A01=Michael B. Katz
Abolitionism
Activism
ADAPT
Affirmative action
African Americans
Agricultural Adjustment Act
Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor
Author_Michael B. Katz
Basic Books
Budget crisis
Capitalism
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Category=NHTB
Charity Organization Society
Charles Loring Brace
Civil Works Administration
Civilian Conservation Corps
Cultural deprivation
Culture of poverty
Decentralization
Demography
Desegregation
E. P. Thompson
Economics
Education
Education reform
Employment
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eq_history
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Extreme poverty
False consciousness
Family preservation
Federal Housing Administration
General Assistance
George Gilder
Harry Hopkins
His Family
Income
Institution
Internship
Ira Katznelson
John F. Kennedy
Layoff
Legislation
Leon Festinger
Local government
Losing Ground (book)
Lumpenproletariat
Margaret Weir
Medicaid
Milliken v. Bradley
Of Education
Orphanage
Oscar Lewis
Outdoor relief
Pension
Political machine
Politician
Politics
Poor relief
Poorhouse
Poverty
Poverty reduction
Princeton University Press
Progressive education
Progressivism
Public expenditure
Public policy
Public sphere
Puritans
Racial segregation
Racial segregation in the United States
Racism
Redlining
Robert D. Putnam
Savage Inequalities
School of education
Seth Low
Settlement movement
Social history
Social insurance
Social issue
Social movement
Social science
Ted Sizer
The Great Transformation (book)
Underclass
Unemployment
Urban renewal
War on Poverty
War pension
Welfare
Welfare reform
Welfare state
Workhouse
Works Progress Administration
Product details
- ISBN 9780691016054
- Weight: 28g
- Dimensions: 197 x 254mm
- Publication Date: 22 Apr 1997
- Publisher: Princeton University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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"There are places where history feels irrelevant, and America's inner cities are among them," acknowledges Michael Katz, in expressing the tensions between activism and scholarship. But this major historian of urban poverty realizes that the pain in these cities has its origins in the American past. To understand contemporary poverty, he looks particularly at an old attitude: because many nineteenth-century reformers traced extreme poverty to drink, laziness, and other forms of bad behavior, they tried to use public policy and philanthropy to improve the character of poor people, rather than to attack the structural causes of their misery. Showing how this misdiagnosis has afflicted today's welfare and educational systems, Katz draws on his own experiences to introduce each of four topics--the welfare state, the "underclass" debate, urban school reform, and the strategies of survival used by the urban poor.
Uniquely informed by his personal involvement, each chapter also illustrates the interpretive power of history by focusing on a strand of social policy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: social welfare from the poorhouse era through the New Deal, ideas about urban poverty from the undeserving poor to the "underclass," and the emergence of public education through the radical school reform movement now at work in Chicago. Why have American governments proved unable to redesign a welfare system that will satisfy anyone? Why has public policy proved unable to eradicate poverty and prevent the deterioration of major cities? What strategies have helped poor people survive the poverty endemic to urban history? How did urban schools become unresponsive bureaucracies that fail to educate most of their students? Are there fresh, constructive ways to think about welfare, poverty, and public education? Throughout the book Katz shows how interpretations of the past, grounded in analytic history, can free us of comforting myths and help us to reframe discussions of these great public issues.
Michael B. Katz is Stanley I. Sheerr Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. Among his many works are In the Shadow of the Poorhouse: A Social History of Welfare in America and The Undeserving Poor: From the War on Poverty to the War on Welfare. He is the editor of The "Underclass" Debate: Views from History (Princeton).
