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smackmartine
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Source is 1000 RC
Since the early 1970's, historians have begun to devote serious attention to the working class in the United States. Yet while we now have studies of working-class communities and culture, we know remarkably little of worklessness. When historians have paid any attention at all to unemployment, they have focused on the Great Depression of the 1930's. The narrowness of this perspective ignores the pervasive recessions and joblessness of the previous decades, as Alexander Keyssar shows in his recent book. Examining the period 1870-1920, Keyssar concentrates on Massachusetts, where the historical materials are particularly rich, and the findings applicable to other industrial areas.
The unemployment rates that Keyssar calculates appear to be relatively modest, at least by Great Depression standards: during the worst years, in the 1870's and 1890's, unemployment was around 15 percent. Yet Keyssar rightly understands that a better way to measure the impact of unemployment is to calculate unemployment frequencies-measuring the percentage of workers who experience any unemployment in the course of a year. Given this perspective, joblessness looms much larger.
Keyssar also scrutinizes unemployment patterns according to skill level, ethnicity, race, age, class, and gender. He finds that rates of joblessness differed primarily according to class: those in middle-class and white-collar occupations were far less likely to be unemployed. Yet the impact of unemployment on a specific class was not always the same. Even when dependent on the same trade, adjoining communities could have dramatically different unemployment rates. Keyssar uses these differential rates to help explain a phenomenon that has puzzled historians-the startlingly high rate of geographical mobility in the nineteenth-century United States. But mobility was not the dominant working-class strategy for coping with unemployment, nor was assistance from private charities or state agencies. Self-help and the help of kin got most workers through jobless spells.
While Keyssar might have spent more time developing the implications of his findings on joblessness for contemporary public policy, his study, in its thorough research and creative use of quantitative and qualitative evidence, is a model of historical analysis.
2. The passage suggests that before the early 1970's, which of the following was true of the study by historians of the working class in the United States?
(A) The study was infrequent or superficial, or both.
(B) The study was repeatedly criticized for its allegedly narrow focus.
(C) The study relied more on qualitative than quantitative evidence.
(D) The study focused more on the working-class community than on working-class culture.
(E) The study ignored working-class joblessness during the Great Depression.
6. According to the passage, Keyssar considers which of the following to be among the important predictors of the likelihood that a particular person would be unemployed in late nineteenth-century Massachusetts?
I. The person's class
II. Where the person lived or worked
III. The person's age
(A) I only
(B) II only
(C) I and II only
(D) I and III only
(E) I, II, and III
8. Which of the following, if true, would most strongly support Keyssar's findings as they are described by the author?
(A) Boston, Massachusetts, and Quincy, Massachusetts, adjoining communities, had a higher rate of unemployment for working-class people in 1870 than in 1890.
(B) White-collar professionals such as attorneys had as much trouble as day laborers in maintaining a steady level of employment throughout the period 1870-1920.
(C) Working-class women living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, were more likely than working-class men living in Cambridge to be unemployed for some period of time during the year 1873.
(D) In the 1890's, shoe-factory workers moved away in large numbers from Chelmsford, Massachusetts, where shoe factories were being replaced by other industries, to adjoining West Chelmsford, where the shoe industry flourished.
(E) In the late nineteenth century, workers of all classes in Massachusetts were more likely than workers of all classes in other states to move their place of residence from one location to another within the state.
I will post the OA after some discussion.
Since the early 1970's, historians have begun to devote serious attention to the working class in the United States. Yet while we now have studies of working-class communities and culture, we know remarkably little of worklessness. When historians have paid any attention at all to unemployment, they have focused on the Great Depression of the 1930's. The narrowness of this perspective ignores the pervasive recessions and joblessness of the previous decades, as Alexander Keyssar shows in his recent book. Examining the period 1870-1920, Keyssar concentrates on Massachusetts, where the historical materials are particularly rich, and the findings applicable to other industrial areas.
The unemployment rates that Keyssar calculates appear to be relatively modest, at least by Great Depression standards: during the worst years, in the 1870's and 1890's, unemployment was around 15 percent. Yet Keyssar rightly understands that a better way to measure the impact of unemployment is to calculate unemployment frequencies-measuring the percentage of workers who experience any unemployment in the course of a year. Given this perspective, joblessness looms much larger.
Keyssar also scrutinizes unemployment patterns according to skill level, ethnicity, race, age, class, and gender. He finds that rates of joblessness differed primarily according to class: those in middle-class and white-collar occupations were far less likely to be unemployed. Yet the impact of unemployment on a specific class was not always the same. Even when dependent on the same trade, adjoining communities could have dramatically different unemployment rates. Keyssar uses these differential rates to help explain a phenomenon that has puzzled historians-the startlingly high rate of geographical mobility in the nineteenth-century United States. But mobility was not the dominant working-class strategy for coping with unemployment, nor was assistance from private charities or state agencies. Self-help and the help of kin got most workers through jobless spells.
While Keyssar might have spent more time developing the implications of his findings on joblessness for contemporary public policy, his study, in its thorough research and creative use of quantitative and qualitative evidence, is a model of historical analysis.
2. The passage suggests that before the early 1970's, which of the following was true of the study by historians of the working class in the United States?
(A) The study was infrequent or superficial, or both.
(B) The study was repeatedly criticized for its allegedly narrow focus.
(C) The study relied more on qualitative than quantitative evidence.
(D) The study focused more on the working-class community than on working-class culture.
(E) The study ignored working-class joblessness during the Great Depression.
6. According to the passage, Keyssar considers which of the following to be among the important predictors of the likelihood that a particular person would be unemployed in late nineteenth-century Massachusetts?
I. The person's class
II. Where the person lived or worked
III. The person's age
(A) I only
(B) II only
(C) I and II only
(D) I and III only
(E) I, II, and III
8. Which of the following, if true, would most strongly support Keyssar's findings as they are described by the author?
(A) Boston, Massachusetts, and Quincy, Massachusetts, adjoining communities, had a higher rate of unemployment for working-class people in 1870 than in 1890.
(B) White-collar professionals such as attorneys had as much trouble as day laborers in maintaining a steady level of employment throughout the period 1870-1920.
(C) Working-class women living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, were more likely than working-class men living in Cambridge to be unemployed for some period of time during the year 1873.
(D) In the 1890's, shoe-factory workers moved away in large numbers from Chelmsford, Massachusetts, where shoe factories were being replaced by other industries, to adjoining West Chelmsford, where the shoe industry flourished.
(E) In the late nineteenth century, workers of all classes in Massachusetts were more likely than workers of all classes in other states to move their place of residence from one location to another within the state.
I will post the OA after some discussion.
