Jean E. Lokerson, Ph.D. was an influential educator who devoted her life to the field of learning disabilities. Lokerson began her career in the 1960s, at a critical moment in the disability rights movement in the US. She became deeply involved in multiple organizations lobbying for improved education for children with learning disabilities.
Continue Reading »Note: This entry is an update to Dr. Marx’s previous article, “Current Issues and Programs in Social Welfare.”
George W. Bush took office as the 43rd President of the United States in 2001. It was only the second time that the son of an American president had later also become president. Bush, a Republican like his father, had defeated Democratic candidate Al Gore from Tennessee in one of the closest and most contested presidential elections in U.S. history.
President Johnson issued a call for a strong voting rights law, and hearings began soon thereafter on the bill that would become the Voting Rights Act.
Continue Reading »Although American corporations have blasted off in the application of Internet technology, the research that led to the development of the Internet was done in the government sector of the United States, not the business sector as you might expect
Continue Reading »In 1974 the expansive social policy system that had prevailed in the postwar era ended, and a more restrictive system that would characterize the rest of the seventies and the early eighties began to take its place.
Continue Reading »As the decade of the 1960s began, the United States had the “highest mass standard of living” in world history.1 The strong American postwar economy of the late 1940s and 1950s continued into the 1960s.
Continue Reading »The November 1994 congressional elections transformed the perennial debate over how much of the national income should be allocated for social welfare, how broadly or narrowly should the welfare responsibility of government be defined, what populations or institutions should receive benefits or administer them, and how to divide the costs.
Continue Reading »American social welfare, thanks to Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the Social Security Act of 1935, is furthered currently by two major categories of cash support programs: social insurances? and public assistance. Social insurances are based on the prior earnings and payroll contributions of an individual, while public assistance, commonly known as “welfare,” is based on the financial need of an individual.
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