Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
11,939
result(s) for
"American middle class"
Sort by:
Falling behind
With a timely new foreword by Robert Frank, this groundbreaking book explores the very meaning of happiness and prosperity in America today. Although middle-income families don't earn much more than they did several decades ago, they are buying bigger cars, houses, and appliances. To pay for them, they spend more than they earn and carry record levels of debt. Robert Frank explains how increased concentrations of income and wealth at the top of the economic pyramid have set off \"expenditure cascades\" that raise the cost of achieving many basic goals for the middle class. Writing in lively prose for a general audience, Frank employs up-to-date economic data and examples drawn from everyday life to shed light on reigning models of consumer behavior. He also suggests reforms that could mitigate the costs of inequality. Falling Behind compels us to rethink how and why we live our economic lives the way we do.
eBook
The Kings of Mississippi : race, religious education, and the making of a middle-class black family in the segregated South
\"The King family was a 20th century anomaly - a middle class black family living in rural Mississippi. Academic studies, mainstream writing, and anecdotes corroborate the same reality - that blacks living in the historic South experienced deleterious conditions due to racism, segregation, and de jure as well as de facto discrimination. Whether prior to or during Reconstruction or as a result of Jim Crow, they were subjected to profound and unrelenting economic, political, legal, and social oppression, often accompanied by the threat of violence, particularly lynching. How did black families navigate these systemic, oppressive conditions daily? What strategies did they use? And how could becoming middle class be possible? This book presents the lives and experiences of seven generations of a black family that originated in Mississippi. Limited mixed-methodological, multi- disciplinary research has been performed on this topic. This book is one response to this omission. We rely on sociology and ecology (or a socio-ecological lens) as well their own voices to examine how race, religion, education and their intersection as a familial ethos influenced economic and non-economic outcomes of the King family. Empirical reports document the context\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
The Radical Middle Class
America has a long tradition of middle-class radicalism, albeit one that intellectual orthodoxy has tended to obscure.The Radical Middle Classseeks to uncover the democratic, populist, and even anticapitalist legacy of the middle class. By examining in particular the independent small business sector or petite bourgeoisie, using Progressive Era Portland, Oregon, as a case study, Robert Johnston shows that class still matters in America. But it matters only if the politics and culture of the leading player in affairs of class, the middle class, is dramatically reconceived.
This book is a powerful combination of intellectual, business, labor, medical, and, above all, political history. Its author also humanizes the middle class by describing the lives of four small business owners: Harry Lane, Will Daly, William U'Ren, and Lora Little. Lane was Portland's reform mayor before becoming one of only six senators to vote against U.S. entry into World War I. Daly was Oregon's most prominent labor leader and a onetime Socialist. U'Ren was the national architect of the direct democracy movement. Little was a leading antivaccinationist.
The Radical Middle Classfurther explores the Portland Ku Klux Klan and concludes with a national overview of the American middle class from the Progressive Era to the present. With its engaging narrative, conceptual richness, and daring argumentation, it will be welcomed by all who understand that reexamining the middle class can yield not only better scholarship but firmer grounds for democratic hope.
eBook
Necessary lies
\"A collection of seven short-stories the examines how suicide, divorce, infidelity, infertility, and lies affect several middle-class, Northeastern American families in the late 20th century\"--Provided by publisher.
Book
Credit Card Blues: The Middle Class and the Hidden Costs of Easy Credit
In an era of increased access to credit, it becomes increasingly important to understand the consequences of taking on unsecured consumer debt. We argue that credit can have both positive and negative consequences resulting from its ability to smooth life transitions and difficulties but that this occurs simultaneously with increased financial risks and stress resulting from carrying unsecured debt. We find that those in the middle of the income distribution suffer the greatest disruptions to mental health from carrying debt. Affluent borrowers are relatively unmoved by debt, suggesting the use of short-term debt as a convenience strategy for the financially well heeled. The least advantaged borrowers also suffer emotionally less from debt, possibly because securing spendable funds for necessities remains their most pressing concern. The onset of the Great Recession, however, produced increased emotional distress for all classes.
Journal Article
The color of success
The Color of Successtells of the astonishing transformation of Asians in the United States from the \"yellow peril\" to \"model minorities\"--peoples distinct from the white majority but lauded as well-assimilated, upwardly mobile, and exemplars of traditional family values--in the middle decades of the twentieth century. As Ellen Wu shows, liberals argued for the acceptance of these immigrant communities into the national fold, charging that the failure of America to live in accordance with its democratic ideals endangered the country's aspirations to world leadership.
Weaving together myriad perspectives, Wu provides an unprecedented view of racial reform and the contradictions of national belonging in the civil rights era. She highlights the contests for power and authority within Japanese and Chinese America alongside the designs of those external to these populations, including government officials, social scientists, journalists, and others. And she demonstrates that the invention of the model minority took place in multiple arenas, such as battles over zoot suiters leaving wartime internment camps, the juvenile delinquency panic of the 1950s, Hawaii statehood, and the African American freedom movement. Together, these illuminate the impact of foreign relations on the domestic racial order and how the nation accepted Asians as legitimate citizens while continuing to perceive them as indelible outsiders.
By charting the emergence of the model minority stereotype,The Color of Successreveals that this far-reaching, politically charged process continues to have profound implications for how Americans understand race, opportunity, and nationhood.
eBook
Black silent majority : the Rockefeller drug laws and the politics of punishment
\"Often seen as a political sop to the racial fears of white voters, aggressive policing and draconian sentencing for illegal drug possession and related crimes have led to the imprisonment of millions of African Americans--far in excess of their representation in the population as a whole. Michael Javen Fortner [argues] that these punitive policies also enjoyed the support of many working-class and middle-class blacks, who were angry about decline and disorder in their communities. [His book examines] the role African Americans played in creating today's system of mass incarceration\"--Dust jacket flap.
Book
Blue-Chip Black
As Karyn R. Lacy's innovative work in the suburbs of Washington, DC, reveals, there is a continuum of middle-classness among blacks, ranging from lower-middle class to middle-middle class to upper-middle class. Focusing on the latter two, Lacy explores an increasingly important social and demographic group: middle-class blacks who live in middle-class suburbs where poor blacks are not present. These \"blue-chip black\" suburbanites earn well over fifty thousand dollars annually and work in predominantly white professional environments. Lacy examines the complicated sense of identity that individuals in these groups craft to manage their interactions with lower-class blacks, middle-class whites, and other middle-class blacks as they seek to reap the benefits of their middle-class status.
eBook