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Who and what a government taxes, and how the government spends the money collected, are questions of primary concern to governments large and small, national and local. When public revenues pay for high-quality infrastructure and social services, citizens thrive and crises are averted. When public revenues are inadequate to provide those goods, inequality thrives and communities can verge into unrest—as evidenced by the riots during Greece's financial meltdown and by the needless loss of life in Haiti's collapse in the wake of the earthquake. In The Public Good and the Brazilian State, Anne G. Hanley assembles an economic history of public revenues as they developed in nineteenth-century Brazil. Specifically, Hanley investigates the financial life of the municipality—a district comparable to the county in the United States—to understand how the local state organized and prioritized the provision of public services, what revenues paid for those services, and what happened when the revenues collected failed to satisfy local needs. Through detailed analyses of municipal ordinances, mayoral reports, citizen complaints, and financial documents, Hanley sheds light on the evolution of public finance and its effect on the early economic development of Brazilian society. This deeply researched book offers valuable insights for anyone seeking to better understand how municipal finance informs histories of inequality and underdevelopment.

Argues that the legacies of Victorian public health in England and Wales were not just better health and cleaner cities but also new ideas of property, liability, and community.This book argues that the legacies of nineteenth-century public health in England and Wales were not just better health and cleaner cities but also new ideas of property and people. Between 1815 and 1872, the work of public healthactivists led to multiple redefinitions of both, shifting the boundaries between public and private nuisances, public and private services, taxable and nontaxable property, cities and suburbs, the state and the individual, and, finally, between different kinds of individuals. These boundary-making processes were themselves inflected by different material, political, and ideological developments in the areas of disease, demography, democracy, and domesticity. The changes in boundaries manifested themselves in the creation of new nuisance laws and in the minute control by the state of private domestic arrangements. Most important, these changes also promoted a radical shiftin ideas on who should bear financial responsibility for the health of others, stimulating in the process a controversy on the nature of community. Public health thus served as an important, if contradictory, site in the creationof communities, enhancing the right to health for some while simultaneously restricting in the name of health the privacy rights of others. Relying on underused legal sources, this book presents a fresh view of the local originsand legal and political significance of the public health movement of the nineteenth century. James G. Hanley is associate professor of history at the University of Winnipeg.

Arkansas seceded from the Union in 1861, opening a chapter in the state�s history that would change its destiny for decades. An estimated 6,862 Arkansas Confederate soldiers died from battle and disease, while some 1,700 Arkansas men died wearing Union blue. Total casualties, killed and wounded, represented 12 percent of the white men in the state between the ages of 15 and 62. Bloody, hard-fought battles included Pea Ridge, Helena, Little Rock, and the rare Confederate victory in southwest Arkansas at Jenkins� Ferry. Following the war, the event that included the largest parade ever in Arkansas, the 1911 United Confederate Veterans Reunion, is presented in picture and word. The event has largely been neglected by history books. From the monuments and veterans to the loyal reenactors still gathering today, the story of the Civil War in Arkansas is remembered and preserved for coming generations.

This book studies the development of banks and stock and bond exchanges in São Paulo, Brazil, during an era of rapid economic diversification. It assesses the contribution of these financial institutions to that diversification, and argues that they played an important role in São Paulo's urbanization and industrialization by the start of the twentieth century. It finds that government regulatory policy was important in limiting and shaping the activities of these institutions, but that pro-development policies did not always have their intended effects. This is the first book on São Paulo's famous industrialization to identify the strong relationship between financial institutions and São Paulo's economic modernization at the turn of the century. It is unique in Brazilian economic history, but contributes to a body of literature on financial systems and economic change in other parts of the world.

View the resort town of Hot Springs, Arkansas from 1900-1960 in postcard images.From the 1890s to the 1920s, the postcard was an extraordinarily popular means of communication, and many of the postcards produced during this'golden age'can today be considered works of art. Early in the century, Hot Springs was among the most noted resorts in the nation. Its Victorian wonders drew thousands of visitors to partake in the hot mineral waters that bubbled from the earth. In the words written on one card in 1910,'Many people of wealth are here from Chicago and New York. Uncle Billy went to the horse show ball at the Eastman Hotel with an ex-wife of a millionaire. Andrew Carnegie and young Jay Gould were at the ball.'Showcased in this fascinating collection are over two hundred postcards from 1900 to 1960. The images are accompanied by the actual penned messages of visitors and extensively researched historical facts.

During the �Golden Age of Postcards,� a craze that swept the nation in the early 1900s, postcard photographers captured images of everyday life in small towns all over the country. In this tradition, its creators unknowingly produced an invaluable archive of historical data that gives us a glimpse of the way life used to be.