San Antonio College Library

This book gives voice to the 57 million Americans--including 21 percent of the nation's children--who are sandwiched between poor and middle class. While government programs help the needy and politicians woo the more fortunate, the "Missing Class" is largely invisible and ignored. Through the experiences of nine families, sociologists Newman and Chen trace the unique problems faced by individuals in this large and growing demographic--the "near poor"--Who...

"This collection explores the dynamics of the modern, middle-class American family and its near-constant state of transition. The editors introduce the book by situating it within the context of work, family, and ethhographic research on middle-class families in the United States. Emerging and established scholars contributed chapters based on their original field research, following each chapter with a personal reflection on doing field work. The...

This text offers a first-hand ethnographic account to examine the relationship between social class structures and educational success. Instead of studying the historically marginalized lower classes, it asserts the need to look beyond poor peoples' values of dominant groups to explain the reproduction of social class. Drawing on interviews with 31 administrators, principals and teachers and 20 middle class mothers in a small Indian town in which...

The relationship between mothers and daughters has been the subject of much research and study, in such fields as psychoanalysis, sociology, and women's studies. But rarely has the history and evolution of this relationship been examined. In The Anchor of My Life Linda W. Rosenzweig draws on a wide range of primary sources - letters, diaries, autobiographies, prescriptive advice or "self-help" literature, and fiction - to reveal the historical nuances...

Taking readers into the homes of middle-class families to reveal the hidden consequences of student debt and the ways that financing college has transformed family life, the author describes the profound moral conflicts for parents who take on enormous debts and gamble on an investment that might not pay off.

With the U.S. economy once again a top priority of policy makers, it is worth understanding that matters are worse than they seem. Output, the traditional "bottom-line" measure of the economy's health, has turned up. The recession of 1990-91 is over. But the tepid recovery leaves much to be desired. Digging deeper, longtime observer of the economy Wallace C. Peterson finds plenty of cause for alarm. Wages, family income, and productivity growth began...

"Service and Style re-creates the days of downtown department stores in their prime, from the 1890s through the 1960s. Exploring in detail the wide range of merchandise they sold, particularly style goods such as clothing and home furnishings, it examines how they displayed, promoted, and sometimes produced goods. It reveals how the stores grew, why they declined, and how they responded to and shaped the society around them."--Jacket.

"Synthesizing mountains of data and explaining sophisticated economic concepts in layman's terms, the Santows expose myths about how entitlement programs actually work, arguing, for example, that while the financial state of Social Security gets most of the press, Medicare and Medicaid are in much more serious trouble. Moreover, they are highly critical of privatization plans, demonstrating that similar programs have failed in other countries and...

"Deep within the American Dream lies the belief that hard work and steady saving will ensure a comfortable retirement and a better life for one's children. But in a nation experiencing unprecedented prosperity, even for many families who seem to be doing everything right, this ideal is still out of reach. In The Financial Diaries, Jonathan Morduch and Rachel Schneider draw on the U.S. Financial Diaries, a project which follows the lives of 235 low-...

A compassionate investigation of the root causes of the epidemic of drug abuse, violence, and despair among "mainstream" American teenagers. In the past few years, it has become painfully clear that all is not well with the children of middle-class America. Beyond the shootings at Columbine, hardly a day goes by without stories of drug use, binge drinking, fatal accidents, and suicides among middle-class adolescents. Sociologist and Pulitzer Prize...