The social life of older rural Americans is made up of relationships formed through kinship, their neighborhoods, and the organizations to which they belong. These social institutions are shaped by the ways people use them, and therefore change through time. In this precedent-setting study, John van Willigen uses the concept of social network to investigate life-course changes in the relationships of older people within the context of community history. Gettin' Some Age on Me grew out of a study of more than 130 older people in a rural Kentucky county. They were interviewed concerning their relationships with others, and data were collected on the give and take of support that is part of their social life. An understanding of community life and history, developed through interviews and period documentation, provided a context for understanding the changes these people have experienced over time. Finally, related studies by other researchers provided a framework for interpreting rural and urban differences.Van Willigen skillfully interweaves these various accounts to reveal fundamentally important patterns. It is clear that these other people should be viewed not as dependent and isolated but as important sources for social support; that even though their social relationships decline in number late in life, early in the post retirement period there is an apparent increase in social involvement; and that older people are much less isolated in the rural community studied than in many urban areas.This book makes a substantial contribution to the very limited literature on aging in rural America. It is important reading for social gerontologists and for all social scientists with an interest in American communities.

The Arrogance of Race is a significant contribution to the historiography of slavery and racism in America. George Fredrickson, one of the most respected and cogent historians of this complex and troubling subject, maintains that racism is a cultural phenomenon not a mere by-product of class conflict and colonialism. He opts for a "dualistic" rather than a more popular monolithic explanation of the tragedy of racism.

American literature is no longer the refuge of the solitary hero. Like the society it mirrors, it is now a far richer, many-faceted explication of a complicated and diverse society -- racially, culturally, and ethnically interwoven and at the same time fractured and fractious.Ten women writing fiction in America today -- Toni Cade Bambara, Joan Didion, Louise Erdrich, Gail Godwin, Mary Gordon, Alison Lurie, Joyce Carol Oates, Jayne Anne Phillips, Susan Fromberg Schaeffer, and Mary Lee Settle -- represent that geographic, ethnic, and racial diversity that is distinctively American. Their differing perspectives on literature and the American experience have produced Erdrich's stolid North Dakota plainswomen; Didion's sun-baked dreamers and screamers; the urban ethnics -- Irish, Jewish, and black -- of Gordon, Schaeffer, and Bambara; Oates's small-town, often violent, neurotics; Lurie's intellectual sophisticates; and the southern survivors and victims, male and female, of Phillips, Settle, and Godwin.The ten original essays in this collection focus on the traditional themes of identity, memory, family, and enclosure that pervade the fiction of these writers. The fictional women who emerge here, as these critics show, are often caught in the interwoven strands of memory, perceive literal and emotional space as entrapping, find identity elusive and frustrating, and experience the interweaving of silence, solitude, and family in complex patterns.Each essay in this collection is followed by bibliographies of works by and about the writer in question that will be invaluable resources for scholars and general readers alike. Here is a readable critical discussion of ten important contemporary novelists who have broadened the pages of American literature to reflect more clearly the people we are.

How close to reality was the official U.S. image of Libya through the Nixon-Ford, Carter, and Reagan administrations? After recounting the actions of Libya and the United States in the Middle East since 1969, ElWahrfally concludes that it was very far from accurate.Using personal interviews as well as scholarly research, ElWarfally demonstrates that recent U.

Perspectives on Irish Nationalism examines the cultural, political, religious, economic, linguistic, folklore, and historical dimensions of the phenomenon of Irish nationalism. Its essayists are among the most distinguished Irish studies scholars. Their essays include a comprehensive analysis of the tapestry of Irish nationalism and focused studies that often challenge myths, pieties, and the scholarly consensus. Thomas E. Hachey is Professor of Irish, Irish-American, and British history and Chair of the department at Marquette University. He wrote Britain and Irish Separatism: From the Fenians to the Free State 1807-1922 (1977), coauthored and edited The Problem of Partition: Peril to World Peace (1972); coedited Voices of Revolution: Rebels and Rhetoric (1972), and edited Anglo-Vatican Relations, 1919-1937: Confidential Annual Reports of the British Ministers to the Holy See and Confidential Dispatches: Analyses of American by the British Ambassador, 1939-45 (1974). Lawrence J. McCaffrey is Professor of Irish and Irish-American History at Loyola University of Chicago. He has published a number of articles and books, including Daniel O'Connell and the Repeal Year (1966), The Irish Question, 1800-1922 (1968), The Irish Diaspora in America (1976) and coauthored The Irish in Chicago (1987). "

