Black middle class Britannia

Lawyers for the Poor explores the development of legal advice and aid provision in England between 1890 and 1990. It is the first book-length study to place legal advice provision in the wider context of English civil society and the welfare state, and it demonstrates how making it easier for people to get advice on their problems was shaped by changing ideas of what it meant to be a citizen. This book examines the origins in the after-hours ‘Poor Man’s Lawyer’ voluntary work of individual lawyers in late Victorian London through to the state-subsidised legal aid schemes of post-war Britain. It considers how affordable access to help with legal matters came to be seen as a right for all, and how charities, the main political parties, the trade unions and the media were involved in trying to achieve this by the 1940s. It also reveals the problems and advantages of offering legal advice services as part of the welfare state after 1949 and the ongoing concerns about using public money on private troubles – issues that remain unresolved in the twenty-first century. This book will be of interest to students and researchers of welfare, citizenship, politics, social policy and voluntary action in twentieth-century Britain, and to practitioners.

This book is a detailed exploration of the working practices of a community of scientists whose work was questioned in public, and of the making of scientific knowledge about climate change in Scotland. For four years, the author joined these scientists in their sampling expeditions into the Caledonian forests, observed their efforts in the laboratory to produce data from wood samples, and followed their discussions of a graph showing the fluctuations of the Scottish temperature over the past millennium in conferences, workshops and peer-review journals. This epistemography of climate change is of broad social and academic relevance – both for its contextualised treatment of a key contemporary science, and for its original formulation of a methodology for investigating and writing about expertise.

The election of Barack Obama was a milestone in US history with tremendous symbolic importance for the black community. But was this symbolism backed up by substance? Did ordinary black people really benefit under the first black president?

This is the question that Andra Gillespie sets out to answer in Race and the Obama Administration. Using a variety of methodological techniques—from content analysis of executive orders to comparisons of key indicators, such as homeownership and employment rates under Clinton, Bush, and Obama— the book charts the progress of black causes and provides valuable perspective on the limitations of presidential power in addressing issues of racial inequality. Gillespie uses public opinion data to investigate the purported disconnect between Obama’s performance and his consistently high ratings among black voters, asking how far the symbolic power of the first black family in the White House was able to compensate for the compromises of political office.

Scholarly but accessible, Race and the Obama Administration will be of interest to students and lecturers in US politics and race studies, as well as to general readers who want to better understand the situation of the black community in the US today and the prospects for its improvement.