The early twentieth century was a time of technological revolution in the United States. New inventions and corporations were transforming the economic landscape, bringing a stunning array of consumer goods, millions of additional jobs, and ever more wealth. Steven J. Diner draws on the rich scholarship of recent social history to show how these changes affected Americans of all backgrounds and walks of life, and in doing so offers a striking new interpretation of a crucial epoch in our hi...

By focusing on Chicago’s first generation of activist professors, Diner shows how modern public policy evolved. Chicago’s early academic professionals, believing that they alone could solve the problems of a complex urban society, united to press for reforms in education, criminal justice, social welfare, and municipal administration. By claiming professional autonomy, they established the university firmly in American society and were able to affect it profoundly.Originally publis...

The first broad survey of the history of urban higher education in America.Today, a majority of American college students attend school in cities. But throughout the nineteenth and much of the twentieth centuries, urban colleges and universities faced deep hostility from writers, intellectuals, government officials, and educators who were concerned about the impact of cities, immigrants, and commuter students on college education. In Universities and Their Citi...

The movement to broaden access to public universities, the dominant strategy during the 1970s and 1980s, has largely shifted to enable the marketplace, rather than the government, to shape the contours of higher education. Government funding is being reduced, affirmative action and other programs designed to insure broader access are in decline and personal fulfillment is replacing a public good designed to insure greater equality of opportunities.This book explores the impact of di...

A comprehensive history of the barriers faced by students from marginalized racial, ethnic, and religious groups to gain access to predominantly white colleges and universities—and how these students responded to these barriers.Affirmative action in college admission is one of the most contested initiatives in contemporary federal policy, from its beginnings in the 1960s through the 2014 lawsuit alleging that Harvard discriminates against Asian American applicants....

In Unwelcome Guests, Harold S. Wechsler and Steven J. Diner argue that discrimination in college admissions has a long and troubling history in the US. Institutions of higher learning have vigorously sought to shape their mission and the experiences of their undergraduate students by paying careful attention to race and religion in admissions decisions. Wechsler and Diner explore how American colleges and universities sought to restrict enrollment of students they considered undes...

Mom may be gone but her daughter is carrying on the legacy of Mom's Diner, a place where people can relax and have their problems solved between refills. Befriending a new customer, she senses he has a few dark secrets to hide, and before he gets the bill he'll learn that just because you get a nice smile from a pretty face in a cozy diner doesn't mean there aren't deeper things afoot.