Jeffrey E. Cohen presents a detailed, quantitative study of the characteristics of presidential cabinets from the days of George Washington through the first Reagan administration. Dividing U. S. history into five party eras, he examines cabinet members' age, education, region, occupation, recruitment patterns, party affiliations, and relations with other branches and institutions of government. This study also addresses major theoretical issues: the Constitution never provided for a cabinet, although George Washington established it. Questions soon arose as to its functions, relation to Congress, and the rules and precedents guiding its activities. Cohen examines how the cabinet balanced representation and capability, and how, despite a lack of institutional authority, it has managed to survive through every administration.

Twenty years ago the Kentucky General Assembly was one of the least powerful and least effective legislatures in the country, almost entirely dominated by the governor. Over the past two decades the legislature has changed -- gradually and with little public attention -- into a far more powerful, professional, and independent body.This book is a study of that process of change: its causes, the obstacles encountered, and the political and policy consequences. It is a study of changing relationships between governor and legislature, caused in part by less aggressive gubernatorial leadership and in part by the growing assertion of legislative independence. It is also a study of the men and women who initiated change and who play major roles in the legislature today.One important area of change has been in the kinds of persons elected to the legislature. Today's Kentucky legislators are more professional in their approach to legislative service, serve longer tenures, and are likely to be committed to long-term political careers. They work harder to become known in their districts, and they devote more time to constituency service.In preparing this study, Malcolm E. Jewell and Penny M. Miller interviewed and sent questionnaires to many past and present members of the Kentucky legislature, as well as examining election returns, roll call votes, and committee records. They also traced developments since the 1960s to provide historical perspective.The Kentucky General Assembly is not a "typical" legislature. It is less professional and meets less frequently than those in most states. But trends in the Kentucky legislature are typical of those in other states, and this book puts the changes in Kentucky into national perspective.

Many books have been written about Appalachia, but few have voiced its concerns with the warmth and directness of this one. From hundreds of interviews gathered by the Appalachian Oral History Project, editors Laurel Shackelford and Bill Weinberg have woven a rich verbal tapestry that portrays the people and the region in all their variety.The words on the page have the ring of truth, for these are the people of Appalachia speaking for themselves. Here they recollect an earlier time of isolation but of independence and neighborliness. For a nearer time they tell of the great changes that took place in Appalachia with the growth of coal mining and railroads and the disruption of old ways. Persisting through the years and sounding clearly in the interviews are the dignity of the Appalachian people and their close ties with the land, despite the exploitation and change they have endured.When first published, Our Appalachia was widely praised. This new edition again makes available an authentic source of social history for all those with an interest in the region.

The transmission of policy preferences from the mass electorate to the political elite is the subject of Warren Miller's illuminating new book. The elites of whom he writes are the delegates to recent nominating conventions analyzed in their subsequent roles as activists involved in presidential election campaigns. Miller's analysis delineates circumstances and conditions that affect the degree to which the issue preferences of these elite activists are more or less representative of those held by rank-and-file members of the nation's electorate. Miller argues that, although consent and accountability are basic principles in the theory of democratic representation, the ways in which convention delegates are selected are not designed to implement these principles. Nevertheless, empirical analysis demonstrates that they often do so to varying degrees. Delegates selected in primary elections, Miller finds, are more representative of the ordinary voters than are delegates selected by any other means -- except for Democratic super delegates, who are the most representative of all.Miller's analysis explains why elites who campaign on behalf of particular candidates are less representative of mass policy opinions than are those who campaign on behalf of their parties, and why, ironically, the elites who campaign on behalf of specific policies are even less representative of the issue positions of their parties' rank-and-file partisans. Without Consent, a sequel to Parties in Transition, makes an important contribution to the literature on theories of representation by its novel analysis of linkages connecting public opinion and public policy through the presidential campaign elites.

