Remembering Joseph A. Pechman, 1918–1989

1990 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 121-124
Author(s):  
Henry J Aaron

Joe Pechman joined the staff of the Brookings Institution in 1960. He graduated from the City College of New York in 1937 and the University of Wisconsin in 1942. During World War II, he worked in the war time Office of Price Administration and later served in the U.S. Army. After the war he worked in the Treasury Department, the staff of the Council of Economic Advisers, and the Committee for Economic Development, a policy-oriented organization sponsored by major businesses. Before and after coming to Brookings he taught at M.I.T., Yale, Stanford (twice), Georgetown, Dartmouth, and Williams College. He was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences and at the Hoover Institution, both at Stanford University.

2019 ◽  
pp. 13-38
Author(s):  
Carl Suddler

This chapter focuses on the juvenile justice system and its related efforts to address youth crime in New York City before World War II. From the 1930s to the onset of the war, there was a nationwide tension about how to address crime. In New York City, this debate had racial, political, and social implications that persisted beyond the period. On one side, there were those, such as New York City mayor Fiorello La Guardia, who believed crime in the city was rampant and that an increased carceral sovereignty, including preventive policing, was critical to establish order. On the other side, there were those, such as Jane M. Bolin, who rejected such logic and aspired to advance a neo-Progressive rationale that emphasized the correction of social ills contributing to criminal behaviors—regardless of the numbers. This chapter provides a sketch of Harlem during the Depression era, with an emphasis on black youths and various crime-prevention effortsthey encountered.


2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Janice Kung

Pignat, Caroline. Unspeakable. Toronto: Razorbill, 2014. Print. Ellie Ryan is an eighteen-year-old girl who has suffered an insurmountable number of personal tragedies that have taught her the importance of perseverance. After her mother’s death, she finds herself unwanted by her father and is forced to move in with her aunt Geraldine. Due to Ellie’s inability to cope with her circumstances, her aunt sends her aboard the Empress of Ireland where she learns to embrace her new position as a stewardess with the help of her most trusted friend, Meg.On the second crossing of the Empress, Ellie meets Jim, a lonely fire stoker who has experienced his share of grief and tragedy, something Ellie is all too familiar with. After many chance encounters late at night along the ship's rail, she finds Jim writing in a journal. He is a quiet and secretive young man who doesn’t share much of his life, which intrigues and compels her to discover more about him. When the ship docks at Quebec City, they explore the city together, a memorable experience for her. However, tragedy strikes on their next voyage when the ship collides into another ship. Ellie appears to be the one of the few remaining crew members to survive the disaster and has no word of Jim’s whereabouts; it seems unlikely that Jim would have survived the frigid ocean. Wyatt Steele, a journalist with The New York Times, later asks Ellie for her story. She refuses at first, but unwittingly gives into him when he appears one day with Jim’s journal. Wyatt represents the last remaining hope she has to learn more about the man she had fallen in love with and to possibly discover what happened to him. In exchange for her story, he agrees to provide Jim’s journal as payment, one page at a time.               This young adult novel follows Ellie’s journey aboard the Empress of Ireland in 1914 and offers a realistic context for Canada’s worst maritime disaster. It explores themes of depression from the loss of family and friends, survivor’s guilt, and redemption. The story weaves an intricate plot that alternates the timeline before and after the ship’s sinking, in order for the reader to actively live through Ellie’s recollections in the present. Overall, the author intricately writes a romantic story in the backdrop of a historical Canadian event that is well suited to young adult audiences.Recommended: 4 out of 4 starsReviewer: Janice KungJanice Kung is an Academic Library Intern at the University of Alberta’s John W. Scott Health Sciences Library. She obtained her undergraduate degree in commerce and completed her MLIS in 2013. She believes that the best thing to beat the winter blues is to cuddle up on a couch and lose oneself in a good book.


2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Crist N. Filer

Abstract Renewed and sustained Cannabis chemistry exploration was initiated by Roger Adams at the University of Illinois Chemistry Department with cooperation from the Treasury Department Narcotics Laboratory in the early 1940’s. This partnership and time investment by both parties made practical sense. Adams was able to explore natural products chemistry and the Narcotics Laboratory began to clarify the chemistry mysteries of Cannabis. Minnesota wild hemp, often viewed as just a roadside weed, was employed as the critical botanical source. Based on its widespread cultivation during World War II, this was also a very pragmatic decision. Although the unique Illinois – Washington D. C. collaboration lasted only a few short years (1939–1942), the stunning results included the isolation and extensive characterization of cannabidiol, the structure elucidation and total synthesis of cannabinol as well as the identification of the tetrahydrocannabinol structure as an intoxicating pharmacophore. Furthermore, this research well prepared many junior chemists for prolific careers in both academia as well as industry, inspired the discoveries of later Cannabis investigators and also provided a successful model of a productive academic-government partnership.


