Fixing the Poor: Eugenic Sterilization and Child Welfare in the Twentieth Century
Author: Molly Ladd-Taylor File Type: pdf Between 1907 and 1937, thirty-two states legalized the sterilization of more than 63,000 Americans. In Fixing the Poor, Molly Ladd-Taylor tells the story of these state-run eugenic sterilization programs. She focuses on one such program in Minnesota, where surgical sterilization was legally voluntary and administered within a progressive child welfare system. Tracing Minnesotas eugenics program from its conceptual origins in the 1880s to its official end in the 1970s, Ladd-Taylor argues that state sterilization policies reflected a wider variety of worldviews and political agendas than previously understood. She describes how, after 1920, people endorsed sterilization and its alternative, institutionalization, as the best way to aid dependent children without helping the undeserving poor. She also sheds new light on how the policy gained acceptance and why coerced sterilizations persisted long after eugenics lost its prestige. In Ladd-Taylors provocative study, eugenic sterilization appears less like a deliberate effort to improve the gene pool than a complicated but sadly familiar tale of troubled families, fiscal and administrative politics, and deep-felt cultural attitudes about disability, dependency, sexuality, and gender. Drawing on institutional and medical records, court cases, newspapers, and professional journals, Ladd-Taylor reconstructs the tragic stories of the welfare-dependent, sexually delinquent, and disabled people who were labeled feebleminded and targeted for sterilization. She chronicles the routine operation of Minnesotas three-step policy of eugenic commitment, institutionalization, and sterilization in the 1920s and 1930s and shows how surgery became the price of freedom from a state institution. Combining innovative political analysis with a compelling social history of those caught up in Minnesotas welfare system, Fixing the Poor is a powerful reinterpretation of eugenic sterilization. **
Author: Hajo Greif
File Type: pdf
A real book on ethics, as Wittgenstein had it, if one could conceive it in the first place, would be the book to destroy all other books. Yet there is an increasing number of real-world discourses in which ethical values are mobilized as justifications for socio-political action while, in turn, moral problems are becoming a topic of political negotiation. Although it will be difficult to find systematic accounts of an absolute good or of absolute values in these debates, it is equally difficult to imagine them not being deeply informed by such considerations. Rather than merely adding to the corpus of applied ethics on the one hand or remaining in seemingly Wittgensteinian silence about ethics on the other, many contributions to this volume explore the reach of what can be said in ethical terms, while others provide critical discussions of what is being said in various fields of applied ethics and political philosophy under real-world power relations. This volume collects invited contributions from the 35th International Wittgenstein Symposium 2012 in Kirchberg am Wechsel, Austria. Authors include Alice Crary, Peter Dabrock, Rom Harre, Agnes Heller, Jaakko Hintikka, Peter Koller, Anton Leist, Chantal Mouffe, Julian Nida-Rumelin, Hans Sluga, David Stern, Gianni Vattimo. **
Author: Daniel Gardner
File Type: epub
From terror attacks to the war on terror, real estate bubbles to the price of oil, sexual predators to poisoned food from China, our list of fears is ever-growing. And yet, we are the safest and healthiest humans in history. Irrational fear seems to be taking over, often with tragic results. For example, in the months after 911, when people decided to drive instead of flyAbelieving they were avoiding riskAroad deaths rose by more than 1,500. In this fascinating, lucid, and thoroughly entertaining examination of how humans process risk, journalist Dan Gardner had the exclusive cooperation of Paul Slovic, the world renowned risk-science pioneer, as he reveals how our hunter gatherer brains struggle to make sense of a world utterly unlike the one that made them. Filled with illuminating real world examples, interviews with experts, and fast-paced, lean storytelling, The Science of Fear shows why it is truer than ever that the worst thing we have to fear is fear itself.
Author: Thich Nhat Hanh
File Type: epub
In Thich Nhat Hanhs latest teachings on applied Buddhism for both the work place and daily life, chapters include dealing with workplace scenarios dealing with home and family encounters with strangers and with daily life transportation and creating communities wherever you are. This book is designed for adults who are new to meditation as well as those who are more experienced. The emphasis is on how to use applied Buddhism in daily life. Work aims at contributing to new models of leadership and doing business. It is also a book full of life-coaching advice, finding happiness, and positive psychology.We all need to Chop Wood and Carry Water. Most of us experience work, hardship, traffic jams, and everything modern, urban life offers. By carefully examining our everyday choices we can move in the direction of right livelihood we can be a lotus in a muddy world by building mindful communities, learning about compassionate living, or by coming to understand the concept of Buddha nature. Work also discusses mindful consumption, or the mindful use of limited resources. Instead of Living Large in Lean Times or Ramen to Riches we can learn to appreciate living less large and think about what kind of riches we want for ourselves and others.
