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Employing a sociological storytelling method, Black, associate professor of sociology at the University of Hartford, recounts the lives of three Puerto Rican brothers living in poor, gang-dominated Springfield, Mass., whom he befriended and followed for 18 years. The book is not so much about the brothers--Julio, Fausto and Sammy--and their friends as it is about the cultural and social forces and the economic and political policies that in the latter decades of the 20th century determined the boys' fates and the fates of thousands of others. Flawed bilingual education programs doomed them to virtual illiteracy, while harsh drug laws warehoused them in a rapidly expanding prison system. While the author provided concrete forms of assistance--especially for the two younger brothers, who battled addiction--the pull of the street as well as the inadequacy of their education led to failed or marginally productive lives, even for the motivated eldest son, Julio.

When Abraham Lincoln moved to Illinois’ Sangamo Country in 1831, he found a pioneer community transforming from a cluster of log houses along an ancient trail to a community of new towns and state roads. But two of the towns vanished in a matter of years, and many of the activities and lifestyles that shaped them were almost entirely forgotten. In The Sangamo Frontier, archaeologist Robert Mazrim unearths the buried history of this early American community, breathing new life into a region that still rests in Lincoln’s shadow. Named after a shallow river that cuts through the prairies of central Illinois, the Sangamo Country—an area that now encompasses the capital city of Springfield and present-day Sangamon County—was first colonized after the War of 1812. For the past fifteen years, Mazrim has conducted dozens of excavations there, digging up pieces of pioneer life, from hand-forged iron and locally made crockery to pewter spoons and Staffordshire teacups. And here, in beautifully illustrated stories of each dig, he shows how each of these small artifacts can teach us something about the lifestyles of people who lived on the frontier nearly two hundred years ago. Allowing us to see past the changed modern landscape and the clichés of pioneer history, Mazrim deftly uses his findings to portray the homes, farms, taverns, and pottery shops where Lincoln’s neighbors once lived and worked. Drawing readers into the thrill of discovery, The Sangamo Frontier inaugurates a new kind of archaeological history that both enhances and challenges our written history. It imbues today’s landscape with an authentic ghostliness that will reawaken the curiosity of anyone interested in the forgotten people and places that helped shape our nation.

Winner of the Gustavus Myers Center Award for the Study of Human Rights in the United States!Winner of the Illinois State Historical Society Superior Achievement Award!This detailed case study of the 1908 race riot in Springfield, Illinois, which began only a few blocks from Abraham Lincoln's family home, explores the social origins of rioting.

A loophole in the town charter creates a time zone free-for-all, Homer remembers when he was forced to choose between his high school sweetheart and Mr. Burn's debutante niece, and Ned moves in with the Simpsons.

