Your Girl and Mine was the first large-scale suffrage film. Also referred to as a “photo-play,” the film was a collaboration between the National American Woman Suffrage Association and Selig Studio of Chicago. This article in The Times-Dispatch includes a lengthy synopsis of the film’s plot, which revolves around the trials of women and children who have few legal rights. Poverty, child labor, tenement housing, alcohol abuse, and child custody battles all play out in the course of the melodrama.
Continue Reading »Search Results for: war on poverty
Contemporary Housing Issues
By Catherine A. Paul, 2018. Housing has been an issue throughout American history, from urbanization to overcrowding. While this article does not provide an exhaustive list or analysis of all of America’s issues related to this topic, gentrification, affordable housing, eviction, and homelessness are all issues that have risen to prominence in recent years.
Continue Reading »Tenement House Reform
Primary sources related to tenement house reforms in the State of New York and the passage of the New York State Tenement House Act of 1901.
Continue Reading »What is Social Welfare History?
By John E. Hansan, Ph.D. 2017. Social welfare history reflects the lives of people living, being educated, working and voting in the nation. It is an interdisciplinary study of the evolution of charitable works, organized activities related to social reform movements and non-profit or public social services designed to protect or benefit individuals, families and citizens of the larger society.
Continue Reading »Theological Foundations of Charity: Catholic Social Teaching, The Social Gospel, and Tikkun Olam
A look at theological principles that have motivated Catholics, Protestants, and Jews to charitable acts.
Continue Reading »Tuberculosis
By Alice W. Campbell and Catherine A. Paul, 2017. Tuberculosis has been known by many names throughout history, among them “consumption,” “the white death,” and “the great white plague.” Tuberculosis remains one of the world’s most deadly diseases.
Continue Reading »Current Issues and Programs in Social Welfare: 2001 – 2017
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.
Hoover, Herbert, 31st U.S. President: 1929-1933
Before serving as America’s 31st President from 1929 to 1933, Herbert Hoover had achieved international success as a mining engineer and worldwide gratitude as “The Great Humanitarian” who fed war-torn Europe during and after World War I. Son of a Quaker blacksmith, Herbert Clark Hoover brought to the Presidency an unparalleled reputation for public service as an engineer, administrator, and humanitarian.
Continue Reading »Solitude of Self: An Address by E.C. Stanton January, 1892
Shakespeare’s play of Titus and Andronicus contains a terrible satire on woman’s position in the nineteenth century–“Rude men” (the play tells us) “seized the king’s daughter, cut out her tongue, cut off her hands, and then bade her go call for water and wash her hands.” What a picture of woman’s position. Robbed of her natural rights, handicapped by law and custom at every turn, yet compelled to fight her own battles, and in the emergencies of life to fall back on herself for protection.
Continue Reading »Springfield Race Riot of 1908
On the evening of August 14, 1908, a race war broke out in the Illinois capital of Springfield. Angry over reports that a black man had sexually assaulted a white woman, a white mob wanted to take a recently arrested suspect from the city jail and kill him….In the early hours of the violence, as many as five thousand white Springfield residents were present, mostly as spectators. Still angry, the rioters minus most of the spectators next methodically destroyed a small black business district downtown, breaking windows and doors, stealing or destroying merchandise, and wrecking furniture and equipment. The mob’s third and last effort that night was to destroy a nearby poor black neighborhood called the Badlands. Most blacks had fled the city, but as the mob swept through the area, they captured and lynched a black barber, Scott Burton, who had stayed behind to protect his home.
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