Analyzes racial prejudice and its impact on white as well as black children, and provides wise counsel and a plan for action that is as fresh—and as necessary—as when the book was first written.

Scholars may have widely differing views of the Progressive Era, but all see business as holding the key to the reforms of that period. In this new book Judith Sealander amplifies our understanding of the relationship between business leaders and reform through a detailed examination of Dayton and the Miami Valley of Ohio. She focuses specifically on four progressive projects that made this nine-county region nationally known as a center for reform activism. The four "projects" include an extensive program of employee benefits instituted at the National Cash Register Company; the creation, in the Miami Conservancy District, of a massive flood prevention system; the institution of a new businesslike city-manager government in Dayton; and a new experimental approach to education in the region's public and private schools.Well grounded in the scholarly literature on progressivism and drawing from a rich trove of local manuscript sources, Judith Sealander has provided an integrated analysis of the role of business leadership in these four reform areas that corrects the exaggerated treatment business has often received. She shows how this one group of businessmen functioned as reformers, the "grand plans" they had for changing society, their merger of scientific engineering, business management, and moral fervor, and the benefits and costs of their kind of progressivism.Grand Plans contributes new insights into the Progressive Era and will interest scholars of that period as well as historians of American business, urban affairs, and reform.

A seminal and original work that delves deeply into what slaveholders thought.

Along the isolated headwaters of the Kentucky River -- Cutshin and Greasy creeks -- folklorist Leonard Roberts found the Couches, a remarkable mountain family of gifted memory and imagination. For half a century they had preserved the traditional ways of their forebears -- the farming methods, the household arts, and the games, ballads, dances, and tales that were their chief entertainment.In Up Cutshin and Down Greasy, brothers Dave and Jim Couch, born about the turn of the century, recall clearly their childhood days on Sang Branch of Greasy and Clover Fork of Big Leatherwood. Dave, a professional moonshiner and bottlegger in his younger days, tells of his brushes with the law. Jim engaged in lumbering and coal mining, with a little moonshining on the side. His accounts of mine accidents, in particular the one that cost him his leg, give an insight into the minds of those who risk their lives underground for the sake of high pay.First published in 1959, the book is available once again in paperback to pleasure a new generation of readers.

Originally issued in 1954 and updated in 1961 and 1987, this pioneering study of "small group" conflict and cooperation has long been out-of-print. It is now available, in cloth and paper, with a new introduction by Donald Campbell, and a new postscript by O.J. Harvey.In this famous experiment, one of the earliest in inter-group relationships, two dozen twelve-year-old boys in summer camp were formed into two groups, the Rattlers and the Eagles, and induced first to become militantly ethnocentric, then intensely cooperative. Friction and stereotyping were stimulated by a tug-of-war, by frustrations perceived to be caused by the "out" group, and by separation from the others. Harmony was stimulated by close contact between previously hostile groups and by the introduction of goals that neither group could meet alone. The experiment demonstrated that conflict and enmity between groups can be transformed into cooperation and vice versa and that circumstances, goals, and external manipulation can alter behavior.Some have seen the findings of the experiment as having implications for reduction of hostility among racial and ethnic groups and among nations, while recognizing the difficulty of control of larger groups.

Policy Analysis by Design examines the approaches to public policy taken by those who try to teach it, write about it, and influence it through major analysis. Bobrow and Dryzek systematically compare the five major contending analytical frames of reference: welfare economics, public choice, social structure, information processing, and political philosophy. The workings of each frame are illustrated by means of a common, if imaginary, policy case - air pollution in the hypothetical Smoke Valley.

"Five Black Lives is a collection of ex-slave narratives which spans 150 years in time, from 1729 to 1870, and some thousands of miles in geographical area from Africa to Connecticut. The autobiographies include the lives of Venture Smith, a native of Africa who ended his days as a resident of East Haddam, Connecticut; James Mars, born a slave near Norfolk, Connecticut in 1790, and freed at twenty-five by state law; William Grimes, a native of Virginia, who became Connecticut's first known runway when he arrived in New Haven about 1808; G.W. Offley, from Maryland, who was bought free by his father and later settled in Hartford; and James L. Smith, of Virginia birth, who escaped from slavery and settled in Norwich, Connecticut."-Victor B. Howard, The New England Quarterly