Social Welfare History Archives News & Events
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A new Search Online Finding Aids web page provides the capability to search across the finding aids of all University of Minnesota Libraries Archives and Special Collections units. Searches can be focused exclusively on Social Welfare History Archives or can include other archives units as well. Please understand that search results are limited to collections whose finding aids have been mounted online. Please consult the Search Tips and the Finding Aids FAQ tabs on the search page for additional information.
Organization of American Historians meets in Minneapolis
Welcome to persons attending the 100th annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians, which meets in Minneapolis on March 29-April 1, 2007. Conference attendees are invited to attend a reception in Andersen Library (home of the SWHA) on Thursday, March 29, 5:30-7:00 p.m. See details on p. 41 of the conference program booklet along with a flyer insert in the registration packet.
Social Science History Association meets in Minneapolis
Welcome to persons attending the 31st annual conference of the Social Science History Association, which meets in Minneapolis on November 2-5, 2006. A session entitled "Writing for Professional Audiences and Reaching Broader Publics: Problems of Criminial Justice, Education, and Social Welfare History" is scheduled for Friday, November 3 at 10:15 a.m.
History of Youth and Community Work Conference
History of Youth and Community Work Conference: The Social Welfare History Archives and the Kautz Family YMCA Archives are pleased to be a part of a study conference that will focus on historical approaches to community-based work with young people. Scheduled for 2-4 June 2006, the first day will draw on archival resources in Elmer Andersen Library; the conference moves to the Minnesota Humanities Commission Conference Center in St. Paul for the remaining two days.
Miss Bailey Says': Common sense in 1930s relief programs
"'Miss Bailey Says': Common sense in 1930s relief programs," an addition to our online Exhibits, provides a lively look at life on the front lines of public relief programs during the Great Depression. "Miss Bailey" was the imaginative creation of journalist Gertrude Springer, who for more than a decade offered practical advice through a column in Survey magazine on what to do "when your client has a car" or "when families won't behave" or other challenging circumstances.
New Resource on the History of International Adoption
"Finding Home: Fifty Years of International Adoption" is the title of a radio documentary aired by American Radio Works (associated with Minnesota Public Radio) in October 2005. Producer Sasha Aslanian drew on resources in the Social Welfare History Archives and interviewed persons who had done research here.
The hour-long documentary broadcast remains available via a special website that also presents extensive additional resources.
More than 20,000 foreign children are adopted by Americans every year. Most come from poor and troubled parts of the world, and a life in America offers new hope. But it also means separation from their birth culture. "Finding Home: Fifty Years of International Adoption" explores the pull of adoption across lives and borders.
Researchers at SWHA have made extensive use of the American Social Service-American Branch to study international adoption, particularly from Korea and Vietnam. The Child Welfare League of America records and the William Pierce papers are other rich sources for the study of adoption.
The "Finding Home" site can be found at:
http://americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features/adoption/
The Andersen Library Research Forum presents:
“Better Homes and Children: Domesticity, Hygiene, and Progress”
with Amy Laura Hall, Duke University Divinity School
Friday, April 21, 2006, 9:15 – 10:15 a.m. in 120 Andersen Library
Professor Hall's discussion will draw on her work for a book entitled Conceiving Parenthood: The Protestant Spirit of Biotechnological Reproduction. Focusing on Andersen Library's collection of the "Keeping Fit" and the "Youth and Life" social hygiene poster series, Professor Hall will draw from other aspects of her research -- from Lysol advertisements to scientific baby books -- to consider the intersection of race, hygiene, and domesticity during the first half of the twentieth century. Amy Laura Hall is assistant professor of theological ethics at Duke University Divinity School, where her current research interest focuses on reproductive bioethics. Also on April 21, she will present “Human Mistakes and Mishaps: Disability, Children, and Atavism” at the Center for Bioethics Seminar Series, 12:15-1:15 p.m. in 2-122 Molecular & Cellular Biology Building.
"Producing Productive Citizens: Disability and the Origins of Eugenics, 1850-1900."
With Sarah Rose, University of Illinois at Chicago
Wednesday, 2 November 2005. 3:30-4:30 p.m. in 120 Andersen Library
The American eugenics movement is conventionally ascribed to elite fears about urbanization, mass immigration, and changes in sexual mores between the 1890s and 1920s. The actual roots of the eugenics movement remain murky, however, as does the infamous "menace of the feeble-minded" so feared by eugenicists such as Henry Goddard. This paper argues that concerns about productivity were central to the eugenics movement and traces the movement's origins to mid-nineteenth-century state institutions for idiots and the feeble-minded. Moreover, through these institutions--and especially their sheltered workshops--disability emerged as a key social problem of productivity and dependency. Sarah Rose is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at the University of Illinois at Chicago working on a dissertation entitled "No Right to Be Idle: Work, Citizenship, and the Invention of Disability, 1850-1920." She received a Clarke Chambers Travel Fellowship toward expenses associated with research in the Social Welfare History Archives.