Improving Poor People: The Welfare State, the "Underclass," and Urban Schools As History - Couverture rigide

Katz, Michael B.

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 0691029946 ISBN 13 : 9780691029948

Editeur : Princeton University Press, 1995

Synopsis

"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 19th-century reformers traced extreme poverty to drink, laziness, and other forms of bad behaviour, 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 the welfare state, the "underclass" debate, urban school reform, and the strategies of survival used by the urban poor. Each chapter also illustrates the interpretative power of history by focusing on a strand of social policy in the 19th and 20th 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.

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

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).

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Princeton University Press
• Date d'édition: 1995
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0691029946
• ISBN 13: 9780691029948
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 200
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible