October 16, 2008 | Read Time: 2 minutes
NEW BOOKS
Civic Engagement: Social Science and Progressive-Era Reform in New York City
by John Louis Recchiuti
“In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, New York City, the nation’s leading metropolis, fed by streams of thought from Europe and America, became a hub — a vibrant, innovative center — of social-science ideas and organization, an incubator for social science and progressive reform,” writes John Louis Recchiuti, professor of history and director of American studies at Mount Union College.
“The social order of the day was now being interpreted, by some at least, as no longer stable and fixed, and longstanding social relations — of gender, race, labor, and the like — were or might be, in the light of modern science, open to a reinterpretation and remaking,” he argues in this history of the intellectuals who shaped social science, modern philanthropy, and progressive activism.
Mr. Recchiuti describes how men and women interested in promoting social change — white and black, immigrant and native-born — worked together and battled each other in New York intellectual circles and in activist efforts. A central problem for this group, the author writes, was whether the social scientists were “intellectual paternalists wielding power or champions of democracy helping to wrest power from barons of wealth who were turning the country into an oligarchy.”
The book covers the activists’ and social scientists’ efforts for children, civil rights, community development, workers, and other people, and their interactions with the government.
The book discusses the transition from “noblesse oblige” to a more modern type of charity that proposed “not merely to manage poverty but to end it.”
It also traces the careers of several activists, including Josephine Shaw Lowell, who founded several charities, and Edward Divine, who helped create the New York School of Philanthropy.
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press, 3905 Spruce Street, Philadelphia, Pa. 19104; http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress; 311 pages; $59.95; ISBN 0-8122-3957-1.
