When the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act became law in 1996, the architects of welfare reform celebrated what they called the new "consensus" on welfare: that cash ...assistance should be temporary and contingent on recipients' seeking and finding employment. However, assessments about the assumptions and consequences of this radical change to the nation's social safety net were actually far more varied and disputed than the label "consensus" suggests.
By examining the varied realities and accountings of welfare restructuring, Stretched Thin looks back at a critical moment of policy change and suggests how welfare policy in the United States can be changed to better address the needs of poor families and the nation. Using ethnographic observations, in-depth interviews with poor families and welfare workers, survey data tracking more than 750 families over two years, and documentary evidence, Sandra Morgen, Joan Acker, and Jill Weigt question the validity of claims that welfare reform has been a success. They show how poor families, welfare workers, and welfare administrators experienced and assessed welfare reform differently based on gender, race, class, and their varying positions of power and control within the welfare state.
The authors document the ways that, despite the dramatic drop in welfare rolls, low-wage jobs and inadequate social supports left many families struggling in poverty. Revealing how the neoliberal principles of a drastically downsized welfare state and individual responsibility for economic survival were implemented through policies and practices of welfare provision and nonprovision, the authors conclude with new recommendations for reforming welfare policy to reduce poverty, promote economic security, and foster shared prosperity.
Modern western Oregon was a crucial site of imperial competition in North America during the formative decades of the United States. In this book, Gray Whaley examines relations among newcomers and ...between newcomers and Native peoples--focusing on political sovereignty, religion, trade, sexuality, and the land--from initial encounters to Oregon's statehood. He emphasizes Native perspectives, using the Chinook wordIllahee(homeland) to refer to the indigenous world he examines.Whaley argues that the process of Oregon's founding is best understood as a contest between the British Empire and a nascent American one, with Oregon's Native people and their lands at the heart of the conflict. He identifies race, republicanism, liberal economics, and violence as the key ideological and practical components of American settler-colonialism. Native peoples faced capriciousness, demographic collapse, and attempted genocide, but they fought to preserveIllaheeeven as external forces caused the collapse of their world. Whaley's analysis compellingly challenges standard accounts of the quintessential antebellum "Promised Land."
In Elephant House , photographer Dick Blau and historian Nigel Rothfels offer a thought-provoking study of the Oregon Zoo’s Asian Elephant Building and the daily routines of its ...residents—human and pachyderm alike. Without an agenda beyond a desire to build a deeper understanding of this enigmatic environment, Elephant House is the result of the authors’ unique creative collaboration and explores the relationships between captive elephants and their human caregivers.
Blau’s evocative photographs are complex and challenging, while Rothfels’s text offers a scholarly and personal response to the questions that surround elephants and captivity. Elephant House does not take sides in the debate over zoos but focuses instead on the bonds of attentiveness between the animals and their keepers. Accompanied by a foreword from retired elephant keeper Mike Keele, Elephant House is a frank, fascinating look at the evolving world of elephant husbandry.
Former high desert rancher Ellen Waterston writes of a wild, essentially roadless, starkly beautiful part of the American West. Following the recently created 750-mile Oregon Desert Trail, she ...embarks on a creative and inquisitive exploration, introducing readers to a "trusting, naïve, earnest, stubbly, grumpy old man of a desert" that is grappling with issues at the forefront of national, if not global, concern: public land use, grazing rights for livestock, protection of sacred Indigenous ground, water rights, and protection of habitat for endangered species. Blending travel writing with memoir and history, Waterston profiles a wide range of people who call the high desert home and offers fresh perspectives on nationally reported regional conflicts such as the Malheur Wildlife Refuge occupation. Walking the High Desert invites readers-wherever they may be-to consider their own beliefs, identities, and surroundings through the optic of the high desert of southeastern Oregon.
The Pacific Northwest of the United States exhibits complex spatial patterns of storm-induced coastal foredune erosion. Using oceanographic and morphologic data from three field sites encompassing a ...range of subaqueous and subaerial coastal profile configurations, a relationship is found between morphologic characteristics and dune volume changes during storm events producing high water levels. The data suggest that dune erosion increases with increasing backshore beach slope and that, under particular oceanographic forcing conditions, wave-driven processes can grow the lower portion of dunes on low sloping, dissipative beaches. These observations of environmental and morphologic controls on storm-induced dune impacts are further explored using XBeach, a state of the art numerical model capable of simulating interactions between hydrodynamics and morphology. Consistent with the field data, model simulations indicate that wave-driven dune growth may occur on low sloping beaches in cases where the dynamic still water level (still water level plus wave setup) is lower than the dune toe. However, these accretional processes are restricted to events where limited incident wave energy impacts the dune. Cases with steep backshore beach slopes or dynamic still water levels exceeding the dune toe instead typically result in dune erosion. Additionally, the model simulations suggest that morphologic properties of the shelf, nearshore, and the dune itself influence storm-induced dune volume change. Therefore, morphologic features far from the dune face, including shelf geometries shaped in part by the regional historical sediment budget, may have important implications on the susceptibility of coastal foredunes systems to storm impacts.
•Storm-induced coastal foredune erosion increases with increasing beach slope.•Infragravity swash can contribute positively to dune growth on low sloping beaches.•Total water levels alone are a poor indicator of foredune erosion.
