A People’s History of Poverty in America (The New Press People's History Series)
Stephen Pimpare
Language: English
Pages: 336
ISBN: 1595586725
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
A “sympathetic social history that allows poor people, past and present, to tell their own remarkably similar stories” (Booklist), A People’s History of Poverty in America movingly brings to life poor people’s everyday battles for dignity and respect in the face of the judgment, control, and disdain that are all too often the price they must pay for charity and government aid.
Through prodigious research, Stephen Pimpare has unearthed poignant and often surprising testimonies and accounts that range from the early days of the United States to the complex social and economic terrain of the present. A work of sweeping analysis, A People’s History of Poverty in America reminds us that poverty is not in itself a moral failure, though our failure to understand it may well be.
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regulation and control and a site in which citizens fought one another for power and for property. Elizabeth Packard, to take one example, was involuntarily committed to an asylum in 1860—“kidnapped,” as she characterizes it— solely upon the oath of her minister husband, who was troubled by her unorthodox religious teachings. Mr. Packard, she insists in a long, angry, and thoughtful memoir of her ordeal, was also seeking to seize property that she would not give to him. “It is for your own good
point in mind; but it is, at first, not easy to imagine something worse. Members of the New York City Council who visited the building in July of 1986 were clearly shaken: “People passing by the hotel have no sense of the tragic dimensions of life inside. Upon entering the hotel, one is greeted by a rush of noise, made in large part by the many small children living there. These children share accommodations with a considerable cockroach and rodent population.” . . . It is difficult to do full
for homeless people, they are clearly an improvement over the past. Among other things, Wagner notes that contemporary shelters, because most of them are designed to provide temporary housing, cannot create the kind of community that was sometimes found in the almshouses and poorhouses of the past; and contemporary shelters are “less humane,” he maintains, because they tend to offer refuge only at night, leaving their residents still homeless during the day. Almshouses provided more of a home, in
the dearth of truly public rest rooms provide a number of unpretty options.35 Not all risks are so benign. During the Great Depression, one man told another, named Cass, that he always was able to eat because he “kin get garbage out o’ any old can.” But: Cass knew better than that. He knew that once a week, on Saturday, all open garbage was sprayed by the city. (In order to keep paupers from poisoning themselves on Sunday, which was the Sabbath.) So to the sullen shoulders in front of him, to a
underrepresented.3 This may be an unfair complaint, I’ll admit, since such histories must inevitably pass lightly over many events and issues, each of which might merit its own book-length treatment, and we could hunt through the index of any book (including this one) and object to the relative emphasis on one topic over another. However, even in analyses specifically focused on the history of race and welfare,4 the narrative rarely begins before the New Deal, and it is exclusion that is the