A poignant study of how a group of poor white urban youth find respite from poverty, violence, and racism in a local community center.

This book considers how impoverished youth living in a deindustrialized urban neighborhood struggle to make sense of their lives in today's economy. Using participant observation and in-depth interviews with a group of eighteen white middle school girls and boys who walk each day from their multi-ethnic bilingual school to the historically white/Irish community center, the author discovered that the poor white youth are experiencing lives saturated with domestic violence and marked by a strong sense of racism. She also found that the youth position the community center as a space in which they feel a sense of safety, belonging, and importance. But upon closer examination, the community center can also be seen as a literal white "construction site," where the scaffolding that supports and sustains white supremacist ideology is produced and encouraged within children, within the neighborhood, across communities, and across generations.

A classic historical novel of a young doctor and the Erie Canal, which brought with it to Western New York not only progress and prosperity but unforeseen upheavals. “[An] elaborate, colorful, and affectionate portrait of a canal town in its growing pains. Obviously [Samuel Hopkins] Adams has not only gone back to the sources but has lived with them for a long time before writing his account of a young doctor setting up his practice.”—The Atlantic “Mr. Adams knows his Erie lore so well and has boned up so thoroughly on American medical history in the early part of the [eighteenth] century that nobody who reads the book can fail to learn a great deal about what life was like in general and the practice of medicine in particular was like in a boom town.”—The New Yorker “His villains are strongly delineated and actuated by very human motives, his minor figures are picturesque and drawn with gusto, even his sympathetic characters come alive with personal crochets and idiosyncrasies.”—Carl Carmer, Saturday Review of Literature

Canastota and Chittenango share a growth spawned by the building of the Erie Canal, the longest continuous canal in the world. These two upstate New York communities also share much in addition to their canal related background, for both have a history of early settlement and townsfolk who were leaders in manufacturing, agriculture, industry, and state politics. Join author and historian Lionel D. Wyld in this exploration of the past through carefully preserved historic images. Canastota and Chittenango: Two Historic Canal Towns reveals the important link between these towns and a canal once hailed as the eighth wonder of the world. Both villages have canal related museums and parks today, in honor of the many ways in which the waterway influenced the communities. In a more popular realm, Chittenango boasts a unique annual Oz festival each May honoring native writer L. Frank Baum, author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and Canastota is home to the International Boxing Hall of Fame, founded in 1984.

This book provides a concise introduction to the practical and theoretical complexities of studying urban youth culture today. Looking across disciplines such as anthropology, sociology, and education, Dimitriadis explores the ways urban youth have been framed - in often limiting and problematic ways - in the popular and academic imagination. Moving beyond critique alone, this highly accessible primer opens a discussion about what a truly powerful, emergent field of critical youth studies might look like. Looking toward the future of this field, this book discusses the most important methodological and substantive trends and issues scholars will be addressing now and in the years to come. The Studying Urban Youth Culture Primer is an indispensable text for students in a range of qualitative methods and urban education courses.

Based on four years of field work with both the adolescent members and staff of an inner-city youth organization in a large mid-western city, Pride in the Projects examines the construction of identity as it occurs within teens' local contexts, emphasizing the relationships within which identities are formed. Drawing on research in psychology, sociology, education, and race and gender studies, the volume highlights the inadequacies in current identity development theories, expanding our understanding of the lives of urban teens and the ways in which interpersonal connections serve as powerful contexts for self-construction. The book closes with implications for practice, alerting scholars, educators, practitioners, and concerned citizens of the positive developmental possibilities when we pay attention to the voices of the youth.