Underclass

Jacob Riis was born on May 3, 1849, in Ribe, Denmark Jacob had a happy childhood, but experienced tragedy at the age of eleven when his younger brother, Theodor, drowned. He never forgot his mother's pain and grief from the tragedy. At only the young age of eleven or twelve, Riis donated all the money he had and gave it to a poor Ribe family living in a cluttered, messy house with little to show of ownership or possessions. The tenants took the money and obliged; when he told his mother, she…

The world is standing on the verge of one of the most consequential technological thresholds in history, a scientific discovery that has the power to alter the very fabric of generations of lives to come, challenging what it means to be human. Imagine a world in which one can look through a catalog of possible traits while shopping for a new child; picking hair color, intelligence level, and or athletic ability. However crazy this may seem, “designer baby” is no longer a science-fiction term,…

book about the era of mass incarceration. Mass incarceration is the imprisoning of many people who are African American on the premise of their race. Mass incarceration was a political campaign. It was created to keep those in the minority as the underclass. It essentially created a caste system. The worst problem of all is the we, as America citizens, created mass incarceration and its effects to further widen the gap between the races. The theories that best explain the book are Symbolic…

Introduction The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels is the formal document that attempts to comprehensively consolidate the aims and ambitions of Communism and explain the underlying theory that drives it. It argues that all historical developments have class struggle as a driving force. Class struggle has been defined as the exploitation of one class by another. The process of “March of history” is introduced which focuses on the growing incompatibilities between class…

As the United States grows in technology and cultures continue to mix, Americans are continuing to only focus on the big news, such as the newest iPad coming out or the violence going on around the country. J.D. Vance writes in his best-selling book, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, how little people know about his type of people yet how many people are just like them. He discusses how their daily life is, how it changes throughout his childhood to how he is still…

The latter half of the nineteenth century was an era of unprecedented rapid expansion for European civilization. This growth was the result of multiple factors originating from within Europe— such as the Industrial Revolution, and the development of the highly organized nature of European nation-states— but had consequences that resonated far outside European borders (Jones). The expansion of European industry and economy created an inter-European power struggle, and “one way to demonstrate…

In 1880, the United States made revisions to the US-China Burlingame Treaty of 1868 in which President Chester A. Arthur introduced a new piece of legislation to the treaty known as the Chinese Exclusion Act, which prohibited almost all Chinese immigration to the United States. Signed into effect in 1882, and later made permanent in 1902, the Chinese Exclusion Act, which only affected a small percentage of immigrants, essentially established a distinction between legal and illegal immigrants…

working class (which is one of the reasons why the welfare state was built) and below these four groups comes the precariat (Standing, 2011). The precariat is not at the bottom, as the unemployed and lumpen precariat comes below it. It is not an underclass, as it was wanted by global capitalism and needed for the system that is being established (MHC Mc2012Culloch Center, 2012). Standing (2011), has characterized the precariat as a group of people that are “socially ill misfits” and exists with…

Over the course of history, various developments took place which led to the formation of sociology. The Enlightenment was a period of philosophical enquiry starting around the sixteenth century with the rise of the scientific method. Before this society and the nature of reality had largely been governed by the teachings of the church and was under state control. The enlightenment was based on rationalist principles, values of empiricism and the belief that the world could be better understood…

Introduction The idea that McDonaldization is an inexorable phenomenon is an erroneous claim, which fails to take into consideration the political and socioeconomic dichotomy that exists independently from it. To fully appreciate the dynamism and influence of the establishment heads of the world, the examination of the concept of McDonaldization becomes a decent portrayal of their overwhelming power, while in the same instance disclosing the actual insignificance of such a system of…