In Civilizing the Child: Discourses of Race, Nation, and Child Welfare in America, Katherine S. Bullard analyzes the discourse of child welfare advocates who argued for the notion of a racialized ideal child. This ideal child, limited to white, often native-born children, was at the center of arguments for material support to children and education for their parents. This book illuminates important limitations in the Progressive approach to social welfare and helps to explain the current dearth of support for poor children. Civilizing the Child tracks the growing social concern with children in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. The author uses seminal figures and institutions to look at the origins of the welfare state. Chapters focus on Charles Loring Brace, Jacob Riis, residents of the Hull House Settlement, and the staff of U.S. Children’s Bureau, analyzing their work to unpack the assumptions about American identity that made certain children belong and others remain outsiders. Bullard traces the ways in which child welfare advocates used racialized language and emphasized the “civilizing mission” to argue for support of white native-born children. This language focused on the future citizenship of some children as an argument for their support and protection.

A massive urban renewal and public-health campaign in the first decades of the nineteenth century transformed Brazil's capital into a showcase of European architecture and public works. The renovation of Rio, or &"civilization&" campaign, as the government called it, widened streets, modernized the port, and improved sanitation, lighting, and public transportation. These changes made life worse, not better, for the majority of the city's residents, however; the laboring poor could no longer afford to live in the downtown, and the public-health plan did not extend to the peripheral areas where they were being forced to move. Their resistance is the focus of Teresa Meade's study. Meade details how Rio grew according to the requirements of international capital, which financed, planned, and oversaw the renewal&—and how local movements resisted these powerful, distant forces. She also traces the popular rebellion that continued for more than twenty years after the renovation ended in 1909, illustrating that community protests are the major characteristic of political life in the modern era.

'Civilizing Missions in Colonial and Postcolonial South Asia' offers a series of analyses that highlights the complexities of British and Indian civilizing missions in original ways and through various historiographical approaches. The book applies the concept of the civilizing mission to a number of issues in the colonial and postcolonial eras in South Asia: economic development, state-building, pacification, nationalism, cultural improvement, gender and generational relations, caste and untouchability, religion and missionaries, class relations, urbanization, NGOs, and civil society.

A fascinating account of the role of sex as a civilizing force in the west, this lucid and compelling book contends that keeping sex within marriage is essential for the well-being of any society. Riley explores the Judaeo-Christian tradition on marriage and sexuality and shows how marriage came to contain the force of sexuality, harnessing its energies to serve both the family and the wider community. He argues that the idea that sex is entirely a private issue is an error with potentially disastrous consequences both for the individual and for society.

Drawing on her experience working in and with museums in the US and throughout the world, Author Elaine Heumann Gurian explores the possibilities for making museums more central and relevant to society.

After a promising start as a prosperous and liberal democratic nation at the end of the nineteenth century, Argentina descended into instability and crisis. This stark reversal, in a country rich in natural resources and seemingly bursting with progress and energy, has puzzled many historians. In Civilizing Argentina, Julia Rodriguez takes a sharply contrary view, demonstrating that Argentina's turn of fortune is not a mystery but rather the ironic consequence of schemes to "civilize" the nation in the name of progressivism, health, science, and public order. With new medical and scientific information arriving from Europe at the turn of the century, a powerful alliance developed among medical, scientific, and state authorities in Argentina. These elite forces promulgated a political culture based on a medical model that defined social problems such as poverty, vagrancy, crime, and street violence as illnesses to be treated through programs of social hygiene. They instituted programs to fingerprint immigrants, measure the bodies of prisoners, place wives who disobeyed their husbands in "houses of deposit," and exclude or expel people deemed socially undesirable, including groups such as labor organizers and prostitutes. Such policies, Rodriguez argues, led to the destruction of the nation's liberal ideals and opened the way to the antidemocratic, authoritarian governments that came later in the twentieth century.

