Author: Robert Oliver File Type: pdf

Author: Jonathan Foster File Type: pdf Growing up in Birmingham, Alabama, a city that he loved, Jonathan Foster was forced to come to grips with its reputation for racial violence. In so doing, he began to question how other cities dealt with similar kinds of stigmas that resulted from behavior and events that fell outside accepted norms. He wanted to know how such stigmas changed over time and how they affected a citys reputation and residents. Those questions led to this examination of the role of stigma and history in three very different cities Birmingham, San Francisco, and Las Vegas. In the era of civil rights, Birmingham became known as Bombingham, a place of constant reactionary and racist violence. Las Vegas emerged as the nations most recognizable Sin City, and San Franciscos tolerance of homosexuality made it the perceived capital of Gay America. Stigma Cites shows how cultural and political trends influenced perceptions of disrepute in these cities, and how, in turn, their status as sites of vice and violence influenced development decisions, from Birminghams efforts to shed its reputation as racist, to San Franciscos transformation of its stigma into a point of pride, to Las Vegass use of gambling to promote tourism and economic growth. The first work to investigate the important effects of stigmatized identities on urban places, Fosters innovative study suggests that reputation, no less than physical and economic forces, explains how cities develop and why. An absorbing work of history and urban sociology, the book illuminates the significance of perceptions in shaping metropolitan history. **Review Stigma Cities sets an example for other scholars efforts to work effectively with popular-culture sources that help us to understand how images of cities are shaped, contested, manipulated, and changed. Eric Fure-Slocum, author of Contesting the Postwar City Working-Class and Growth Politics in 1940s Milwaukee About the Author Jonathan Foster is Professor of History at Great Basin College in Elko, Nevada, and the author of Lake Mead National Recreation Area A History of Americas First National Playground.

Author: Robert A. Wilson File Type: epub Part science and part social movement, eugenics emerged in the late nineteenth century as a tool for human improvement. In response to perceived threats of criminality, moral degeneration, feeble-mindedness, and the rising tide of color, eugenic laws and social policies aimed to better the human race by regulating reproductive choice through science and technology. In this book, Rob Wilson examines eugenic thought and practice--from forced sterilization to prenatal screening--drawing on his experience working with eugenics survivors. Using the social sciences standpoint theory as a framework to understand the intersection of eugenics, disability, social inclusiveness, and human variation, Wilson focuses on those who have lived through a eugenic past and those confronted by the legacy of eugenic thinking today. By doing so, he brings eugenics from the distant past to the ongoing present. Wilson discusses such topics as the conceptualization of eugenic traits the formulation of laws regulating immigration and marriage and requiring sexual sterilization the depiction of the targets of eugenics as subhuman the systematic construction of a concept of normality the eugenic logic in prenatal screening and contemporary bioethics and the incorporation of eugenics and disability into standpoint theory. Individual purchasers of this book will receive free access to the documentary Surviving Eugenics, available at EugenicsArchive.cafilm.

Author: Douglas Crimp File Type: pdf