Social Class and Income Inequality in the United States: Ownership, Authority, and Personal Income Distribution from 1980 to 2010.

This study outlines a theory of social class based on workplace ownership and authority relations, and it investigates the link between social class and growth in personal income inequality since the 1980s. Inequality trends are governed by changes in between-class income differences, changes in the relative size of different classes, and changes in within-class income dispersion. Data from the General Social Survey are used to investigate each of these changes in turn and to evaluate their impact on growth in inequality at the population level. Results indicate that between-class income differences grew by about 60% since the 1980s and that the relative size of different classes remained fairly stable. A formal decomposition analysis indicates that changes in the relative size of different social classes had a small dampening effect and that growth in between-class income differences had a large inflationary effect on trends in personal income inequality.

Financial Capability in Early Social Work Practice: Lessons for Today.

During the profession's first decades, social workers tried to improve their clients' financial capability (FC). This article describes the methods used by early social workers who attempted to enhance the FC of their clients, based on contemporary descriptions of their practice. Social workers initially emphasized thrift, later adding more sophisticated consideration of the cost of foods, rent, and other necessities. Social work efforts were furthered by home economists, who served as specialists in nutrition, clothing, interior design, and other topics related to homemaking. Early home economists included specialists in nutrition and family budgeting; these specialists worked with social services agencies to provide a financial basis for family budgets and assisted clients with family budgeting. Some agencies engaged home economists as consultants and as direct providers of instruction on home budgets for clients. By the 1930s, however, social work interest in family budget problems focused on the psychological meaning of low income to the client, rather than in measures to increase client FC. Consequently, social workers' active engagement with family budget issues­engagement that characterized earlier decades­faded. These early efforts can inform contemporary practice as social workers are once again concerned about improving their clients' FC.

Copies of Vesalius' De Humani Corporis Fabrica in the USA.

The purpose of this study was to confirm the locations in the United States of America (USA) of the first (1543) and second edition (1555) of the De humani Corporis Fabrica authored by Andreas Vesalius. Contacts were made at institutions of higher learning, museums, libraries and an update of locations of previous studies in 1943 and 1984. A total of 64 copies of the 1543 Fabrica and 58 copies of the 1555 Fabrica were recorded in University and Institutional Libraries in the USA. Twenty-Six (54%) out of 48 locations having both editions. The majority of locations recorded by Cushing in 1943 and subsequently by Horowitz and Collins in 1984 are still in their original collections. Location and dual ownership in private collections were more difficult to locate.

The Advocate's Devil: The Maritime Public Historian as Expert Witness.

The maritime historian working as litigation support and expert witness faces many challenges, including identifying and analyzing case law associated with admiralty subjects, cultural resource management law, and general historical topics. The importance of the unique knowledge of the historian in the maritime context is demonstrated by a case study of attempts to salvage the shipwreck Atlantic, the remains of a merchant vessel built and enrolled in the United States and lost in the Canadian waters of Lake Erie in 1852.

The editor, the publisher, and his mother: the representation of lesbians and gays in the New York Times.

The attention and prominence given to issues in media outlets may affect the importance citizens attribute to them, so the actors who influence mass media coverage decisions may have political power in society generally. This article seeks to measure the relative influence of journalists, social trends, events, government officials, editors, and owners on the New York Times coverage of lesbians and gays from 1960 to 1995. Although many factors affected the nature and frequency of such coverage, the findings of this article show that the owners of the Times exerted decisive influence. Documentary evidence reveals that the Times' owners actively intervened to suppress coverage of lesbians and gays until 1987, even as reporters and editors recognized that increased social visibility made them newsworthy. Statistical analysis confirms that, although some actual events and statements of officials attracted attention from the newspaper throughout the period, they were more likely to generate prominent coverage after 1987 when the stories were consistent with the enthusiasms of the owners.

Who owns what? Private ownership and the public interest in recombinant DNA technology in the 1970s.