National levels of personal health-care access and quality can be approximated by measuring mortality rates from causes that should not be fatal in the presence of effective medical care (ie, amenable mortality). Previous analyses of mortality amenable to health care only focused on high-income countries and faced several methodological challenges. In the present analysis, we use the highly standardised cause of death and risk factor estimates generated through the Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study (GBD) to improve and expand the quantification of personal health-care access and quality for 195 countries and territories from 1990 to 2015. We mapped the most widely used list of causes amenable to personal health care developed by Nolte and McKee to 32 GBD causes. We accounted for variations in cause of death certification and misclassifications through the extensive data standardisation processes and redistribution algorithms developed for GBD. To isolate the effects of personal health-care access and quality, we risk-standardised cause-specific mortality rates for each geography-year by removing the joint effects of local environmental and behavioural risks, and adding back the global levels of risk exposure as estimated for GBD 2015. We employed principal component analysis to create a single, interpretable summary measure–the Healthcare Quality and Access (HAQ) Index–on a scale of 0 to 100. The HAQ Index showed strong convergence validity as compared with other health-system indicators, including health expenditure per capita (r=0·88), an index of 11 universal health coverage interventions (r=0·83), and human resources for health per 1000 (r=0·77). We used free disposal hull analysis with bootstrapping to produce a frontier based on the relationship between the HAQ Index and the Socio-demographic Index (SDI), a measure of overall development consisting of income per capita, average years of education, and total fertility rates. This frontier allowed us to better quantify the maximum levels of personal health-care access and quality achieved across the development spectrum, and pinpoint geographies where gaps between observed and potential levels have narrowed or widened over time. Between 1990 and 2015, nearly all countries and territories saw their HAQ Index values improve; nonetheless, the difference between the highest and lowest observed HAQ Index was larger in 2015 than in 1990, ranging from 28·6 to 94·6. Of 195 geographies, 167 had statistically significant increases in HAQ Index levels since 1990, with South Korea, Turkey, Peru, China, and the Maldives recording among the largest gains by 2015. Performance on the HAQ Index and individual causes showed distinct patterns by region and level of development, yet substantial heterogeneities emerged for several causes, including cancers in highest-SDI countries; chronic kidney disease, diabetes, diarrhoeal diseases, and lower respiratory infections among middle-SDI countries; and measles and tetanus among lowest-SDI countries. While the global HAQ Index average rose from 40·7 (95% uncertainty interval, 39·0–42·8) in 1990 to 53·7 (52·2–55·4) in 2015, far less progress occurred in narrowing the gap between observed HAQ Index values and maximum levels achieved; at the global level, the difference between the observed and frontier HAQ Index only decreased from 21·2 in 1990 to 20·1 in 2015. If every country and territory had achieved the highest observed HAQ Index by their corresponding level of SDI, the global average would have been 73·8 in 2015. Several countries, particularly in eastern and western sub-Saharan Africa, reached HAQ Index values similar to or beyond their development levels, whereas others, namely in southern sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, and south Asia, lagged behind what geographies of similar development attained between 1990 and 2015. This novel extension of the GBD Study shows the untapped potential for personal health-care access and quality improvement across the development spectrum. Amid substantive advances in personal health care at the national level, heterogeneous patterns for individual causes in given countries or territories suggest that few places have consistently achieved optimal health-care access and quality across health-system functions and therapeutic areas. This is especially evident in middle-SDI countries, many of which have recently undergone or are currently experiencing epidemiological transitions. The HAQ Index, if paired with other measures of health-system characteristics such as intervention coverage, could provide a robust avenue for tracking progress on universal health coverage and identifying local priorities for strengthening personal health-care quality and access throughout the world. Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

\"This continuing series of handpicked stories is chock-full, featuring 176 pages of comedic gems in a high quality trade paperback format that includes a pullout paper craft that will allow the reader to recreate the second in a series of Springfield's favorite landmarks. Join the fun as Bart meets his double-crossing doppelgèanger, Homer proves there IS cause to be alarmed at the nuclear power plant, Moe and the barflies invent a popular beer-flavored donut, the whole family makes itself busy as bees while trying to make money in the honey business, and Bartman faces his deadliest foe of all ... the Bartman of the Future! And much, much more! Then build your very own replica of one Homer Simpsons' favorite nightspot, Moe's Tavern, with your very own two hands!\" -- from publisher's web site.

Purpose This historical example of the creation of the arms industry in the Connecticut River Valley in the 1800s provides new insights into the value of government venture capital (GVC) and government demand in creating a new industry. Since current theoretical explanations of the best uses of governmental venture capital are still under development, there is considerable need for further theory development to explain and predict the creation of an industry and especially those industries where failures in private capital supply necessitates governmental involvement in new firm creation. The purpose of this paper is to provide an in depth historical review of how the arms industry evolved spurred by GVC and government created demand. Design/methodology/approach This study uses abductive inference as the best way to build and test emerging theories and advancing theoretical explanations of the best uses of GVC and governmental demand to achieve socially required outcomes. Findings By observing this specific historical example in detail, the authors add to the understanding of value creation caused by governmental venture capital funding of existing theory. A major contribution of this paper is to advance theory based on detailed observation. Originality/value The relatively limited research literature and theory development on governmental venture capital funding and the critical success factors in startups are enriched by this abductive investigation of the creation of the historically important arms industry and its spillover into creating the specialized machine industry.

