By Linnea M. Anderson
Archivist, Social Welfare History Archives

Three research fellows are using the Social Welfare History Archives and Kautz Family YMCA Archives with assistance from the Clarke Chambers Fellowship.

Established in honor of Clarke Chambers, Professor Emeritus of History and the founder of the Social Welfare History Archives, the fellowships pay for travel to the archives for dissertation writers and early career scholars. The first fellowship was awarded in 1992 and, to date, 123 fellows have visited the archives.  

We are pleased to announce the Clarke Chambers Fellowship awardees for 2016:

• Mark Hauser, Doctoral Candidate, Carnegie Mellon University – “Amusing the Millions: World War I and the Growth of American Mass Culture”  

Mr. Hauser is using the extensive records on World War I in the Kautz Family YMCA Archives to research the war as a unique moment when mass-produced goods began to enter ordinary Americans’ lives.  He explores how wartime recreation and social services provided mass-produced entertainment and consumer goods to millions of soldier-consumers in a way that opened the door to a mass consumption economy and shaped the development of a culture of consumption during the 1920s.

• Margaret Boren Neubauer, Doctoral Candidate, Southern Methodist University – “American Indian Child Welfare, Activism and Sovereignty, 1945-1978”

Ms. Neubauer is researching in the Social Welfare History Archives’ collections on adoption policy and practice to study the 20th century American Indian child welfare crisis, in which authorities removed tens of thousands of Native American children from their families for placement in adoption, foster care, and boarding schools. She investigates how federal policy affected Indigenous peoples in the social services context and explores in depth how Native people successfully contested these policies in the child welfare arena.

• Angelica Stoddard, Doctoral Candidate, University of Southern California – “Defining Worthiness: California Mental Health, from Uneven Investment to Deinstitutionalization, 1941-1981”

Ms. Stoddard is using records in the Social Welfare History Archives on community mental health programs to research how the rise in popularity of psychiatry after World War II developed in parallel with the erosion of mental health care for economically vulnerable populations. She is focusing on psychiatric social workers and their patients and how their status as women from ethnically and racially diverse backgrounds impacted the mental health treatment of economically vulnerable people and the operation of community mental health programs in the face of funding cuts in the 1970s.