Kategoria BISAC: Social Science >> Poverty & Homelessness

It has often been said that early America was the "best poor man's country in the world." After all, wasn't there an abundance of land and a scarcity of laborers? The law of supply and demand would seem to dictate that most early American working people enjoyed high wages and a decent material standard of living. Down and Out in Early America presents the evidence for poverty versus plenty and concludes that financial insecurity was a widespread problem that plagued many early Americans.

The fact is that in early America only an extremely thin margin separated those who...

Penn State Press interview with Margaret Morton, March 2004.

Your books--The Tunnel; Fragile Dwelling; Transitory Gardens, Uprooted Lives; and now Glass House--always use a place in their titles and often present photographs of sites throughout New York City. Why these titles? Why so many photographs of the places where the homeless gather to find shelter?

From the beginning, my work was devoted not to despair but rather to the courage and imagination with which people face...

This book is designed to help readers navigate through the vast and rapidly growing literature on poverty in urban America. The major themes, topics, debates, and issues are examined through an analysis of eight basic questions about the nature and problem of urban poverty: *What is poverty, and how is it measured? *What kinds of national policies have been utilized to manage poverty? *What are the major characteristics and trends associated with poverty in America, and how are race and ethnicity reflected in these trends? *What are the major explanations for persistent poverty in the...

As one of our country's major social problems, homelessness is often in the news. The media tend to portray the homeless as drunk, stoned, crazy, or sick individuals--a portrayal that is only partly accurate and represents an obstacle to our understanding of the wider social implications of this complex issue. This edited collection examines the various ways--both verbal and visual--in which the homeless have been portrayed by the media from the 1980s to the present day. The contributors apply different frameworks, ranging from phenomenology to culture studies, to analyze the...

In many respects, the United States remains a nation of immigrants. This is the first book length treatment of the impact of the 1996 welfare reform act on a wide range of immigrant groups in North America. Contributors to the book draw on ethnographic fieldwork, government data, and original survey research to show how welfare reform has reinforced socio-economic hardships for working poor immigrants. As the essays reveal, reform laws have increased the social isolation of poor immigrant households and discouraged large numbers of qualified immigrants from applying for health and welfare...

Americans have always stubbornly clung to the myth of egalitarianism, of the supremacy of the individual average man. But here, at long last, Pulitzer Prize-winning critic William A. Henry III takes on, and debunks, some basic, fundamentally ingrained ideas: that everyone is pretty much alike (and should be); that...

A genuinely global survey of world poverty from 1500 to the present day, Poverty in World History focuses upon the period from around 1500 onwards when poverty became a global issue, and uses the process of globalization as the chief lens through which to study and understand poverty in world history.

The result is both a tying together of significant strands of world history, and an examination of changing attitudes towards poverty and poor relief throughout the world. This wide ranging study underscores a major consequence of increased cultural and economic interaction...

A genuinely global survey of world poverty from 1500 to the present day, Poverty in World History focuses upon the period from around 1500 onwards when poverty became a global issue, and uses the process of globalization as the chief lens through which to study and understand poverty in world history.

The result is both a tying together of significant strands of world history, and an examination of changing attitudes towards poverty and poor relief throughout the world. This wide ranging study underscores a major consequence of increased cultural and economic interaction among the...

Paying for Progress in China is a collection of essays which trace the causes of this growing inequality, using new data including surveys, interviews, newly available official statistics and...