Social Work and Human Rights or Civil Disobedience Solitude and Life without Principle

Social Work and Human Rights: A Foundation for Policy and Practice

Author: Elisabeth Reichert

As social work students and practitioners encounter the term "human rights" with greater frequency, there is a pressing need for them to understand its meaning, especially in contradistinction to the related concept of "social justice." This book is an overview of human rights ideas and laws for social workers that stresses the importance of human rights in all types of social work policy and practice. The volume first traces the history and development of human rights from the passage of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 and subsequent international documents. In particular, Social Work and Human Rights addresses issues relating to vulnerable groups, including women, children, disabled persons, the HIV- or AIDS-infected population, gays and lesbians, victims of racism, and older persons. The book concludes with indispensable case studies that illustrate the application of human rights theory in real-life settings. These case studies demonstrate how to identify relevant human rights issues and then connect these issues to ethical responsibilities in order to form an appropriate intervention scenario with the client.

See also: The Communist Manifesto or Mary Kay Way

Civil Disobedience, Solitude and Life without Principle

Author: Henry David Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) championed the belief that people of conscience were at liberty to follow their own opinion. In these selections from his writings, we see Thoreau the individualist and opponent of injustice. "Civil Disobedience" (1849), composed following Thoreau's imprisonment for refusing to pay his taxes in protest against slavery and the Mexican War, is an eloquent declaration of the principles that make revolution inevitable in times of political dishonor. "Solitude," from his masterpiece, Walden (1849), poetically describes Thoreau's oneness with nature and the companionship solitude offers to those who want to be rid of the world to discover themselves. "Life without Principle" (posthumously published 1863) decries the way in which excessive devotion to business and money coarsens the fabric of society: in merely making a living, the meaning of life gets lost.

Table of Contents:

	Civil Disobedience	11
	Solitude	47
	Life Without Principle	61

Someday Well All Be Free or Arms and Influence

Someday We'll All Be Free

Author: Kevin Powell

Hurricane Katrina and 9/11 may have been wake-up calls to Americans insulated from the effects of poverty and terrorism, but according to Kevin Powell, similar disasters have been happening in slow motion throughout America for years. Instead of through floods and bombs, these disasters take place via things like rampant unemployment and police brutality, with consequences that are ultimately longer lasting and more damaging. Full of uncomfortable truths and difficult facts, Someday We'll All Be Free lays out Powell's case for how freedom and democracy are being subverted in 21st-century America. More than just a catalog of sins, Someday We'll All Be Free also finds Powell loudly calling for African-Americans to stand up and finish the work begun by MLK. The most blistering book yet from an author equally recognized for intellectual rigor and scalding rhetoric, Someday We'll All Be Free firmly establishes why Powell is widely considered one of America's brightest leaders and thinkers.

The Washington Post - Hakim Hasan

The enlightening essays in Someday We'll All Be Free are an interpretive collage of tragic events in American life that are redefining our debates about civil liberties and the unspoken expendability of the poor. Powell argues that the key to the future of American democracy is the willingness of Americans to assess their history and to reject rabid nationalism as a form of patriotism. He makes the point that freedom is measured by an evolving recognition of our shared humanity. Through this realization, problems such as poverty, natural disaster and terrorism can be addressed effectively.

Go to: Feeding Your Appetites or Half a Brain Is Enough

Arms and Influence

Author: Thomas C Schelling

In this landmark book, Nobel laureate Thomas C. Schelling considers the ways in which military capabilities—real or imagined—are used as bargaining power.  This edition contains a new foreword by the author where he considers the book’s relevance over forty years after its first publication.  Included as an afterword is the text of Professor Schelling’s Nobel acceptance speech in which he reflects upon the global taboo that has emerged against nuclear weapons since Hiroshima.

"This is a brilliant and hardheaded book.  It will frighten those who prefer not to dwell on the unthinkable and infuriate those who have taken refuge in stereotypes and moral attitudinizing."—Gordon A. Craig, New York Times Book Review

Thomas C. Schelling is Distinguished University Professor, Department of Economics and School of Public Affairs, University of Maryland and Lucius N. Littauer Professor of Political Economy, Emeritus, Harvard University. He is co-recipient of the 2005 Nobel Prize in Economics.
 

The Henry L. Stimson Lectures Series

Dear Mrs Roosevelt or U S Presidents Factbook

Dear Mrs. Roosevelt: Letters from Children of the Great Depression

Author: Robert Cohen

Impoverished young Americans had no greater champion during the Depression than Eleanor Roosevelt. As First Lady, Mrs. Roosevelt used her newspaper columns and radio broadcasts to crusade for expanded federal aid to poor children and teens. She was the most visible spokesperson for the National Youth Administration, the New Deal's central agency for aiding the needy young, and she was adamant in insisting that federal aid to young people be administered without discrimination so that it reached blacks as well as whites, girls as well as boys.

