In A People's History of Poverty in America, political scientist Stephen Pimpare brings the human lives and real-life stories of those who struggle with poverty in America to the foreground, vividly describing life as poor and welfare-reliant Americans experience it, from the big city to the rural countryside. Prodigiously researched, A People's History of Poverty in America unearths rich, poignant, and often surprising testimonies—both heart-wrenching and humorous—that range from the early days of the United States to the present day. Pimpare shows us how the poor have found food, secured shelter, and created community, and, most important, he illuminates their 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. In telling these hidden stories, Pimpare argues eloquently for a fundamental rethinking of poverty, one that includes both a more nuanced understanding of the history of the American welfare state, and a meaningful—and truly accurate—new definition of the poverty line. Hailed by Kirkus Reviews as an “illuminating history of America's poor” and a “useful counter against those who blame the poor for their bad luck,” A People's History of Poverty in America reminds us that poverty is not in itself a moral failure, but our failure to understand it may well be.

In Poverty and Neglected Tropical Diseases in the American Rural South, Christine Crudo Blackburn and Macey T. Lively study regions of the United States rarely acknowledged by the average American. These are regions of extreme poverty in the rural American South where a mixture of historical discrimination, structural discrimination, lack of opportunities, and decaying infrastructure conspire to create an environment conducive to chronic, debilitating diseases known as Neglected Tropical Diseases (NTDs). Blackburn and Lively explore the conditions that allow NTDs to thrive in a wealthy nation like the United States when such diseases are typically associated with the poorest communities in Africa, Asia, and South America. Poverty and Neglected Tropical Diseases pulls back the curtain on the reality of poverty and disease in America and tell the story of failing sanitation infrastructure, the lack of clean water, the inability to access healthcare, and the lack of financial security through the eyes of those living it every day.

Selected testimonies to living history—speeches, letters, poems, songs—offered by the people who make history happen, but are often left out of history books: women, workers, nonwhites. Featuring introductions to the original texts by Howard Zinn. New voices featured in this 10th Anniversary Edition include Chelsea Manning, speaking after her 35-year prison sentence); Naomi Klein, speaking from the Occupy Wall Street encampment in Liberty Square; a member of Dream Defenders, a youth organization that confronts systemic racial inequality; members of the Undocumented Youth movement, who occupied, marched, and demonstrated in support of the DREAM Act; a member of the Day Laborers movement; Chicago Teachers Union strikers; and several critics of the Obama administration, including Glenn Greenwald, on governmental secrecy.

The voices of famous and lesser known figures in America's quest to reduce poverty are collected for the first time in this comprehensive historical anthology. The book traces the most important ideas and contributions of citizens, activists, labour leaders, scholars, politicians, and governmental agencies to ensure American citizens the basics of food, housing, employment, education, and health care. The book follows the idea of poverty reduction from Thomas Paine's agrarian justice to Josiah Quincy's proposal for the construction of poorhouses; from the Freedmen's Bureau to Sitting Bull's demand for money and supplies; from Coxey's army of the unemployed to Jane Addams's Hull House; from the Civil Works Administration to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s call for an Economic Bill of Rights; and from William Julius Wilson's universal programme of reform to George W. Bush's armies of compassion.

New York Times Bestseller This American Book Award winning title about Native American struggle and resistance radically reframes more than 400 years of US history A New York Times Bestseller and the basis for the HBO docu-series Exterminate All the Brutes, directed by Raoul Peck, this 10th anniversary edition of An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States includes both a new foreword by Peck and a new introduction by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz. Unflinchingly honest about the brutality of this nation’s founding and its legacy of settler-colonialism and genocide, the impact of Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s 2014 book is profound. This classic is revisited with new material that takes an incisive look at the post-Obama era from the war in Afghanistan to Charlottesville’s white supremacy-fueled rallies, and from the onset of the pandemic to the election of President Biden. Writing from the perspective of the peoples displaced by Europeans and their white descendants, she centers Indigenous voices over the course of four centuries, tracing their perseverance against policies intended to obliterate them. Today in the United States, there are more than five hundred federally recognized Indigenous nations comprising nearly three million people, descendants of the fifteen million Native people who once inhabited this land. The centuries-long genocidal program of the US settler-colonial regimen has largely been omitted from history. With a new foreword from Raoul Peck and a new introduction from Dunbar Ortiz, this classic bottom-up peoples’ history explodes the silences that have haunted our national narrative. Big Concept Myths That America's founding was a revolution against colonial powers in pursuit of freedom from tyranny That Native people were passive, didn’t resist and no longer exist That the US is a “nation of immigrants” as opposed to having a racist settler colonial history

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, and who should benefit from it. Many of the program's implementers took seriously the federal mandate to empower the poor as they pushed for a more participatory form of democracy that would include more citizens in the political, cultural, and economic life of the city. At the center of this book are the vitally important but virtually forgotten grassroots activists who administered federal War on Poverty programs, including church ministers, federal program volunteers, students, local administrators, civil rights activists, and the poor themselves. The moderate Great Society liberalism that motivated the architects of the federal programs certainly galvanized local antipoverty activists in Houston. However, their antipoverty philosophy was driven further by prophetic religious traditions and visions of participatory democracy and community organizing championed by the New Left and iconoclastic figures like Saul Alinsky. By focusing on these local actors, Phelps shows that grassroots activists in Houston were influenced by a much more diverse set of intellectual and political traditions, fueling their efforts to expand the meaning of democracy. Ultimately, this episode in Houston's history reveals both the possibilities and the limits of urban democracy in the twentieth century.

This "brilliant and moving history of the American people" ("Library Journal") presents more than 500 years of American social and cultural history, going well beyond the wars and presidencies contained in traditional texts to tell the stories of working men and women. Abridged for use in the classroom.

The first interdisciplinary reference to cover the socioeconomic and political history, the movements, and the changing face of poverty in the United States. Poverty in the United States: An Encyclopedia of History, Politics, and Policy follows the history of poverty in the United States with an emphasis on the 20th century, and examines the evolvement of public policy and the impact of critical movements in social welfare such as the New Deal, the War on Poverty, and, more recently, the "end of welfare as we know it." Encompassing the contributions of hundreds of experts, including historians, sociologists, and political scientists, this resource provides a much broader level of information than previous, highly selective works. With approximately 300 alphabetically-organized topics, it covers topics and issues ranging from affirmative action to the Bracero Program, the Great Depression, and living wage campaigns to domestic abuse and unemployment. Other entries describe and analyze the definitions and explanations of poverty, the relationship of the welfare state to poverty, and the political responses by the poor, middle-class professionals, and the policy elite.

In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson declared an "unconditional war" on poverty in the form of sweeping federal programs to assist millions of Americans. Two decades later, President Reagan drastically cut such programs, claiming that welfare encouraged dependency and famously quipping, "Some years ago, the federal government declared war on poverty, and poverty won." These opposing policy positions and the ideologies informing them have been well studied. Here, the focus turns to the influence of popular art and entertainment on beliefs about poverty's causes and potential cures. These new essays interrogate the representation of poverty in film, television, music, photography, painting, illustration and other art forms from the late 19th century to the present. They map when, how, and why producers of popular culture represent--or ignore--poverty, and what assumptions their works make and encourage.