Author: Robert Graves
File Type: mobi
Endymion, Pelops, Daedalus, Pygmalion what are the stories behind these and the hundreds of other familiar names from Greek mythology names that recur throughout the history of European culture? In a two-volume work that has become a classic reference book for both the serious scholar and the casual inquirer, Robert Graves retells the adventures of the important gods and heroes worshipped by the ancient Greeks. Drawing on an enormous range of sources, he has brought together all the elements of every myth in simple narrative form, supplying detailed cross-references and indexes. Each entry has a full commentary which examines problems of interpretation in both historical and anthropological terms, and in the light of contemporary research.
Author: Lao Tzu
File Type: epub
For the true bibliophile and design-savvy book lover, here is the next set of Penguins celebrated Great Ideas series by some of historys most innovative thinkers. Acclaimed for their striking and elegant package, each volume features a unique type-driven design that highlights the bookmakers art. Offering great literature and great design at great prices, this series is ideal for readers who want to explore and savor the Great Ideas that have shaped our world.
Author: Rachel Berney
File Type: pdf
Once known as a drug capital and associated with kidnappings, violence, and excess, Bogota, Colombia, has undergone a transformation that some have termed the miracle of Bogota. Beginning in the late 1980s, the city emerged from a long period of political and social instability to become an unexpected model of urban development through the redesign and revitalization of the public realmparks, transportation, and derelict spacesunder the leadership of two public space mayors, Antanas Mockus and Enrique Penalosa (the latter reelected in 2015). In Learning from Bogota, Rachel Berney analyzes how these mayors worked to reconfigure the troubled city into a pedagogical one whose public spaces and urban policy have helped shape a more tolerant and aware citizenry. Berney examines the contributions of Mockus and Penalosa through the lenses of both spatialurban design and the citys history. She shows how, through the careful intertwining of new public space and transportation projects, the reclamation of privatized public space, and the refurbishment of dilapidated open spaces, the mayors enacted an ambitious urban vision for Bogota without resorting to the failed method of the top-down city master plan. Illuminating the complex interplay between formal politics, urban planning, and improvised social strategies, as well as the negative consequences that accompanied Bogotas metamorphosis, Learning from Bogota offers significant lessons about the possibility for positive and lasting change in cities around the world. **
Author: W. Julian Korab-Karpowicz
File Type: pdf
The book focuses on Heideggers thoughtful repetition of early Greek thinking, and his receptive attention to the fragments of the Presocratics from our contemporary age. Their thought has a special value for him as the heritage which must be repeated anew in order to bring us back to the question of being and to open before us new avenues for existence. The author raises questions which help us to understand Heidegger as a thinker. He presents a deep analysis of Heideggers interpretations of the Presocratics and contributes to a new, insightful understanding of Heideggerian philosophy. The book deserves a wide reception among scholars who are interested in the Presocratics, Heidegger and contemporary philosophy. Dr. Katherine Morris (University of Oxford) Prof. Korab-Karpowicz () develops a consistent reading of Heideggers historical studies, thereby significantly contributing to a new approach for the study of Heideggerian philosophy. Dr. Michal Bizon (Jagiellonian University, Krakow) **
Author: Mark Bradley
File Type: pdf
In this study of the encounter between Vietnam and the United States from 1919 to 1950, Mark Bradley fundamentally reconceptualizes the origins of the Cold War in Vietnam and the place of postcolonial Vietnam in the history of the twentieth century. Among the first Americans granted a visa to undertake research in Vietnam since the war, Bradley draws on newly available Vietnamese-language primary sources and interviews as well as archival materials from France, Great Britain, and the United States. Bradley uses these sources to reveal an imagined America that occupied a central place in Vietnamese political discourse, symbolizing the qualities that revolutionaries believed were critical for reshaping their society. American policymakers, he argues, articulated their own imagined Vietnam, a deprecating vision informed by the conviction that the country should be remade in Americas image. Contrary to other historians, who focus on the Soviet-American rivalry and ignore the policies and perceptions of Vietnamese actors, Bradley contends that the global discourse and practices of colonialism, race, modernism, and postcolonial state-making were profoundly implicated in--and ultimately transcended--the dynamics of the Cold War in shaping Vietnamese-American relations. **