Oregon's landscape boasts brilliant waterfalls, towering volcanoes, productive river valleys, and far-reaching high deserts. People have lived in the region for at least twelve thousand years, during ...which they established communities; named places; harvested fish, timber, and agricultural products; and made laws and choices that both protected and threatened the land and its inhabitants. William G. Robbins traces the state's history of commodification and conservation, despair and hope, progress and tradition. This revised and updated edition features a new introduction and epilogue with discussion of climate change, racial disparity, immigration, and discrimination. Revealing Oregon's rich social, economic, cultural, and ecological complexities, Robbins upholds the historian's commitment to critical inquiry, approaching the state's past with both open-mindedness and a healthy dose of skepticism about the claims of Oregon's boosters.
When the US Army Corps of Engineers began planning construction of The Dalles Dam at Celilo Village in the mid-twentieth century, it was clear that this traditional fishing, commerce, and social site ...of immense importance to Native tribes would be changed forever. Controversy surrounded the project, with local Native communities anticipating the devastation of their way of life and white settler�descended advocates of the dam envisioning a future of thriving infrastructure and industry. In In Defense of Wyam, having secured access to hundreds of previously unknown and unexamined letters, Katrine Barber revisits the subject of Death of Celilo Falls, her first book. She presents a remarkable alliance across the opposed Native and settler-descended groups, chronicling how the lives of two women leaders converged in a shared struggle to protect the Indian homes of Celilo Village. Flora Thompson, member of the Warm Springs Tribe and wife of the Wyam chief, and Martha McKeown, daughter of an affluent white farming family, became lifelong allies as they worked together to protect Oregon�s oldest continuously inhabited site. As a Native woman, Flora wielded significant power within her community yet outside of it was dismissed for her race and her gender. Martha, although privileged due to her settler origins, turned to women�s clubs to expand her political authority beyond the conventional domestic sphere. Flora's and Martha�s coordinated efforts offer readers meaningful insight into a time and place where the rhetoric of Native sovereignty, the aims of environmental movements in the American West, and women�s political strategies intersected.
A shocking murder lays bare fissures running through the
founding myths of the American republic
On an autumn day in 1895, eighteen-year-old Loyd Montgomery shot
his parents and a neighbor in a ...gruesome act that reverberated
beyond the small confines of Montgomery's Oregon farming community.
The dispassionate slaying and Montgomery's consequent hanging
exposed the fault lines of a rapidly industrializing and urbanizing
society and revealed the burdens of pioneer narratives boys of the
time inherited.
In Pioneering Death: The Violence of Boyhood in
Turn-of-the-Century Oregon, Peter Boag examines the Brownsville
parricide as an allegory for the destabilizing transitions within
the rural United States at the end of the nineteenth century. While
pioneer families celebrated and memorialized founders of western
white settler society, their children faced a present and future in
frightening decline. Connecting a fascinating true-crime story with
the broader forces that produced the murders, Boag uncovers how
Loyd's violent acts reflected the brutality of American colonizing
efforts, the anxieties of global capitalism, and the buried traumas
of childhood in the American West.
For thousands of years, Pacific Northwest Indians fished, bartered, socialized, and honored their ancestors at Celilo Falls, part of a nine-mile stretch of the Long Narrows on the Columbia River. ...Although the Indian community of Celilo Village survives to this day as Oregon's oldest continuously inhabited town, with the construction of The Dalles Dam in 1957, traditional uses of the river were catastrophically interrupted. Most non-Indians celebrated the new generation of hydroelectricity and the easy navigability of the river "highway" created by the dam, but Indians lost a sustaining center to their lives when Celilo Falls was inundated.
Death of Celilo Falls is a story of ordinary lives in extraordinary circumstances, as neighboring communities went through tremendous economic, environmental, and cultural change in a brief period. Katrine Barber examines the negotiations and controversies that took place during the planning and construction of the dam and the profound impact the project had on both the Indian community of Celilo Village and the non-Indian town of The Dalles, intertwined with local concerns that affected the entire American West: treaty rights, federal Indian policy, environmental transformation of rivers, and the idea of "progress."
Seismically-induced landslides can be detrimental to urban communities, often resulting in significant damage and repair costs, blockage of lifeline connection routes and utilities, environmental ...impacts, and potential for loss of life. Consistent, reliable hazard maps can assist agencies to efficiently allocate limited resources to prepare for these events. This paper presents methodology for evaluating and mapping seismically-induced landslide hazards across a large area utilizing performance-based design strategies. This approach scales site-specific seismic hazard curve analysis techniques to a regional scale evaluation by combining generally available data, including: previous landslide inventories, lidar and photogrammetric topographic data, geologic mapping, NEHRP site classifications based on shear wave velocity (VS30) measurements, and seismic hazard curves for the analysis. These maps can be combined with maps generated for other hazards (e.g., liquefaction) for a fully probabilistic, multi-hazard evaluation and risk assessment. To demonstrate the methodology, a series of landslide hazard maps showing the probabilities of exceeding different thresholds of movement (e.g., 0.1, 0.3, and 1.0m) were generated for western Oregon. The study area contains weak, wet soils that experience land sliding regularly even without significant seismic activity. The maps show reasonable agreement with landslide inventory and susceptibility maps.
•A novel probabilistic approach to map seismically-induced landslide hazards regionally.•Utilizes a performance based design framework.•The methodology was effectively applied to the western portion of Oregon, USA.•The methodology effectively scales site specific analysis techniques across a much larger area.•Estimates soil strength in geologic units where geotechnical data can be difficult to obtain.