On February 4, 1986, the lives of thousands of workers changed in ways they could only begin to imagine. On that day, United Technologies Corporation ordered the closure of the 76-year-old American Bosch manufacturing plant in Springfield, Massachusetts, capping a nearly 32-year history of job loss and work relocation from the sprawling factory. The author, a former Bosch worker and the business agent for the union representing nearly 1,200 Bosch employees when the plant closed, interjects his personal recollections into the story.For more than 150 years Springfield stood at the center of a prosperous 200-mile industrial corridor along the Connecticut River, between Bridgeport, Connecticut, and Springfield, Vermont, populated with hundreds of machine tool and metalworking plants and thousands of workers. This book is a historical account of the profound economic collapse of the Connecticut River Valley region, with a particular focus on Bosch, its workers, and its union. The shutdown is placed in the context of the wider region's deindustrialization. The closure marked the watershed for large-firm metalworking and metalworking unions in the Connecticut River Valley. The book also describes how the United States, in a ten-year period from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, went from being the world's leading exporter of machine tools to its leading importer, and how that sharp decline affected the region's leading city, Springfield, Massachusetts, which by 2005 was in danger of bankruptcy. Foreword by John Wodding Acknowledgements Chapter 1 \"You Don't Believe She is Going to Die\" Chapter 1 provides an introduction and overview of story of deindustrialization and its impact on Springfield, Massachusetts and the Connecticut River Valley. Chapter 2 'A Breeding Ground for Inventors and Skilled Labor': The Valley Flourishes Chapter 2 traces the growth of machinery building and metalworking along the Connecticut River during the 19th and early 20th centuries. By examining events in Springfield, Massachusetts, and the central role that the Springfield Armory played in developing and diffusing precision machining skills and collaborative relationships among firms in the region. Chapter 3 American Bosch and Its Workers: An Historical Overview The third chapter details the history of the American Bosch plant from its construction in 1911 through the early 1950s, and includes a discussion of successful efforts to unionize the plant in 1937, the 1948 sale of the firm to a Wall Street investment company, and the internecine labor battles in the plant in the early 1950s that culminated in the replacement of the plant's original union, the United Electrical Workers, with the International Union of Electrical Workers. Chapter 4 Work Moves Out: Bosch Doomed in Springfield? Chapter 4 follows Bosch jobs to Mississippi during the early 1950s and analyzes workers' reactions to the loss of hundreds of jobs and the first inkling of permanent employment insecurity. I detail the elaborate steps managers took to cultivate alternative production sites in the 1950s and early 1960s. Chapter 5 Skill Was Not Enough: The Bosch Closes Chapter 5 provides an historical account of events in the Bosch from the 1960s to its closure in 1986. Included here is an examination of the union's failed efforts to develop a community response to the possible closing of the factory. Chapter 6 Too Many Bends in the River-the Larger Valley's Demise In Chapter 6 a wider lens is utilized to consider what happened to many of the region's precision metalworking and machine tool firms as the United States went from being the world's leading exporter of machine tools to its leading importer. This story is told through several case studies of firms in Springfield, Massachusetts and Springfield, Vermont. Chapter 7 The International Association of Machinists, Pratt & Whitney, and the Struggle for Connecticut's Blue-Collar Future Chapter 7 moves to the southern end of the Connecticut River Valley and considers union-company dynamics between Pratt & Whitney Aircraft and the International Associations of Aerospace Workers. For most of the 1980s and 1990s workers there suffered through several rounds of deep layoffs and the occasional threat by Pratt to cease jet engine manufacturing in the state. Chapter 8 Staggering Job Loss, A Shrinking Revenue Base and Grinding Decline The final chapter returns to Springfield, Massachusetts and discusses the City's current financial situation and how its crushing debt is linked to the entire region's massive job loss. Numerous failed economic development schemes, gross mismanagement, and political corruption exacerbated the slump caused by the disappearance of thousands of jobs. References Index