Historically, the insurance industry in America has been fragmented. As a result, there have been debates and conflicts over the proper roles of federal and state governments, business, and the responsibilities of individuals. Who should cover the risks of loss? And to what extent should risk be shared and by whom? In Uncovered, Katherine Hempstead answers these questions by exploring the history of the insurance business and its regulation in the United States from the 1870s through the twentieth century. Specifically, she focuses on the friction between the public demand for insurance and the private imperatives of insurers. Tracing the history of the industry from the early days of life, fire, and casualty insurance to the development of state regulation in the late nineteenth century, Hempstead examines the role that insurers initially played in the largely voluntary social safety net and how this changed over time. After the Great Depression, the federal government assumed a greater role in the provision of insurance, while insurers enthusiastically pursued the growing business of employee benefits. As the twentieth century progressed, insurers and government have become interdependent, with insurers participating in publicly funded markets. As Hempstead shows, periodic crises in life, fire, health, auto, and liability insurance highlighted gaps between the coverage that insurers were willing to provide and what the public demanded. Highlighting how the major part states play in insurance regulation has made it harder to solve important problems, Uncovered fundamentally changes our understanding of the crucial role that insurance has always played in American politics.

Classing -- Fatalizing -- Writing -- Smoothing -- A modern conception of death -- Valuing lives, in four movements -- Failing the future.

In the five decades after the Civil War, the United States witnessed a profusion of legal institutions designed to cope with the nation’s exceptionally acute industrial accident crisis. Jurists elaborated the common law of torts. Workingmen’s organizations founded a widespread system of cooperative insurance. Leading employers instituted welfare-capitalist accident relief funds. And social reformers advocated compulsory insurance such as workmen’s compensation. John Fabian Witt argues that experiments in accident law at the turn of the twentieth century arose out of competing views of the loose network of ideas and institutions that historians call the ideology of free labor. These experiments a century ago shaped twentieth- and twenty-first-century American accident law; they laid the foundations of the American administrative state; and they occasioned a still hotly contested legal transformation from the principles of free labor to the categories of insurance and risk. In this eclectic moment at the beginnings of the modern state, Witt describes American accident law as a contingent set of institutions that might plausibly have developed along a number of historical paths. In turn, he suggests, the making of American accident law is the story of the equally contingent remaking of our accidental republic.

In this book, Richardson crosses disciplinary boundaries to examine mental hygiene issues of contemporary concern in both the United States and Canada. The work juxtaposes a social history of the child in the twentieth century to shifts in private and public power as influenced by the mental hygiene movements in both countries. The author shows how the historical record sheds light on current policy concerned with mentally, emotionally, and educationally handicapped children. As a sociology of mental illness, the book examines the relationship between mental hygiene as a form of knowledge and the social institutions that fostered the use of psychiatric perspectives concerning child and family life. Significant topics covered in this regard include the history of early childhood and parent education, the origins of child psychiatry in treating juvenile delinquency, and the evolution of contemporary concepts of normal development.

A collection of journal articles from the 1980s examining the historical development of current health care issues in American society and comparing them to related issues of the past. Articles by sociologists, historians, economists, physicians, and health researchers include introductions, bibliographies, and discussion questions, and brief explanations of relevant concepts and terms. Paper edition (unseen), $17.95. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Emery's central argument is that scholars must recognize the social historical character of the statistics before using them as a basis for research. He defines "social" broadly to include both an external component (the ideologies, concerns, and processes in society that influenced civil registration officials) and an internal component (the complex way officials organized civil registration, which greatly affected the statistics). Thus he treats statutes, regulations, the content of registration forms, and definition of significant terms as part of the social history of the statistics, not as technical background material. The issues treated include the incomplete registration of vital events, the influence of different definitions of "live birth" on statistics for infant deaths, the nature of statistics for death by cause, and the problem of "residence" - the difference between vital events occurring in a municipality and those involving its residents. Emery places Ontario's vital statistics in the context of the international statistics movement and the development of the province's registration system. He then provides empirical illustrations of how aspects of definition influence the data and suggests strategies for responding to such problems. The chapter providing a case study of the completeness of mortality registrations for 1869 to 1972 was prepared in collaboration with Kevin McQuillan.

Presents a powerful new vision of the history of science through the lens of disability studies. Disability has been a central—if unacknowledged—force in the history of science, as in the scientific disciplines. Across historical epistemology and laboratory research, disability has been “good to think with”: an object of investigation made to yield generalizable truths. Yet disability is rarely imagined to be the source of expertise, especially the kind of expertise that produces (rational, neutral, universal) scientific knowledge. This volume of Osiris places disability history and the history of science in conversation to foreground disability epistemologies, disabled scientists, and disability sciencing (engagement with scientific tools and processes). Looking beyond paradigms of medicalization and industrialization, the volume authors also examine knowledge production about disability from the ancient world to the present in fields ranging from mathematics to the social sciences, resulting in groundbreaking histories of taken-for-granted terms such as impairment, infirmity, epidemics, and shōgai. Some contributors trace the disabling impacts of scientific theories and practices in the contexts of war, factory labor, insurance, and colonialism; others excavate racial and settler ableism in the history of scientific facts, protocols, and collections; still others query the boundaries between scientific, lay, and disability expertise. Contending that disability alters method, authors bring new sources and interpretation techniques to the history of science, overturn familiar narratives, apply disability analyses to established terms and archives, and discuss accessibility issues for disabled historians. The resulting volume announces a disability history of science.