Stephan Thernstrom (born November 5, 1934) is an American academic and historian who is the Winthrop Research Professor of History Emeritus at Harvard University. He is a specialist in ethnic and social history and was the editor of the Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups. [1] He and his wife Abigail Thernstrom are prominent opponents of affirmative action in education and according to the New York Times, they "lead the conservative charge against racial preference in America." [2]
Thernstrom was born and raised in a working-class family in Port Huron, Michigan. His father was the son of a Swedish-born immigrant laborer and worked on the railroad. Thernstrom was raised a Christian Scientist, but was disillusioned with the faith. His family later moved to Battle Creek, Michigan. Thernstrom received his bachelor's degree from Northwestern University and his Ph.D. from Harvard University, working with Oscar Handlin.
Thernstrom held faculty appointments at Harvard University, Brandeis University and the University of California, Los Angeles. He returned to Harvard with an appointment as full professor in 1973. From 1978 to 1979 Thernstrom was Pitt Professor of American History and Institutions at the University of Cambridge.
He is the author of several prize-winning books including Poverty and Progress: Social Mobility in the 19th Century and The Other Bostonians: Poverty and Progress in the American Metropolis, 1880-1970, which won the Bancroft Prize in American History and was described by The New York Times Book Review as "the best piece of quantitative history yet published." [3] Thernstrom has served as an expert witness for the defense in more than two dozen federal cases involving claims of racial discrimination in schools. He is the co-author of a brief in "Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle," challenging the constitutionality of Seattle's racial balancing plan.
He co-authored with his wife Abigail Thernstrom No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning, named by both the Los Angeles Times and the American School Board Journal as one of the best books of 2003 and the winner of the 2007 Fordham Prize for Distinguished Scholarship. They also co-authored America in Black and White: One Nation, Indivisible, a comprehensive history of race relations which the New York Times Book Review named as one of the notable books of 1997. Their writings have been awarded the Waldo G. Leland Prize, R.R. Hawkins Award, and the Fordham Foundation Prize, 1997 Bradley Foundation prizes for Outstanding Intellectual Achievement, and the 2004 Peter Shaw Memorial Award given by the National Association of Scholars, an organization of conservative scholars. Their work criticizes affirmative action programs. [4]
According to the New York Times, "The couple are much in demand on the conservative talk-show circuit, where they forcefully argue that racial preferences are wrong, divisive and, as a tool to help minorities, overrated. They serve on the boards of conservative and libertarian public-policy institutes." [5]
Thernstrom married Abigail in 1959. They have two children, Melanie Thernstrom of Palo Alto, CA, a writer, and Samuel Thernstrom.[ citation needed ]
Thomas Sowell is an American economist, social philosopher, and political commentator. He is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. With widely published commentary and books—and as a guest on TV and radio—he became a well-known voice in the American conservative movement as a prominent black conservative. He was a recipient of the National Humanities Medal from President George W. Bush in 2002.
Social history, often called "history from below", is a field of history that looks at the lived experience of the past. Historians who write social history are called social historians.
William Julius Wilson is an American sociologist, a professor at Harvard University, and an author of works on urban sociology, race, and class issues. Laureate of the National Medal of Science, he served as the 80th President of the American Sociological Association, was a member of numerous national boards and commissions. He identified the importance of neighborhood effects and demonstrated how limited employment opportunities and weakened institutional resources exacerbated poverty within American inner-city neighborhoods.
Racial integration, or simply integration, includes desegregation, leveling barriers to association, creating equal opportunity regardless of race, and the development of a culture that draws on diverse traditions, rather than merely bringing a racial minority into the majority culture. Desegregation is largely a legal matter, integration largely a social one.
The Public Interest (1965–2005) was a quarterly public policy journal founded by Daniel Bell and Irving Kristol, members of the loose New York intellectuals group, in 1965. It was a leading neoconservative journal on political economy and culture, aimed at a readership of journalists, scholars and policy makers.
Glenn Cartman Loury, is an American economist, academic, and author. He is the Merton P. Stoltz Professor of the Social Sciences at Brown University, where he has taught since 2005 also as a professor of economics. At the age of 33, Loury became the first African American professor of economics at Harvard University to gain tenure.
