The history of Chicago can be told through its neighborhoods, and perhaps none is more telling than Douglas/Grand Boulevard on the city's south side. The future site of the neighborhood remained a sparsely settled prairie until the early 1850s, when Stephen A. Douglas purchased a large tract of land and began developing a residential subdivision for the wealthy. Douglas/Grand Boulevard: A Chicago Neighborhood explores the development of this distinctive community and the many obstacles its residents encountered. Originally a predominately white neighborhood, Douglas/Grand Boulevard became an African-American community during the Great Migration when thousands of Southern blacks moved north seeking greater opportunities. After the 1919 Race Riot, an increasing number of white residents moved away from the neighborhood, and the community became a national model of black achievement.

An incisive examination of how black leaders reinvented the history of Chicago's Bronzeville neighborhood in ways that sanitized the brutal elements of life under Jim Crow develops a new way to understand the political significance of race today. Simultaneous.

Based on years of research, this is the inspiring story of the dramatic revitalization of urban wastelands from Los Angeles to Chicago to Boston and the grassroots organizations and leaders that helped bring it about. 30 line illustrations.

A preeminent sociologist of race explains a groundbreaking new framework for understanding racial inequality, challenging both conservative and liberal dogma. In this timely and provocative contribution to the American discourse on race, William Julius Wilson applies an exciting new analytic framework to three politically fraught social problems: the persistence of the inner-city ghetto, the plight of low-skilled black males, and the fragmentation of the African American family. Though the discussion of racial inequality is typically ideologically polarized. Wilson dares to consider both institutional and cultural factors as causes of the persistence of racial inequality. He reaches the controversial conclusion that while structural and cultural forces are inextricably linked, public policy can only change the racial status quo by reforming the institutions that reinforce it.

Wilson, one of our foremost authorities on race and poverty, challenges decades of liberal and conservative pieties to look squarely at the devastating effects that joblessness has had on our urban ghettos. Marshaling a vast array of data and the personal stories of hundreds of men and women, Wilson persuasively argues that problems endemic to America's inner cities--from fatherless households to drugs and violent crime--stem directly from the disappearance of blue-collar jobs in the wake of a globalized economy. Wilson's achievement is to portray this crisis as one that affects all Americans, and to propose solutions whose benefits would be felt across our society. At a time when welfare is ending and our country's racial dialectic is more strained than ever, When Work Disappears is a sane, courageous, and desperately important work. "Wilson is the keenest liberal analyst of the most perplexing of all American problems...[This book is] more ambitious and more accessible than anything he has done before." --The New Yorker

This volume celebrates the 40th Anniversary of Ethnic and Racial Studies. It reproduces eleven classic papers published in the journal, accompanied by discussions of each paper by invited specialists, and responses from the original authors. The various discussions in this volume provide an insight into the evolution of contemporary debates and controversies in the field of ethnic and racial studies. By bringing together these papers in one volume for the first time, this book explores a number of on-going debates about race and ethnicity.

The volume offers essential reading for undergraduates who need an introduction to the field, for graduate students who wish to broaden their understanding of stratification research, and for advanced scholars who seek a basic reference guide. Although most of the selections are middle-range theoretical pieces suitable for introductory courses, the anthology also includes advanced contributions on the cutting edge of research. The editor outlines a modified study plan for undergraduate students requiring a basic introduction to the field.

To what extent are major social and political problems caused by basic income and unemployment trends? Is it possible to restore the kind of broadly shared prosperity the U.S. once experienced before the early 1970s? Some of the top economists of our time address these critical questions.

The time has come to stand up for what's right in America. We may be in the middle of economic recovery, but millions of Americans are not sharing the benefits. The growing ranks of those without adequate food, jobs, shelter, or health care challenge our fundamental notions of right and wrong. America Needs Human Rights makes a powerful case that both the letter and spirit of universally recognized human rights are routinely violated in America by government policies that safeguard profits rather than people. Topics includes understanding human rights, basic needs and human rights, the new American crisis, poverty in America, welfare reform and human rights, policy options, and movement building.

Oriented toward the introductory student, The Inequality Reader is the essential textbook for today's undergraduate courses. The editors, David B. Grusky and Szonja Szelenyi, have assembled the most important classic and contemporary readings about how poverty and inequality are generated and how they might be reduced. With thirty new readings, the second edition provides new materials on anti-poverty policies as well as new qualitative readings that make the scholarship more alive, more accessible, and more relevant. Now more than ever, The Inequality Reader is the one-stop compendium of all the must-read pieces, simply the best available introduction to the stratifi cation canon.