A portrait of america the demographic perspective pdf download

Taking a long view of American Jewry, it is one of very few books that build on specific sociological data but get beyond its detail. All those who want to know what it means and has meant to be an American Jew will find this volume of interest.

Examines U. A portrait of the United States, culled from data based on the U. Census, offers startling statistics, such as the profile of the average American--a Uses long-forgotten WPA files archived in the Library of Congress to paint a detailed picture of Depression Era Americans through the food that they ate and the local traditions and customs they observed when preparing meals.

A Book by Stephen B. Oates,Charles J. A Book by Anonim. A Book by Bryan Sykes. Indiana by Anonim. Gillon,Cathy D. A striking collection of presidential portraits from the National Portrait Gallery, this volume encapsulates the spirit of the most powerful office in the world.

America's Presidents showcases the nation's largest collection of portraits of all the presidents beyond the White House's own, capturing the permanent exhibition that lies at the heart of the Portrait Gallery's mission to tell the American story through the individuals who have shaped it.

The book explores presidential imagery through portraits ranging from the traditional, such as the iconic and newly restored "Lansdowne" portrait of George Washington by Gilbert Stuart, to the contemporary, such as Elaine de Kooning's colorful depiction of John F. Many of the featured portraits reveal much about the sitter, such as the intimate rendering of an informal George W.

Some tell us more about the artist, such as the likeness of Franklin Delano Roosevelt that Douglas Chandor planned to include in a larger work about peace that would commemorate Roosevelt's Yalta meeting with wartime Allied leaders Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin. Works in other media, including sculptures and daguerreotypes, round out the presidential collection. Lively narratives accompany each piece, exploring the president's background and biography as well as the work's artistic and historical significance.

Taken together, the portraits are a powerful visual exploration of the history of the highest office in the land and the diverse men who have held it. Skip to content. Portrait of America. Author : Stephen B. Oates,Charles J. Portrait of America Book Review:. American Portrait. American Portrait Book Review:. A Portrait of America. A Portrait of America Book Review:. Author : Bryan Sykes Publsiher : W. Portrait of a Nation Second Edition. African America.

African America Book Review:. Folk Masters. Folk Masters Book Review:. The Red Couch. The Red Couch Book Review:. Oklahoma Book Review:. The Portrait and the Book. The Portrait and the Book Book Review:. Image of America. He argues that the same conditions that have allowed Jews to live in relative security since the s have also presented them with a greater challenge than did the adversity and upheaval of earlier years. The second half of the twentieth century has been a time when American Jews have experienced a minimum of prejudice and almost all domains of life have been accessible to them, but it has also been a time of assimilation, of swelling rates of intermarriage, and of large numbers ignoring their Jewishness completely.

Jews have no trouble building synagogues, but they have all sorts of trouble filling them. The quality of Jewish education is perhaps higher than ever before, and the output of Jewish scholarship is overwhelming in its scope and quality, but most American Jews receive a minimum of religious education and can neither read nor comprehend the great corpus of Jewish literature in its Hebrew or Aramaic original.

This is a time in America when there is no shame in being a Jew, and yet fewer American Jews seem to know what being a Jew means. How did this come to be? What does it portend for the Jewish future? This book endeavors to answer these questions by examining data gleaned from numerous sociological surveys.

By , however, nearly 13 percent of the U. As indicated earlier, through most of the nineteenth century a majority of immigrants came from northern and western Europe, with the three largest sending countries being Germany, Ireland, and the United Kingdom. The late s saw a large increase in the proportion of immigrants coming from southern and eastern Europe; between and , 42 percent of immigrants came from Russia and Italy alone.

Immigration from Mexico slowly accelerated after World War II, and the rapid increase in the percentage of immigrants from Asia began in the s.

The s have also seen an appreciable number of immigrants from Africa 7 percent of all immigrants. As a consequence, the proportion of all legal immigrants in the United States who were from Europe was only 13 percent from to , down from 86 percent in the period. The share of all immigrants from Asia grew from 4 percent to 34 percent and from Latin America from 10 percent to 41 percent over the same time period.

Immigration from Asia has accelerated in recent years and in fact has surpassed the number of Hispanic immigrants since High levels of immigration were accompanied by high levels of internal migration through U. Two long-term processes characterize this internal movement: the westward expansion of the population and its movement from rural areas to urban ones.

With regard to westward expansion, at the time of the first census in only 13 percent of the total population lived in territories west of the thirteen original states, which of course were situated on the eastern seaboard of the United States, where the first European colonists had settled. By , however, a full 55 percent of the population was living west of these states. The framers of the Constitution had made it easy for new territories to gain statehood, and by the eve of the Civil War in there were thirty-four states in the Union.

Americans were also considered more mobile than their European counterparts. As remarked by an English observer, Americans "acquire no attachment to Place. Wandering about Seems engrafted in their Nature; and it is a weakness incident to it, that they should forever imagine that the Lands further off, are still better than those on which they have already Settled.

The westward movement of the population is illustrated in figure 6. It shows how in , the center of the population was east of Baltimore, Maryland. By it was in southern Ohio, by it was in Illinois, and by the time of the census the center of the U. The map also shows the more recent southern movement of the population since about This represents the rise of the Sun Belt, or the southern migration of the U.

Also illustrating this pattern of mobility, over a quarter 27 percent of the native-born population lived outside their state of birth in ; this is in line with historical patterns, in which 22 to 31 percent of the population lived outside their state of birth at different points in time.