This activism made Mrs. Roosevelt a beloved figure among poor teens and children, who between 1933 and 1941 wrote her thousands of letters describing their problems and requesting her help. Dear Mrs. Roosevelt presents nearly 200 of these extraordinary documents to open a window into the lives of the Depression's youngest victims. In their own words, the letter writers confide what it was like to be needy and young during the worst economic crisis in American history.

Revealing both the strengths and the limitations of New Deal liberalism, this book depicts an administration concerned and caring enough to elicit such moving appeals for help yet unable to respond in the very personal ways the letter writers hoped.

KLIATT

A world of deep need comes into focus through a sampling of letters written by young people to Eleanor Roosevelt during the 1930s, the years when the Great Depression caused great economic and social distress. Ninety percent of the letters requesting aid of the president and his wife during this time were written by adults, but Cohen's search through archives reveals that children and teens, girls more often than boys, also wrote. Mrs. Roosevelt composed columns for the newspapers of the time and made radio broadcasts in which she spoke of great concern for the poverty-stricken state of the population, especially the youth, and invited listeners to write to her. President Roosevelt, in a memorable speech, said that one third of the nation was "ill clothed, ill housed, and ill fed," and here is very human evidence that he was correct. Cohen introduces the letters at length, and examples of the letters are clustered in chapters, which also begin with interpretive material. The letters almost always start with a note of apology for writing, and then reveal a heartrending desperation. The great majority of the writers requested clothing and imagined that Mrs. Roosevelt could dip into an extensive wardrobe of her personal discards or into a trove of used clothing it was rumored was stored in the White House attic. They believed that she could send them a package by return mail. It appears that the lack of proper clothing meant not only that the young people could not protect their bodies from the elements, but that it degraded them socially and prevented them from participating in important events surrounding high school graduation. Many asked for money and often offered to pay it back withinterest. They wanted it for daily needs (requests for food are surprisingly largely absent, and doctors reported little evidence of starvation), for gifts and bicycles, for medical and dental care for themselves and their families, and for books, tuition and typewriters. Government agencies developed income scales with which they estimated the lifestyle achievable at varying levels, and many of the correspondents clearly fell well below the minimum at which a family could sustain life with dignity. A final brief chapter comments on the response of Mrs. Roosevelt and her staff to the letters. A very few were answered fulfilling the request; most received rather cool form letters telling the writer that, because of the many similar letters Mrs. Roosevelt received, she could not send the desired aid. The editor feels the staff could have done a better job of personalizing the replies. The editor's essays are scholarly and will be challenging reading for most high school students, but they will appreciate the letters for how, through them, their counterparts of the 1930s become real persons. Teachers who treat the period will be delighted to find this fresh material on the library shelf. KLIATT Codes: SA—Recommended for senior high school students, advanced students, and adults. 2002, Univ. of North Carolina Press, 266p. illus. notes. index., Boardman

Books about: Abnormal Pap Smears or The Womens Migraine Survival Guide

U. S. Presidents Factbook

Author: Elizabeth Jewell

Up-to-date through the 2004 election, the ultimate resource on the American presidency

Whether students are writing an essay on American history or parents are choosing which candidate gets their vote, the U.S. Presidents Factbook is one of the best resources on presidential history.

• Up-to-date with presidents from George Washington to the winner of the 2004 election. This is the only comprehensive and unbiased coverage of more than 200 years of American leadership.

• Includes each president's family history, career decisions, notable appointments, major legislative acts, and major successes and failures.

Main Street Revisited or Americas Lost War

Main Street Revisited: Time, Space, and Image Building in Small-Town America

Author: Richard V Francaviglia

Main Street has come to symbolize a place of honest aspirations and few pretenses, a place where economics, community pride, and entertainment generate an intuitive appreciation of the small town as a vital part of the American experience. As an archetype for an entire class of places, Main Street has become one of America's most popular and idealized images. In Main Street Revisited, the first book to place the design of small downtowns in spatial and chronological context, Richard Francaviglia finds the sources of romanticized images of this archetype, including Walt Disney's Main Street USA, in towns as diverse as Marceline, Missouri, and Fort Collins, Colorado. Francaviglia interprets Main Street both as a real place and as an expression of collective assumptions, designs, and myths; his Main Streets are treasure troves of historic patterns. Using many historical and contemporary photographs and maps from his extensive fieldwork and research, he reveals a rich regional pattern of small-town development that serves as the basis for American community design. He underscores the significance of time in the development of Main Street's distinctive personality, focuses on the importance of space in the creation of place, and concentrates on popular images that have enshrined Main Street in the collective American consciousness. As a historical geographer with a long-standing interest in American popular culture, Francaviglia looks sympathetically but realistically at the ways in which Main Street's image developed and persists. He reaffirms that life can imitate art, that the cherished icons surrounding Main Street have become the substance of popular culture. Ultimately, his book is about the material culture that architects, town developers, and image makers have left us as their legacy. Seen through the lives of the visionaries who created them in their search for the perfect community, Main Streets above all symbolize both individual and collective human ene

