Large Questions in Small Places: Why Study Mount Pleasant\u27s Institutions

One of three lectures that were part of the Mount Pleasant History Project, held at the Mount Pleasant Municipal Complex, September 18, 1993

Lincoln\u27s Rise to the Presidency

Lincoln\u27s Entry into Presidential Politics William C. Harris has done it againùanother superb book on Abraham Lincoln. Building on his impressive body of work, as well as that of Douglas Wilson, Don Fehrenbacher, and others, Harris summarizes Lincoln\u27s emergence and ascendancy from obscur...

The Creation and Destruction of the Fourteenth Amendment Duringthe Long Civil War

The article investigate the creation and destruction of the Fourteenth Amendment during the Civil War and how the U.S. Supreme Court undid most of the gains of the Fourteenth Amendment toward equality and equal rights for black citizens

African Americans and Land Loss in Texas: Government Duplicity and Discrimination Based on Race and Class

African American Farmers and Land Loss in Texas, surveys the ways that discrimination at the local, state, and national levels constrained minority farmers during the twentieth century. It considers the characteristics of small-scale farming that created liabilities for landowners regardless of race, including state and federal programs that favored commercial and agribusiness interests. In addition to economic challenges African American farmers had to negotiate racism in the Jim Crow South. The Texas Agricultural Extension Service, the state branch of the USDA\u27s Extension Service, segregated in 1915. The Negro division gave black farmers access to information about USDA programs, but it emphasized their subordinate position relative to white farmers. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 did not reverse decades of racial discrimination. Instead, USDA officials relied on federalism, a theory as old as the Constitution, to justify their tolerance of civil rights violations in Texas and elsewhere. Then, special needs legislation passed during the 1970s and 1980s did not realize its potential to serve ethnically diverse and economically disadvantaged rural Texans. Discrimination based on race combined with a bias toward commercial production. This crippled most black farmers and led to their near extinction

Social change and the family: Comparative perspectives from the west, China, and South Asia

This paper examines the influence of social and economic change on family structure and relationships: How do such economic and social transformations as industrialization, urbanization, demographic change, the expansion of education, and the long-term growth of income influence the family? We take a comparative and historical approach, reviewing the experiences of three major sociocultural regions: the West, China, and South Asia. Many of the changes that have occurred in family life have been remarkably similar in the three settings—the separation of the workplace from the home, increased training of children in nonfamilial institutions, the development of living arrangements outside the family household, increased access of children to financial and other productive resources, and increased participation by children in the selection of a mate. While the similarities of family change in diverse cultural settings are striking, specific aspects of change have varied across settings because of significant pre-existing differences in family structure, residential patterns of marriage, autonomy of children, and the role of marriage within kinship systems.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/45661/1/11206_2005_Article_BF01124383.pd

RiverWeb

RiverWeb is an education and outreach program started at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The mission of RiverWeb is to promote environmental education and historical and cultural awareness about rivers and their watersheds among students, educators, and their communities, and to facilitate greater citizen participation in environmental monitoring, planning, and policy-making by harnessing advanced information technologies. The RiverWeb project is currently using historic city directories to allow an opportunity to explore in unprecedented clarity the demographic evolution East St Louis during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century. The city directories contain a wealth of demographic information about East St Louis???s citizens, allowing for direct analysis of how racial, marital, and occupational status affected the composition of different neighborhoods in different years. By digitizing city directories, it is possible to map residential patterns within East St Louis at a higher temporal and spatial resolution than is possible through the use of the decennial census. In particular, the city directories also allow us to explore how a specific event???whether the tornado of 1896 or the 1917 race riot that shocked the country???affected population dynamics within the city. www.riverweb.ncsa.uiuc.edu. This poster was also presented at the Second International Conference on e-Social Science in Manchester, United Kingdom and at Digital Humanities '06 in Paris, France.unpublishe