Product Description: At the turn of the twentieth century, black fraternities and sororities, also known as Black Greek-Letter Organizations (BGLOs), were an integral part of what W.E.B. Du Bois called the "talented tenth." This was the top ten percent of the black community that would serve as a cadre of educated, upper-class, motivated individuals who acquired the professional credentials, skills, and capital to assist the race to attain socio-economic parity...read more

Product Description: The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act signed by President Obama in March 2010 is a landmark in U.S. social legislation. The new law extends health insurance to nearly all Americans, fulfilling a century-long quest and bringing the United States to parity with other industrial nations...read more

Product Description: From the nineteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries, millions of American men and women participated in fraternal associations--self-selecting brotherhoods and sisterhoods that provided aid to members, enacted group rituals, and engaged in community service...read more

Product Description: The contemporary American political landscape has been marked by two paradoxical transformations: the emergence after 1960 of an increasingly activist state, and the rise of an assertive and politically powerful conservatism that strongly opposes activist government...read more

Product Description: In the twentieth century, the United States ended some of its most flagrant inequalities. The "rights revolution" ended statutory prohibitions against women's suffrage and opened the doors of voting booths to African Americans...read more

Product Description: Pundits and social observers have voiced alarm each year as fewer Americans involve themselves in voluntary groups that meet regularly. Thousands of nonprofit groups have been launched in recent times, but most are run by professionals who lobby Congress or deliver social services to clients...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

The author of Boomerang: Health Care Reform and the Turn Against Government explores the changing world of American social policy and its ramifications in terms of average working families. Reprint. (view table of contents)

Product Description: An analysis of civic engagement in American democracy. It opens with a look at the roots of America's patterns of civic engagement, examining the ways in which social groups and government and electoral politics have influenced each other...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

The work of Barrington Moore, Jr., is one of the landmarks of modern social science. A distinguished roster of contributors here discusses the influence of his best-known work, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy. Their individual perspectives combine in delineating Moore's contributions to the transformation of comparative and historical social science over the past several decades. The essays in Democracy, Revolution, and History all address substantive and methodological problems, asking questions about the different historical paths toward democratic or nondemocratic political outcomes. Following Moore's example, they use well-researched comparative cases to make their arguments. In the process, they demonstrate how vital Moore's work remains to contemporary research in the social sciences. This volume points, as well, to new frontiers of scholarship, suggesting lines of work that build upon Moore's achievements. Contributors: Brian M. Downing, Silver Springs, MD Edward Friedman, University of Wisconsin, Madison Peter A. Gourevitch, University ofCalifornia, San Diego George Ross, Brandeis University Rebecca J. Scott, University of Michigan Theda Skocpol, Harvard University Tony Smith, Tufts University Charles Tilly, Columbia University Judith Eisenberg Vichniac, Harvard University Michael Walzer, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ

Product Description: In an era of widespread and unsettling change in families, businesses, and communities, most Americans yearn for a government that will take their side. The contributors to this bold and visionary book argue that America is ready for a progressive politics with substance and bite...read more

Product Description: How did the debate on health reform turn into the most concerted attack on government in recent American history?In this incisive account, a prize-winning social scientist offers deep insights into the changing terrain of U.S. politics and public policy...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Notwithstanding the myriad forms of government assistance to American business, the relationship of business to politics in the United States remains a highly antagonistic one, characterized by substantial mutual distrust. This adversarial relationship is both reflected and reinforced not only in American business ideology, but also in America's unique legalistic and confrontational style of regulation, the political strategies of the public interest movement, the American approach to American industrial policy, and the distinctive way Americans think about the subject of business ethics...read more

An account of Clinton's use of health-care reforms during his presidential campaign and their relation to present-day attacks on government concerning health care draws on contemporary documents, media coverage, and confidential White House strategy memos to offer deep insight. (view table of contents)

Product Description: In this collection of essays, Theda Skocpol, author of the award-winning States and Social Revolutions (CUP, 1979), updates her arguments about social revolutions. How are we to understand recent revolutionary upheavals in countries across the globe? Why have social revolutions happened in some countries, but not in others that seem similar? Skocpol shows how she and other scholars have used ideas about states and societies to identify the particular types of regimes that are susceptible to the growth of revolutionary movements and vulnerable to transfers of state power to revolutionary challengers...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Health care, welfare, Social Security, employment programs--all are part of ongoing national debates about the future of social policy in the United States. In this wide-ranging collection of essays, Theda Skocpol shows how historical understanding, centered on governmental institutions and political alliances, can illuminate the limits and possibilities of American social policymaking both past and present...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: From the 1850s to the 1920s, laws regulating the industrial labour process, pensions for the elderly, unemployment insurance, and measures to educate and ensure the welfare of children were enacted in many industrializing capitalist nations...read more

Product Description: Providing a needed historical perspective on current debates about industrial and agricultural policy, Kenneth Finegold and Theda Skocpol compare the origins, implementation, and consequences of two similar programs from Franklin Roosevelts New Deal, each of which committed the federal government to extensive intervention in sectors of the U...read more

Product Description: It is a commonplace that the United States lagged behind the countries of Western Europe in developing modern social policies. But, as Theda Skocpol shows in this startlingly new historical analysis, the United States actually pioneered generous social spending for many of its elderly, disabled, and dependent citizens...read more

Product Description: An edited collection of readings offering a combination of institutional, historical and theoretical perspectives on US political institutions and public policymaking, and on the social groups and movements that have participated in modern American national politics...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: This volume places the welfare debates of the 1980s in the context of past patterns of U.S. policy, such as the Social Security Act of 1935, the failure of efforts in the 1940s to extend national social benefits and economic planning, and the backlashes against "big government" that followed reforms of the 1960s and early 1970s...read more

Product Description: Until recently, dominant theoretical paradigms in the comparative social sciences did not highlight states as organizational structures or as potentially autonomous actors. Indeed, the term 'state' was rarely used. Current work, however, increasingly views the state as an agent which, although influenced by the society that surrounds it, also shapes social and political processes...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Some of the most important questions of the social sciences in the twentieth century have been posed by scholars working at the intersections of social theory and history viewed on a grand scale. The core essays of this book focus on the careers and contributions of nine of these scholars: Marc Bloch, Karl Polanyi, S...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: State structures, international forces, and class relations: Theda Skocpol shows how all three combine to explain the origins and accomplishments of social-revolutionary transformations. From France in the 1790s to Vietnam in the 1970s, social revolutions have been rare but undeniably of enormous importance in modern world history...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)