Social class is an important theme for historians of the United States for decades. The subject touches on many other elements of American history such as that of changing U.S. education, with greater education attainment leading to expanding household incomes for many social groups. The overall level of prosperity grew greatly in the U.S. through the 20th century as well as the 21st century, anchored in changes such as growing American advances in science and technology with American inventions such as the phonograph, the portable electric vacuum cleaner, and so on. Yet much of the debate has focused lately on whether social mobility has fallen in recent decades as income inequality has risen, what scholars such as Katherine S. Newman have called the "American nightmare."
Urban history is a field of history that examines the historical nature of cities and towns, and the process of urbanization. The approach is often multidisciplinary, crossing boundaries into fields like social history, architectural history, urban sociology, urban geography, business history, and archaeology. Urbanization and industrialization were popular themes for 20th-century historians, often tied to an implicit model of modernization, or the transformation of rural traditional societies.
Abigail Thernstrom was an American political scientist and a leading conservative scholar on race relations, voting rights and education. She was an adjunct scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a member of the Massachusetts Board of Education, and vice chair of the United States Commission on Civil Rights. She received her Ph.D. from the Department of Government at Harvard University in 1975. According to the New York Times, she and her husband Harvard Professor Stephan Thernstrom, "are much in demand on the conservative talk-show circuit, where they forcefully argue that racial preferences are wrong, divisive, and as a tool to help minorities overrated." They serve on the boards of conservative and libertarian public-policy institutes."
Canadian Americans are American citizens or in some uses residents whose ancestry is wholly or partly Canadian, or citizens of either country who hold dual citizenship.
Oscar Handlin was an American historian. As a professor of history at Harvard University for over 50 years, he directed 80 PhD dissertations and helped promote social and ethnic history, virtually inventing the field of immigration history in the 1950s. Handlin won the 1952 Pulitzer Prize for History for The Uprooted (1951). Handlin's 1965 testimony before Congress was played an important role in passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 that abolished the discriminatory immigration quota system. According to historian James Grossman, "He reoriented the whole picture of the American story from the view that America was built on the spirit of the Wild West, to the idea that we are a nation of immigrants."
In the United States, affirmative action consists of government-mandated, government-approved, and voluntary private programs granting special consideration to groups considered or classified as historically excluded, specifically racial minorities and women. These programs tend to focus on access to education and employment in order to redress the disadvantages associated with past and present discrimination. Another goal of affirmative action policies is to ensure that public institutions, such as universities, hospitals, and police forces, are more representative of the populations they serve.
Thomas J. Sugrue is an American historian of the 20th-century United States currently serving as a professor at New York University. From 1991 to 2015, he was the David Boies Professor of History and Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania and founding director of the Penn Social Science and Policy Forum. His areas of expertise include American urban history, American political history, housing and the history of race relations. He has published extensively on the history of liberalism and conservatism, on housing and real estate, on poverty and public policy, on civil rights, and on the history of affirmative action.
Commodity price shocks are times when the prices for commodities have drastically increased or decreased over a short span of time.
Vaba Eesti Sõna is an Estonian expatriate weekly newspaper published in New York City, United States established in 1949.
Racial diversity in United States schools is the representation of different racial or ethnic groups in American schools. The institutional practice of slavery, and later segregation, in the United States prevented certain racial groups from entering the school system until midway through the 20th century, when Brown v. Board of Education forbade racially segregated education. Globalization and migrations of peoples to the United States have increasingly led to a multicultural American population, which has in turn increased classroom diversity. Nevertheless, racial separation in schools still exists today, presenting challenges for racial diversification of public education in the United States.
Ethnic history is a branch of social history that studies ethnic groups and immigrants. Barkan (2007) argues that the field allows historians to use alternate models of interpretation, unite qualitative and quantitative data, apply sociological models to historical patterns, examine more deeply macro-level policies and decisions, and, especially, empathize with the ethnic groups under study.
The post-Napoleonic Depression was an economic depression in Europe and the United States after the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815. In England and Wales, an agricultural depression led to the passage of the Corn Laws, and placed great strain on the system of poor relief inherited from Elizabethan times.
The following is a list of works about Boston, Massachusetts.
The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education is a former academic journal, now an online magazine, for African Americans working in academia in the United States.
