The "Underclass" Debate: Views from History / Edition 1

by Michael B. Katz

Overview

Do ominous reports of an emerging "underclass" reveal an unprecedented crisis in American society? Or are social commentators simply rediscovering the tragedy of recurring urban poverty, as they seem to do every few decades? Although social scientists and members of the public make frequent assumptions about these questions, they have little information about the crucial differences between past and present. By providing a badly needed historical context, these essays reframe today's "underclass" debate. Realizing that labels of "social pathology" echo fruitless distinctions between the "deserving" and "undeserving" poor, the contributors focus not on individual and family behavior but on a complex set of processes that have been at work over a long period, degrading the inner cities and, inevitably, the nation as a whole.


How do individuals among the urban poor manage to survive? How have they created a dissident "infrapolitics?" How have social relations within the urban ghettos changed? What has been the effect of industrial restructuring on poverty? Besides exploring these questions, the contributors discuss the influence of African traditions on the family patterns of African Americans, the origins of institutions that serve the urban poor, the reasons for the crisis in urban education, the achievements and limits of the War on Poverty, and the role of income transfers, earnings, and the contributions of family members in overcoming poverty. The message of the essays is clear: Americans will flourish or fail together.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691006284
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	12/07/1992
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	520
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.25(h) x (d)

About the Author

Michael B. Katz is Stanley I. Sheerr Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author or editor of ten books on the history of education, social policy, and poverty, including Poverty and Policy in American History (Academic Press), In the Shadow of the Poorhouse: A Social History of Welfare in America (Basic Books), and The Undeserving Poor: From the War on Poverty to the War on Welfare (Pantheon).

Table of Contents

	Preface	vii
	Introduction: The Urban "Underclass" as a Metaphor of Social Transformation	3
Part 1	The Roots of Ghetto Poverty
Chapter 1	Southern Diaspora: Origins of the Northern "Underclass"	27
Chapter 2	Blacks in the Urban North: The "Underclass Question" in Historical Perspective	55
Part 2	The Transformation of America's Cities
Chapter 3	The Structures of Urban Poverty: The Reorganization of Space and Work in Three Periods of American History	85
Chapter 4	Housing the "Underclass"	118
Part 3	Families, Networks, and Opportunities
Chapter 5	The Ethnic Niche and the Structure of Opportunity: Immigrants and Minorities in New York City	161
Chapter 6	The Emergence of "Underclass" Family Patterns, 1900-1940	194
Chapter 7	Poverty and Family Composition since 1940	220
Chapter 8	Social Science, Social Policy, and the Heritage of African-American Families	254
Part 4	Politics, Institutions, and the State
Chapter 9	The Black Poor and the Politics of Opposition in a New South City, 1929-1970	293
Chapter 10	Nineteenth-Century Institutions: Dealing with the Urban "Underclass"	334
Chapter 11	Urban Education and the "Truly Disadvantaged": The Historical Roots of the Contemporary Crisis, 1945-1990	366
Chapter 12	The State, the Movement, and the Urban Poor: The War on Poverty and Political Mobilization in the 1960s	403
	Conclusion: Reframing the "Underclass" Debate	440
	Contributors	479
	Name Index	483
	Subject Index	499