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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... as of my family, especially my wife, Edda, and youngest daughter, Sarah, on whom the preoccupation that accompanies writing takes the greatest toll. Improving Poor People Introduction THERE ARE places where history feels xi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.
The Welfare State, the "Underclass," and Urban Schools as History Michael B. Katz. Improving Poor People Introduction THERE ARE places where history feels irrelevant, and America's.
... improve the character of poor people rather than to attack the material sources of their misery. Reformers emphasized individual regeneration through evangelical religion, temperance legislation, punitive conditions for relief, family ...
... improve poor people during the last two centuries. It also illustrates the public uses of history. For nearly thirty years, my excursions into the world of social science and social policy often have highlighted obsolete or distorted ...