Publishers Weekly

Whether in Sinclair Lewis novels, Jimmy Stewart films or Norman Rockwell paintings, no American image is as uniformly depicted as that of Main Street, with its Fourth of July parades, five-and-dime stores and barber poles. This book, part of Iowa's American Land and Life series, asks how and why the recognizably generic streetscape took shape. Francaviglia, an associate professor of history at the University of Texas at Arlington, documents the physical changes in downtown America over the years and offers 16 axioms that define the design and development of the small-town commercial center. Photographs taken from Maine to California reveal Main Street's material culture: building styles and materials, street plans, road surfaces and lighting. An interesting paradox emerges: that Main Street is both mundane and utopian, mundane in its aspirations to uniformity but utopian in that it embodies an ideal of life in America. Francaviglia's otherwise bland study culminates in a somewhat belabored defense of the influence of Disneyland's Main Street, U.S.A. on the very form and existence of America's downtown shopping districts since the 1950s. For historians of architecture and town planning, this book will offer a useful review of Main Street's development. But readers interested in why Main Street came to represent American ideals may be disappointed. Photos and illustrations. (June)

Table of Contents:

	Foreword
	Acknowledgments
	Introduction
Sect. 1	Time and Main Street: The Origins and Evolution of an Image	1
Sect. 2	Space and Main Street: Toward a Spatial and Regional Identity	65
Sect. 3	Image Building and Main Street: The Shaping of a Popular American Icon	130
	Notes	193
	Glossary	203
	Bibliography	207
	Index	217

Books about: Pedometer Power or Libro de Cocina Ilustrado de la Nueva Dieta Atkins

America's Lost War: Vietnam: 1945-1975 9American History Series)

Author: Charles E Neu

In college and high school classrooms across the United States, students display a keen interest in knowing more about what they rightly sense was a pivotal event in the recent past, one that brought a sea change in the life of the nation.

In a long-awaited alternative to the lengthy and overly expensive texts on the Vietnam War, Charles Neu presents America’s Lost War, a balanced, lively narrative account of that tragic conflict, one that sweeps across the whole time-span of the war and explores American, Vietnamese, and international perspectives. Recreating the physical and psychological landscape of the war, Neu fluidly describes policy disputes—among leaders of both the United States and North Vietnam—as well as individual policy makers, battles, and military realities, tracing the legacy of the “Vietnam” phenomenon that shapes American domestic politics and elections, as well as foreign relations, to the present day.

The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government or Worlds Apart

The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government, Vol. 1

Author: Jefferson Davis

The North had their orders: "Capture or kill Jefferson Davis," the rebel President of the Confederate South. Davis was captured, and upon his release from federal prison, crafted this intimate Civil War document that gives a powerful firsthand account of the South's defeat and the reasons behind its secession from the Union.

Book review: Contabilit�

Worlds Apart: Why Poverty Persists in Rural America

Author: Cynthia M Duncan

This book takes us to three remote rural areas in the United States to hear the colorful stories of their residentsthe poor and struggling, the rich and powerful, and those in between - as they talk about their families and work, the hard times they've known, and their hopes and dreams. Cynthia M. Duncan examines the nature of poverty in Blackwell in Appalachia and in the Mississippi Delta town of Dahlia. She finds in these towns a persistent inequality that erodes the fabric of the community, feeds corrupt politics, and undermines institutions crucial for helping poor families achieve the American Dream. In contrast, New England's Gray Mountain enjoys a rich civic culture that enables the poor to escape poverty. Focusing on the implications of the differences among these communities, the author provides powerful new insights into the dynamics of poverty, politics, and community change.

(American Journal of Sociology) - David Brown

Analyzing data from over 350 in-depth interviews conducted during 1990-95, Cynthia Duncan provides a vivid and highly nuanced description of life in rural America's poor communities. . . . I am enthusiastic about this book, and I recommend it highly.

(World & I) - Linda Simon

[An] absorbing, provocative book. . . . In her lavish use of direct quotes and firsthand observations, skillfully interwoven with commentary and historical and economic background, Duncan achieves an authenticity and believability rare in academic work, which make one take her seriously. . . . For an examination of persistent rural poverty in America, Worlds Apart is excellent.

