Kategoria BISAC: Social Science >> Poverty & Homelessness

As orphan asylums ceased to exist in the late twentieth century, interest in them dwindled as well. Yet, from the Civil War to the Great Depression, America's dependent children--children whose families were unable to care for them--received more aid from orphan asylums than from any other means. This important omission in the growing literature on poverty in America is addressed in "Second Home."

As Timothy Hacsi shows, most children in nineteenth-century orphan asylums were "half-orphans," children with one living parent who was unable to provide for them. The asylums spread widely...

Hailed in her native Campbell County, Tennessee, as the Mother Teresa of the coal country, Tilda Kemplen was a teacher, activist, and founder and executive director of Mountain Communities Child Care and Development Centers (MCCCDC). In recognition of her work on behalf of impoverished children and families in central Appalachia, Kemplen was presented in 1980 with the American Institute for Public Service s Jefferson Award for Outstanding Public Service Benefi ting Local Communities.

Kemplen movingly describes her struggles to educate herself, her years as a teacher in rural schools and...

In A People s War on Poverty, Wesley G. Phelps investigates the on-the-ground implementation of President Lyndon Johnson s War on Poverty during the 1960s and 1970s. He argues that the fluid interaction between federal policies, urban politics, and grassroots activists created a significant site of conflict over the meaning of American democracy and the rights of citizenship that historians have largely overlooked. In Houston in particular, the War on Poverty spawned fierce political battles that revealed fundamental disagreements over what democracy meant, how far it should extend,...

With the spread of neoliberal projects, responsibility for the welfare of minority and poor citizens has shifted from states to local communities. Businesses, municipalities, grassroots activists, and state functionaries share in projects meant to help vulnerable populations become self-supportive. Ironically, such projects produce odd discursive blends of justice, solidarity, and wellbeing, and place the languages of feminist and minority rights side by side with the language of apolitical consumerism. Using theoretical concepts of economic citizenship and emotional capitalism,...

In the early twentieth century, a time of political fragmentation and social upheaval in China, poverty became the focus of an anguished national conversation about the future of the country. Investigating the lives of the urban poor in China during this critical era, Guilty of Indigence examines the solutions implemented by a nation attempting to deal with "society's most fundamental problem." Interweaving analysis of shifting social viewpoints, the evolution of poor relief institutions, and the lived experiences of the urban poor, Janet Chen explores the development of Chinese...

In the United States, the causes and even the meanings of poverty are disconnected from the causes and meanings of global poverty. The "Routledge Handbook of Poverty in the United States" provides an authoritative overview of the relationship of poverty with the rise of neoliberal capitalism in the context of globalization.

Reorienting its national economy towards a global logic, US domestic policies have promoted a market-based strategy of economic development and growth as the obvious solution to alleviating poverty, affecting approaches to the problem discursively, politically,...