Jane Addams

Inspired by their Progressive Era faith in social science solutions to society’s problems, the residents of Hull-House collaborated on this work of sociology based on their experiences as residents of Chicago’s Near West Side. The contributors to this book believed that an enlightened citizenry could be mobilized for reform, and that by publishing maps with explicit information about the wages and conditions of the working poor in Chicago’s Nineteenth Ward they would educate the public and inspire reforms. In addition to Jane Addams’s own prefatory note and paper on the role of social settlements in the labor movement, contributors provided detailed, real-world analyses of the Chicago Jewish ghetto, garment workers and the sweatshops, child labor, immigrant neighborhoods in the vicinity of Hull-House, and local charities. This edition also contains eight color reproductions of the original Hull-House neighborhood maps. The year 2006 marks the one hundred and eleventh anniversary of the publication of Hull-House Maps and Papers, and the volume remains a dramatic statement about the residents’ shared values as well as a major influence on subsequent social surveys.

In this her second book, Jane Addams moves beyond humanitarian appeals to sensibility and prudence, advancing a more aggressive, positive idea of peace as a dynamic social process emerging out of the poorer quarters of cosmopolitan cities. Her deep analysis of relations among diverse groups in U. S. society, exemplified by inter-ethnic and labor relations in Chicago, draws widely useful lessons for both domestic and global peace, in an early formulation of today’s "globalization from below." In an unprecedented, revolutionary critique of the pervasive militarization of society, Addams applies her scathing pen to traditional advocates and philosophers of “negative” peace, founders of the U. S. constitution, militarists, bigots, imperialists, and theories of “democratic peace” and liberal capitalism. Instead she sees a slow, powerful emergence of forces from below--the poor, the despised, workers, women, ethnic and racial communities, oppressed groups at home and abroad--that would invent moral substitutes for war and gradually shape a just, peaceful, and varied social order. An extensive, in-depth introduction by Berenice Carroll and Clinton Fink provides historical context, analysis, and a reassessment of the theoretical and practical significance of Newer Ideals of Peace today.