Integrating Ethnic and Minority Group History Into Social Welfare Policy and History Courses
Abstract This paper provides guidelines for identifying and integrating context relating to ethnic and minority group history into social welfare history and policy courses. Sources of information are reviewed and the use of local history is discussed. Examples for use in classroom teaching are provided.
The Tragedy of the Ten-Million-Acre Bill
THE protracted but unsuccessful effort of Dorothea Lynde Dix to secure federal assistance for the mentally ill in the United States has come to be regarded as a significant bench mark in the history of social welfare in this country. It serves in the first place to demonstrate, if further demonstration were needed, the perseverance and dedication of this remarkable, untiring woman who, by the time she first memorialized Congress in 1848, had successfully induced the legislatures of several states to provide at least a minimum of humane care for the institutionalized insane. Because of her work as legislative advocate for a helpless and outcast group, her name had become a byword in households throughout the country.' The failure of her effort, although personally disappointing, did not diminish her zeal or effectiveness as a reformer or the esteem in which she was generally held. However, the real significance of Miss Dix's thwarted attempts to secure federal assistance for the mentally ill was its effect on subsequent social welfare development. Writers who have surveyed the history of social welfare in this country are in unanimous agreement that President Pierce's veto of the Dix proposals established the principle and pattern of federal non-participation in social welfare matters until the federal emergency relief measures of the 1930's and the passage of the Social Security Act in 1935. The effect of the presidential veto, it is believed, was to turn back the growing tide of expectation of congressional aid for specific categories of needy persons. The story of the legislative vicissitudes of the Dix proposal to Congress is fairly well known. However, we shall review them here in order to point out some of the influences and conflicting interests which delayed its passage by Congress and which may have affected President Pierce's decision to veto the bill.
Byron: Augustan and Romantic
The impact of Byron's writings - an evaluative approach, William St Clair "My brain is feminine" - Byron and the poetry of deception, Jerome J. McGann Byron and the romantic heroine, Malcolm Kelsall Byron and the Empire in the East, Marilyn Butler Byron Augustan - mutations of mock-heroic in "Don Juan" and Shelley's "Peter Bell the Third", Claude Rawson continuities and discontinuities of language and voice in Dryden, Pope, and Byron, Bernard Beatty Augustan satires and Panegyrics on London and Byron's image of the city, Michael Gassermeier Byron, Pope, and the Grand Tour, Michael G. Cooke Byron in Italy - the return of Augustus, Donald H. Reiman "Don Juan" transformed, Anne Barton Byron's "Wrong Revolutionary System" and romanticism, Hermann Fischer the quintessential Byron, Leslie A. Marchand.