Civilizing Habits explores the life stories of three French women missionaries--Philippine Duchesne, Emilie de Vialar, and Anne-Marie Javouhey--who crossed boundaries, both real and imagined, to evangelize far from France's shores. In so doing, they helped France reestablish a global empire after the dislocation of the Revolution and the fall of Napoleon. They also pioneered a new missionary era in which the educational, charity, and health care services provided by women became valuable tools for spreading Catholic influence across the globe. Philippine Duchesne traveled to former French territory in Missouri in 1818 to proselytize among Native Americans. Thwarted by the American policy of removing tribes even further west, she turned her attention to girls' education on the frontier. Emilie de Vialar followed French troops to Algeria after its conquest and opened missions throughout the Mediterranean basin in the mid-nineteenth century. Prevented from direct evangelization, she developed strategies and subterfuges for working among Muslim populations. Anne-Marie Javouhey evangelized among Africans in the French slave colonies, including a utopian settlement in the wilds of French Guiana. She became a rare Catholic proponent of the abolition of slavery and a woman designated a "great man" by the French king. Paradoxically, through embracing religious institutions designed to shield their femininity, these women gained increased authority to travel outside France, challenge church power, and evangelize among non-Christians, all roles more commonly ascribed to male missionaries. Their stories teach us about the life paths open to religious women in the nineteenth century and how both church and state benefitted from their initiative to expand the boundaries of faith and nation.

Offering fresh insights into the history of labor policy, the New Deal, feminism, and southern politics, Landon Storrs examines the New Deal era of the National Consumers' League, one of the most influential reform organizations of the early twentieth century. Founded in 1899 by affluent women concerned about the exploitation of women wage earners, the National Consumers' League used a strategy of "ethical consumption" to spark a successful movement for state laws to reduce hours and establish minimum wages for women. During the Great Depression, it campaigned to raise labor standards in the unregulated, non-union South, hoping to discourage the relocation of manufacturers to the region because of cheaper labor and to break the downward spiral of labor standards nationwide. Promoting regulation of men's labor as well as women's, the league shaped the National Recovery Administration codes and the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 but still battled the National Woman's Party, whose proposed equal rights amendment threatened sex-based labor laws. Using the National Consumers' League as a window on the nation's evolving reform tradition, Civilizing Capitalism explores what progressive feminists hoped for from the New Deal and why, despite significant victories, they ultimately were disappointed.

In her in-depth study of Harriet Martineau's writings on the evolution of the British Empire in the nineteenth century, Deborah A. Logan elaborates the ways in which Martineau's works reflect Victorian concerns about radically shifting social ideologies. To understand Martineau's interventions into the Empire Question, Logan argues, is to recognize her authority as an insightful political commentator, historian, economist, and sociologist whose eclectic studies and intellectual curiosity positioned her as a shrewd observer and recorder of the imperial enterprise. Logan's primary sources are Martineau's nonfiction works, particularly those published in periodicals, complemented by telling references from Martineau's didactic fiction, correspondence, and autobiography. Key texts include History of The Peace; Letters from Ireland and Endowed Schools of Ireland; Illustrations of Political Economy; Eastern Life, Present and Past; and History of British Rule in India and Suggestions for the Future Rule of India. Logan shows Martineau negotiating the inevitable conflict that arises when the practices of Victorian imperialism are measured against its own stated principles, and especially against Martineau's idea of both the Civilizing Mission and the indigenous cultural integrity often compromised in the process. The picture of Martineau that emerges is complex and fascinating. Both an advocate and a critic of British imperialism, Martineau was a persistent champion of the Civilizing Mission. Written with an awareness that she was recording contemporary history for future generations, Martineau’s commentary on this perpetually fascinating, often tragic, and always instructive chapter in British and world history offers important insights that enhance and complicate our understanding of imperialism and globalization.

Since 9/11, the American government has presumed to speak and act in the name of ‘civilization’. But isthat how the rest of the world sees it? And if not, why not? Stephen Mennell leads up to such contemporary questions through a careful study of the whole span of American development, from the first settlers to the American Empire. He takes a novel approach, analysing the USA’s experience in the light of Norbert Elias’s theory of civilizing (and decivilizing) processes. Drawing comparisons between the USA and other countries of the world, the topics discussed include: American manners and lifestyles Violence in American society The impact of markets on American social character American expansion, from the frontier to empire The ‘curse of the American Dream’ and increasing inequality The religiosity of American life Mennell shows how the long-term experience of Americans has been of growing more and more powerful in relation to their neighbours. This has had all-pervasive effects on the way they see themselves, their perception of the rest of the world, and how the rest of the world sees them. Mennell’s compelling and provocative account will appeal to anyone concerned about America's role in the world today, including students and scholars of American politics and society.