The Eras category consists of a group of articles contributed by social welfare experts and scholars drawn from our project consultants and Project Advisory Committee. These entries describe important eras and significant persons and thereby help establish a context for better understanding the political, economic and social conditions surrounding the establishment of social welfare programs, policies and services in a particular era.
A
- African American SlaveryFrom about 1619 until 1865, people of African descent were legally enslaved in the United States. The economic prosperity of early America and the accumulation of wealth by some families was made possible in large part by the free labor afforded by slavery.
- American Social Policy in the 60's and 70'sAs the decade of the 1960s began, the United States had the “highest mass standard of living” in world history.1 The strong American postwar economy of the late 1940s and 1950s continued into the 1960s.
- Attaining Civil Rights In Baltimore 1946-1960Looking at the events as a whole there is no pattern in the changes. The differential pace of overcoming obstruction to change for the better continued even in circumstances where it was ordered by court action. As has been already noted, in 1947 the Baltimore School System received the Hollander award for promoting integration in the schools...
B
- Bonus March May, 1932: The Unmet Demands and Needs of WWI HeroesFollowing WWI, a pension was promised all returning service men to be administered in 1945. As the Great Depression took shape, many WWI veterans found themselves out of work, and an estimated 17,000 traveled to Washington, D.C. in May 1932 to put pressure on Congress to pay their cash bonus immediately. The former soldiers created camps in the Nation’s capital when they did not receive their bonuses which led to their forcible removal by the Army and the bulldozing of their settlements.
C
- Child LaborAlthough children had been servants and apprentices throughout most of human history, child labor reached new extremes during the Industrial Revolution. Children often worked long hours in dangerous factory conditions for very little money. Children were useful as laborers because their size allowed them to move in small spaces in factories or mines where adults couldn't fit, children were easier to manage and control and perhaps most importantly, children could be paid less than adults.
- Child Labor in New York CityThe continuation of child labor in industry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, sparked controversy. Much of this ire was directed at employers, especially in industries where supervisors bullied children to work harder and assigned them to dangerous, exhausting or degrading jobs. In addition, working-class parents were accused of greedily not caring about the long-term well-being of their children. Requiring them to go to work denied them educational opportunities and reduced their life-time earnings, yet parents of laboring children generally required them to turn over all or almost all of their earnings. For example, one government study of unmarried young women living at home and working in factories and stores in New York City in 1907 found over ninety percent of those under age 20 turned all of their earnings over to their parents.
