Michigan (No date of birth known).  She graduated from Oberlin…

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Lewenstein, Ian

Ian Lewenstein received a B.A. with high distinction in history from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. One year later, Lewenstein received his M.A. in the social sciences from the University of Chicago, where he researched United States and German foreign policy. In addition to his research experience gained from his undergraduate and graduate education,…

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Tammanyizing of a Civilization (1909)

The oldest and most infamous organization in America for exploiting this population is Tammany Hall of New York, which the great classic historian, Professor Guglielmo Ferrero, recently compared to the very similar organizations that were formed for exploiting the city of Rome during its decadence. For fifty years and more this body has perverted civilization in New York, using the great politically untrained population for this purpose. Its political saloon-keepers have killed unnumbered multitudes of these people through excessive drinking; its political procurers have sold the bodies of their daughters; its contractors and street-railway magnates have crowded them into the deadly tenement districts by defrauding them of their rights of cheap and decent transportation; and its sanitary officials have continuously murdered a high percentage of the poor by their sale of the right to continue fatal and filthy conditions in these tenement districts, contrary to law. Meantime they have kept control of the population they have exploited by their cunning distribution of wages and charity.

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Child Growth and Development: A Report (1954)

Excerpt from Recorder’s Report, Institute on Child Growth and Development, Harvard School of Public Health, 1954. “Rights are derived from basic needs which must be met to insure optimal opportunity for growth and development into healthy individuals and thereby into a healthy, effective society.”

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