Author(s):  
Roberta Gold

In postwar America, not everyone wanted to move out of the city and into the suburbs. For decades before World War II, New York's tenants had organized to secure renters' rights. After the war, tenant activists raised the stakes by challenging the newly dominant ideal of homeownership in racially segregated suburbs. They insisted that renters as well as owners had rights to stable, well-maintained homes, and they proposed that racially diverse urban communities held a right to remain in place—a right that outweighed owners' rights to raise rents, redevelop properties, or exclude tenants of color. Further, the activists asserted that women could participate fully in the political arenas where these matters were decided. Grounded in archival research and oral history, this book shows that New York City's tenant movement made a significant claim to citizenship rights that came to accrue, both ideologically and legally, to homeownership in postwar America. The book emphasizes the centrality of housing to the racial and class reorganization of the city after the war, the prominent role of women within the tenant movement, and their fostering of a concept of “urban community rights” grounded in their experience of living together in heterogeneous urban neighborhoods.


1996 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 130-167
Author(s):  
Daniel Kryder

No ceremonies marked the fiftieth anniversary of the wartime riots in New York, Los Angeles, Beaumont, Detroit, and Mobile. American political culture, if not recent historical analysis, continues to associate “the Good War” with national unity rather than unrest. But race tension was palpable to contemporaries. For example, ten months prior to Pearl Harbor and six months before a deadly shoot-out between black soldiers and white military policemen occurred in Fayetteville, North Carolina, that town had already earned the nickname “Uncle Sam's Powder Keg.” Less than ten miles from the city lay Fort Bragg, the nation's largest army camp, and visitors sensed a “seething undercurrent” of race friction coursing through the camp and the city. Thousands of black artillery trainees visited the downtown area each week, drinking and milling about in the streets. Because very few establishments welcomed their business, there was little else for them to do. A cab driver, asked about the city's hostile mood, replied that “the trouble is not ‘Is there trouble,’ but ‘What kind of trouble is it going to be and when is it going to pop?’” Similar questions animate this research, which explores the relationship between the Second World War mobilization and War Department practices and policies, on the one hand, and racial confrontations and violence involving soldiers, on the other.


1962 ◽  
Vol 5 (03) ◽  
pp. 23-33
Author(s):  
Richard E. Dahlberg ◽  
Benjamin E. Thomas

Some of the most accessible sources for African maps are the new atlases which have been published since World War II. If we interpret the term “atlas” loosely so as to include any assemblage of maps which can be placed on a book shelf, the range of subject materials covered is surprisingly large -- from agriculture to zoogeography. But despite the wealth of data which is presented in convenient map form, it is difficult to obtain information about atlases and their contents. The purpose of this article is to provide a guide to the kinds of information which is available, and a list of atlases and other publications with African maps which have appeared since 1945. The analysis is based mainly upon atlases examined at the Map Division in the Library of Congress, at the American Geographical Society in New York, and at the University of California, Los Angeles. A few additional atlases were obtained through inter-library loan. Mrs. Clara Egli LeGear, of the Map Division, Library of Congress, provided especially helpful bibliographic aid at the early stages of the survey. This article is a part of a research project supported by the African Studies Center at U. C. L. A. More extension listings of African maps and atlases are in preparation; the authors would therefore welcome comments upon errors or omissions which may be noted in the article.


2020 ◽  
pp. 269-314
Author(s):  
Melissa J. Homestead

After losing their Greenwich Village apartment in 1927, Cather and Lewis had no permanent home in New York City, living together instead at the Grosvenor Hotel when both were in the city. In 1932, they finally leased an apartment on Park Avenue. The first half of this chapter reconstructs their life together in the 1930s and 1940s living on Park Avenue and traveling to Europe and Mt. Desert Island in Maine. The chapter includes their responses to the Great Depression and World War II, the formation of new friendships and maintenance of old ones, the deeper intertwining of their families, and Cather’s declining health. After describing Cather’s death and burial, the second half of the chapter tells the story of Edith Lewis’s mourning for Cather in the years immediately after Cather’s death and her work as Cather’s literary executor.


Author(s):  
Roberta Gold

This chapter examines the unprecedented housing crisis that erupted in New York City at the end of World War II. At the end of the war, New Yorkers faced their worst housing shortage ever. The housing supply that had already been inadequate for the city's population and contained many substandard tenements had fallen even further behind, as construction virtually ceased during the Great Depression and the war. Meanwhile, demand was rising. Even the worst slum apartments found a market among African Americans who were moving north and discovering that de facto segregation confined them to a few crowded neighborhoods. By 1950, census figures showed that the city required an additional 430,000 dwelling units to properly house its population. This chapter looks at the rise of tenant activists and how they addressed the housing crisis via grassroots mobilizations in concert with leftist and liberal organizations, allowing them not only to retain, but also to institutionalize, the signal achievements of rent control and public housing.


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