This essay analyzes how academic institutions, government agencies, and the nascent biotech industry contested the legal ownership of recombinant DNA technology in the name of the public interest. It reconstructs the way a small but influential group of government officials and university research administrators introduced a new framework for the commercialization of academic research in the context of a national debate over scientific research's contributions to American economic prosperity and public health. They claimed that private ownership of inventions arising from public support would provide a powerful means to liberate biomedical discoveries for public benefit. This articulation of the causal link between private ownership and the public interest, it is argued, justified a new set of expectations about the use of research results arising from government or public support, in which commercialization became a new public obligation for academic researchers. By highlighting the broader economic and legal shifts that prompted the reconfiguration of the ownership of public knowledge in late twentieth-century American capitalism, the essay examines the threads of policy-informed legal ideas that came together to affirm private ownership of biomedical knowledge as germane to the public interest in the coming of age of biotechnology and genetic medicine.

Becoming farmers: opening spaces for women's resource control in Calakmul, Mexico.

Despite empirical findings on women's varied and often extensive participation in smallholder agriculture in Latin America, their participation continues to be largely invisible. In this article, I argue that the intransigency of farming women's invisibility reflects, in part, a discursive construction of farmers as men. Through a mixture of quantitative and qualitative methods, including interviews with one hundred women in Calakmul, Mexico, I demonstrate the material implications of gendered farmer identities for women's control of resources, including land and conservation and development project resources. In particular, I relate the activities of one women's agricultural community-based organization and the members' collective adoption of transgressive identities as farmers. For these women, the process of becoming farmers resulted in increased access to and control over resources. This empirical case study illustrates the possibility of women's collective action to challenge and transform women's continued local invisibility as agricultural actors in rural Latin American spaces.

Colonialism, planters, sugarcane, and the agrarian economy of Caguas, Puerto Rico, between the 1890s and 1930.

This article presents new research on the impact and consequences of the incorporation of Puerto Rico into the American economic sphere of influence and how much change truly took place during the first decades of the twentieth century. As reconstructed here, Puerto Rico's social and economic structure did change after the American invasion. However, a closer look at the data reveals that, contrary to the generally accepted conclusions, land tenure did not become concentrated in fewer hands. Puerto Rico did experience profound changes with the rapid growth of US agribusiness and the penetration of American capital. In the process of arriving on the island, these two interests found a land tenure system in the firm control of local farmers (small, medium, and large). The American invasion and subsequent incorporation of the island into the American economic/political system as a non-incorporated territory provided the conditions for the numerical increase of farms and farmers in the island during the first three decades of the twentieth century.

Widows' land security in the era of HIV/AIDS: panel survey evidence from Zambia.

In areas of Africa hard hit by HIV/AIDS, there are growing concerns that many women lose access to land after the death of their husbands. However, there remains a dearth of quantitative evidence on the proportion of widows who lose access to their deceased husband's land, whether they lose all or part of that land, and whether there are factors specific to the widow, her family, or the broader community that influence her ability to maintain rights to land. This study examines these issues using average treatment effects models with propensity score matching applied to a nationally representative panel data of 5,342 rural households surveyed in 2001 and 2004. Results are highly variable, with roughly a third of households incurring the death of a male household head controlling less than 50% of the land they had prior to their husband's death, while over a quarter actually controlled as much or even more land than while their husbands were alive. Widows who were in relatively wealthy households prior to their husband's death lose proportionately more land than widows in households that were relatively poor. Older widows and widows related to the local headman enjoy greater land security. Women in matrilineal inheritance areas were no less likely to lose land than women in patrilineal areas.

Inheriting, marrying, and founding farms: women's place on the land.

This article considers rural women's place on the land in south-central New York during the first half of the twentieth century. Based on a community history and ethnographic study conducted during the 1980s, the article draws on women's oral narratives to explore the connections between women's sense of agency and their relationship to the land through descent and inheritance, marriage into a landowning family, founding a farm in partnership, and the experience of dispossession.

