Improving Poor People: The Welfare State, the "Underclass," and Urban Schools as HistoryPrinceton University Press, 02/04/1997 - 191 من الصفحات "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. |
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... Public welfare—United States—History. 2. Urban poor—United States—History. 3. Urban schools— United States—History. 4. Social history. 5. Social policy. I. Title. HV91.K348 1995 362.5′0973—dc20 94-31111 This book has been composed in ...
... social agency or in community economic development. Would historians committed to social reconstruction give more to the causes they champion with degrees in social work or public policy or as public interest lawyers? Since the early ...
... social science and social policy often have highlighted obsolete or distorted versions of history that undermine the conclusions of research or recommendations for policy, especially ones relating to cities and their people. In response ...
... policy related—raised by these excursions into the history of social policy and reform. Although, in part, this reflects my own limitations, at points the historical evidence complicates my own inclinations (as with local democracy ...
... social issue can lead in very different policy directions. How then should one conceptualize the role of the historian in policy? Where can the historian be most useful? At a recent conference of the Social Science Research Council's ...