Since the early 1970’s, historians have begun to devote serious attention to the working class in the United States. Yet while we now have studies of working-class communities and culture, we know remarkably little of worklessness. When historians have paid any attention at all to unemployment, they have focused on the Great Depression of the 1930’s. The narrowness of this perspective ignores the pervasive recessions and joblessness of the previous decades, as Alexander Keyssar shows in his recent book. Examining the period 1870-1920, Keyssar concentrates on Massachusetts, where the historical materials are particularly rich, and the findings applicable to other industrial areas.
The unemployment rates that Keyssar calculates appear to be relatively modest, at least by Great Depression standards: during the worst years, in the 1870’s and 1890’s, unemployment was around 15 percent. Yet Keyssar rightly understands that a better way to measure the impact of unemployment is to calculate unemployment frequencies—measuring the percentage of workers who experience any unemployment in the course of (in the course of: adv.在...期间) a year. Given this perspective, joblessness looms much larger.
Keyssar also scrutinizes unemployment patterns according to skill level, ethnicity, race, age, class, and gender. He finds that rates of joblessness differed primarily according to class: those in middle-class and white-collar occupations were far less likely to be unemployed. Yet the impact of unemployment on a specific class was not always the same. Even when dependent on the same trade, adjoining communities could have dramatically different unemployment rates. Keyssar uses these differential rates to help explain a phenomenon that has puzzled historians—the startlingly high rate of geographical mobility in the nineteenth-century United States. But mobility was not the dominant working-class strategy for coping with unemployment, nor was assistance from private charities or state agencies. Self-help and the help of kin got most workers through jobless spells.
While Keyssar might have spent more time developing the implications of his findings on joblessness for contemporary public policy, his study, in its thorough research and creative use of quantitative and qualitative evidence, is a model of historical analysis.
2. The passage suggests that before the early 1970’s, which of the following was true of the study by historians of the working class in the United States?
(A) The study was infrequent or superficial, or both.
(B) The study was repeatedly criticized for its allegedly narrow focus.
(C) The study relied more on qualitative than quantitative evidence.
(D) The study focused more on the working-class community than on working-class culture.（A）
(E) The study ignored working-class joblessness during the Great Depression.
答案A，我选得B。文中只说，之前关于working class，大多只涉及culture和community，后来才研究jobless。这只是说明研究范围narraw啊，并不是肤浅和很少吧。如果说大家一直深入地研究culture和community选项A就不对阿。但B我觉得很合适。
3. According to the passage, which of the following is true of Keyssar’s findings concerning unemployment in Massachusetts?
(A) They tend to contradict earlier findings about such unemployment.
(B) They are possible because Massachusetts has the most easily accessible historical records.
(C) They are the first to mention the existence of high rates of geographical mobility in the nineteenth century.
(D) They are relevant to a historical understanding of the nature of unemployment in other states.
(E) They have caused historians to reconsider the role of the working class during the Great Depression.
答案D，我选的B.
因为第一段末尾有“where the historical materials are particularly rich。而选项B语气也很适度。。
如果D正确，答案来源是最后的“other industrial areas”等同于other states么？ | 
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发表于 2005-10-5 17:22:00