The second pattern of internal migration was the movement of people from rural areas to urban centers. In only six towns in the United States had more than 8, people, with New York City the largest with 33, people and Philadelphia the second largest with 29, people.

Only 3 percent of the U. However, cities grew at a faster rate than rural areas in subsequent decades as they became centers of bustling trade. The proportion of the U. The rapid growth of cities in the late s and through the s was fueled by industrialization, for example, the steel factories in Pittsburgh, the textile industry in New York, meatpacking plants in Chicago, and the explosive growth of the automobile industry in Detroit.

Industrialization and urbanization are reflected in the growth rates of individual cities. In , New York had , inhabitants, followed by Philadelphia with , Just forty years later in , New York City had grown to 3. Immigrants swelled the populations of these cities. New York itself was a major port of entry at the turn of the twentieth century and was largely divided into ethnic neighborhoods. Jacob Riis, in his classic book on poverty, How the Other Half Lives, describes the often-desperate conditions in which poor immigrants lived, crowded as they were in dense, poorly constructed tenement housing.

As Riis writes,. A map of the city, colored to designate nationalities, would show more stripes than on the skin of a zebra, and more colors than any rainbow. The city on such a map would fall into two great halves, green for the Irish prevailing in the West Side tenement districts, and blue for the Germans on the East Side. But intermingled with these ground colors would be an odd variety of tints that would give the whole the appearance of an extraordinary quilt.

From down in the Sixth Ward. The two races [Italians and Jews], differing hopelessly in much, have this in common: they carry their slums with them wherever they go, if allowed to do it. But in tandem with the growth of these poor, racially distinct immigrant neighborhoods were the architectural marvels representative of the growing wealth and standards of living of the city: the modern skyscraper.

New York and Chicago initially dueled to be the home of the tallest of these new buildings in the s. New York took the lead for many years beginning in the s and saw a sustained period of skyscraper construction between the s and early s, culminating with the erection of the Empire State Building, which was the world's tallest from until These cities continued to grow and thrive even with the relative lull in immigration in the middle decades of the twentieth century.

They also saw a rapid growth in their black populations, fueled by a large-scale migration of blacks from the Jim Crow South to the North in search for jobs in bustling factories, in what became known as the Great Migration. By , the largest three metropolitan areas in the U.

As an aside, it should be noted that the world's tallest buildings today are in countries elsewhere in the world. The eclipse of American cities as the homes of the tallest buildings coincides with the urbanization and development of large industrial cities across the globe.

As of , the five largest urban agglomerations cities and their surrounding commuting areas , as defined by the United Nations, included Tokyo, Japan Close on their heels and rounding out the top ten are Sao Paulo, Brazil It is no surprise that a number of the largest cities in the world are in China and India-the two most populous countries, which are also experiencing rapid economic development.

Back to the development of U. While only a quarter of the population of U. This suburbanization in the twentieth century was a result of several developments, including the rise of the automobile, which allowed residents to live farther from their central city jobs than they used to, the movement of jobs themselves to suburban locations, and the desire of many families to "escape the noise, dirt, crowding, and crime that city dwellers must tolerate.

Public policy also fostered suburbanization, such as through the provision of generous credit terms to home buyers, especially in the suburbs, after World War II and the Interstate Highway Act of , which facilitated suburban commuting. While affluent and middle-class whites initially propelled suburbanization, and whites remain overrepresented in the suburbs today, minority suburbanization rates have increased rapidly in recent decades, and many immigrants today move directly to suburban ethnic communities rather than to traditional central city enclaves.

The United States has experienced profound social and demographic changes over the decades. Several demographic processes described in this chapter characterize the period from colonial settlement to today. The United States, like western European countries, experienced a demographic transition in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

This involved a change in a regime of high birth rates and high death rates to one of low birth rates and low death rates. However, U. At its peak the U. The s saw a substantial decline in the U. These declines occurred by the end of the nineteenth century in other Western and developed countries and reflected social processes such as urbanization, growing levels of education and affluence, and growing gender equality-all of which tend to increase the cost of raising children.

After a baby boom in the s, fertility in the United States declined to what is now close to replacement levels-just under 2. As in a number of other western European countries, U. This decline in mortality continues today. The initial reason for the decline was a better understanding of the transmission of infectious diseases, which led to effective public health measures and individual health practices, and later on, medical advances drove declines.

The net result was a decline in infectious diseases, such as cholera, as the primary cause of death and the rise of chronic and degenerative diseases such as heart disease and cancer. Immigration historically played a significant role not only in the country's growth but also in its composition.

Through colonial times a majority of settlers came from England, though a substantial number of immigrants came from other countries such as France and Germany. Many slaves-involuntary immigrants-were also brought from Africa. During the early to mids a growing number of Catholic immigrants came to the United States, raising nativist concerns. These concerns were also later evident in response to the growing tide of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe and China and Japan on the West Coast in the last decades of the nineteenth century.

This led to restrictions of immigration from the s to the s, and indeed the middle decades of the twentieth century saw a plunge in the number of immigrants coming to the United States. The latest wave of immigration occurred after changes in immigration laws in that overturned prejudicial immigration policies favoring immigration from northern and western Europe. Today, immigration flows are quite diverse, with significant numbers of immigrants coming from Latin America, Asia, and Africa.

Two long-term processes characterize internal migration: westward expansion, especially in the early days of the republic, and urbanization. The nineteenth century saw the continual addition of states as pioneers extended the frontier westward.