(America) - Thomas Bokenkotter

The debate goes on, and Cynthia Duncan's Worlds Apart is must reading for anyone involved. Those who advocate the need for greater sense of social responsibility in our attitude toward the poor will find much support in this study.

Choice

The description of rural poverty in Worlds Apart are interesting and read almost like a novel. Sociologist Duncan compiles accounts of residents who describe their lives in three rural areas: a coal-mining town in Appalachia, a cotton-plantation town in the Mississippi Delta, and a mill town in northern Maine. . . . All levels.

Doubletake

Duncan combines theoretical sophistication with the gravity of real-life stories to tell of the absence of democratic processes in these areas, a main reason why the cycle of poverty continues. . . . Duncan weaves a narrative that should cause us profound national embarrassment over how, in a land of plenty, so many can have so little.

(Appalachian Journal) - Jim Sessions

This is a good book. It is imminently readable, filled with rich and revelatory interviews with both 'haves' and 'have nots' in 'Blackwell,' a coal county in Appalachia; 'Dahlia,' an agricultural plantation county of the Mississippi Delta; and 'Gray Mountain,' a mill town in northern New England. . . . . [Duncan] pursue[s] the ways in which poverty is perpetuated and what can be done about it.

Kirkus Reviews

University of New Hampshire sociologist Duncan (Rural Poverty in America, not reviewed) looks at the social relations and political and economic institutions that perpetuate poverty in rural America. "Blackwell" (place names have been changed) in Appalachia and "Dahlia" on the Mississippi Delta, are two of the poorest areas in the US. Duncan studied the lives of the residents of these places, and what she found was communities where the "haves" and "have nots" inhabit different worlds within historically structured, rigid class and, in Dahlia, race divisions. In both places local elites—coal company operators in Blackwell, plantation owners in Dahlia—control not only the economic life of the community but the political life as well. Their power is near absolute, and they use public institutions, including schools, to further their own interests and punish those who cross them. The poor remain "powerless, dependent, and do not participate" in civic life. A kind of stasis sets in where the poor see no option but to give way to those who have always had power, and the powerful resist change as it may threaten their status. In contrast, "Gray Mountain," in northern New England, is a town with a strong civic culture based on a blue-collar middle class that has created public institutions—from little league to effective schools—that serve all in the community. Duncan, through in-depth investigation and interviews, concludes that only a strong civic culture, a sense among citizens of community and the need to serve that community, can truly address poverty. Yet class and race relations in places like Blackwell and Dahlia preclude such a sense of community. Her answer, goingagainst so much conventional wisdom, is federal government intervention, especially to create equitable school systems where they do not exist. Only such intervention, Duncan asserts, will give the poor the knowledge of alternatives, the hope they now lack. Moving and troubling. Duncan has created a remarkable study of the persistent patterns of poverty and power. (The book's foreword is by Robert Coles.)

What People Are Saying

Robert Coles
A documentary exposition of great moral energy, informed by impressive intellectual skills: an extraordinary mix of social history, economic and political analysis, and direct observation by a boldly original researcher.

Table of Contents:

	Map of Northern New England, Central Appalachia, and the Mississippi Delta
	Foreword
	Preface
	List of People Profiled
ch. 1	Blackwell: Rigid Classes and Corrupt Politics in Appalachia's Coal Fields	1
	"Good Rich People" and "Bad Poor People"	3
	Blackwell Yesterday: Developing Appalachia's Coal Fields	11
	The Families That Run Things	17
	The Politics of Work in the Mountains	30
	Blackwell's Have-Nots: Scratching a Living Up the Hollows	39
	Blackwell's Haves: The Good Life on Redbud Hill	53
	Bringing Change to Blackwell	59
ch. 2	Dahlia: Racial Segregation and Planter Control in the Mississippi Delta	73
	Dahlia's Two Social Worlds	74
	Work in Dahlia: Creating and Maintaining the Plantation World	90
	Class and Caste in the Delta	96
	White Planters, Politicians, and Shopkeepers	111
	Leadership in the Black Community: The Old and the New "Toms"	123
	Dahlia's Emerging Middle Class	140
ch. 3	Gray Mountain: Equality and Civic Involvement in Northern New England	152
	A Blue-Collar Middle-Class Mill Town	154
	Participation and Investment in the 1990s	164
	The Big Middle "Continuum"	177
	Difficult Times Ahead: Putting Civic Culture to the Test	184
ch. 4	Social Change and Social Policy	187
	Cultural and Structural Causes of Persistent Poverty	187
	Class and Politics in Rural Communities	191
	Equality, Democracy, and Social Change	198
	Policies to Encourage Mobility and Build Civic Culture	200
	Appendix	209
	Notes	223
	Acknowledgments	229
	Index	231