Impact of non-livelihood-based land management on land resources: the case of upland watersheds in Uporoto Mountains, South West Tanzania.

Various land management strategies are used to prevent land degradation and keep land productive. Often land management strategies applied in certain areas focus on the context of the physical environment but are incompatible with the social environment where they are applied. As a result, such strategies are ignored by land users and land degradation becomes difficult to control. This study observes the impacts of land management in the upland watersheds of the Uporoto Mountains in South West Tanzania. In spite of various land management practices used in the area, 38% of the studied area experienced soil fertility loss, 30% gully erosion, 23% soil loss, 6% biodiversity loss and drying up of river sources. Land management methods that were accepted and adopted were those contributing to immediate livelihood needs. These methods did not control land resource degradation, but increased crop output per unit of land and required little labour. Effective methods of controlling land degradation were abandoned or ignored because they did not satisfy immediate livelihood needs. This paper concludes that Integrating poor people's needs would transform non-livelihood-based land management methods to livelihood-based ones. Different ways of transforming these land management methods are presented and discussed.

"We were all trespassers": George Edward Lemmon, Anglo-American cattle ranching, and the Great Sioux Reservation.

With the opening of the Black Hills to white settlement in the mid-1870s, thousands of fortune-seekers made their way into Dakota Territory. George Edward Lemmon, a man later renowned as one of the world's most accomplished cowboys, was among them. During the 1880s his employer, the Sheidley Cattle Company, grazed thousands of cattle in western Dakota Territory, many of them on Sioux Indian land. Indeed, the company owed a great deal of its success to illegal grazing on the Great Sioux Reservation. Opportunists such as Lemmon supported Indian reservations because they could use those lands to make a profit. The interaction between large-scale white ranchers and the Indians of the Great Sioux Reservation provides insight into the development of the range cattle industry in the northern Great Plains and illuminates the motivations that led many ranchers to support, rather than oppose, the reservation system.

The impact of housing rehabilitation on local neighborhoods: the case of small community development organizations.

Across the nation, nonprofit organizations located in poor and declining neighborhoods are promoting homeownership in the hopes that their efforts will stave off decline and contribute to neighborhood stability. A common homeownership strategy among nonprofits is to acquire boarded-up or deteriorated homes at a low price, rehabilitate them, and then sell them at an affordable price. As these programs continue, nonprofit organizations want to show quantitatively that neighborhood revitalization works­that the funds devoted to an area stabilize neighborhoods or, even more, that they initiate a surge of continued upward progress. But, unlike their larger counterparts, smaller community development organizations are usually at a disadvantage in undertaking such an evaluation. This study will help illustrate what might be done. It focuses on the case of St. Joseph's Carpenter Society (SJCS) in Camden, New Jersey and assesses the quantitative impact that SJCS has on its target neighborhoods. A three-tiered approach is adopted that ranges from a target and comparison area analysis, to regression analysis of SJCS's impact on local housing prices, and finally to an examination of the relative market performance of SJCS's houses. All told, the analysis suggests that SJCS's rehabilitation and homeownership education activities appear to have a positive influence on the neighborhoods in its target area.

Moving up the ladder or stuck on the bottom rung? Homeownership as a solution to poverty in urban South Africa.

In the global South, policies providing property titles to low-income households are increasingly implemented as a solution to poverty. Integrating poor households into the capitalist economy using state-subsidized homeownership is intended to provide poor people with an asset that can be used in a productive manner. In this article the South African "housing subsidy system" is assessed using quantitative and qualitative data from in-depth research in a state-subsidized housing settlement in the city of Cape Town. The findings show that while state-subsidized property ownership provides long-term shelter and tenure security to low-income households, houses have mixed value as a financial asset. Although state-subsidized houses in South Africa are a financially tradable asset, transaction values are too low for low-income vendors to reach the next rung on the housing ladder, the township market. Furthermore, low-income homeowners are reticent to use their (typically primary) asset as collateral security for credit, and thus property ownership is not providing the financial returns that titling theories assume.