Michael B. Katz

"American society today is hardly recognizable from what it was a century ago. Integrated schools, an information economy, and independently successful women are but a few of the remarkable changes that have occurred over just a few generations. Still, the country today is influenced by many of the same factors that revolutionized life in the late nineteenth century - immigration, globalization, technology, and shifting social norms - and is plagued by many of the same problems, including economic, social, and racial inequality. One Nation Divisible, a history of twentieth-century American life by Michael B. Katz and Mark J. Stern, weaves together information from the latest census with a century's worth of data to show how trends in American life have changed while inequality and diversity have endured." "On Nation Divisible examines all aspect so of work, family, and social life to paint a broad picture of the American experience over the long arc of the twentieth century. Katz and Stern track the transformations of the U.S. workforce, from the farm to the factory to the office tower. Technological advances at the beginning and end of the twentieth century altered the demand for work, causing large population movements between regions. These labor market shifts fed both the explosive growth of cities at the dawn of the industrial age and the sprawling suburbanization of today. On Nation Divisible also discusses how the norms of growing up and growing old have shifted. Whereas the typical life course once involved early marriage and living with large, extended families, Americans today commonly take years before marrying or settling on a career path, and often live in non-traditional households. Katz and Stern examine the growing influence of government on trends in American life, showing how new laws have contributed to more diverse neighborhoods and schools, and increased opportunity for minorities, women, and the elderly. One Nation Divisible also explores the abiding economic paradox in American life: while many individuals are able to climb the financial ladder, inequality of income and wealth remains pervasive throughout the society." "The last hundred years have been marked by incredible transformations in American society. Great advances in civil rights have been tempered significantly by rising economic inequality. One Nation Divisible provides a compelling new analysis of the issues that continue to divide this country and the powerful role of government in both mitigating and exacerbating them."--BOOK JACKET.

"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 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. Why have American governments proved unable to redesign a welfare system that will satisfy anyone? Why has public policy proved unable to eradicate poverty and prevent the deterioration of major cities? What strategies have helped poor people survive the poverty endemic to urban history? How did urban schools become unresponsive bureaucracies that fail to educate most of their students? Are there fresh, constructive ways to think about welfare, poverty, and public education? Throughout the book Katz shows how interpretations of the past, grounded in analytic history, can free us of comforting myths and help us to reframe discussions of these great public issues.

This book suggests that the creation of public school systems was essentially a conservative response to rapid industrialization and that myths about the history of public education have hindered reform by masking weaknesses inherent in its origins.

"In this work, Katz traces the evolution of the welfare state from colonial relief programs through the war on poverty and into our own age, marked by the "end of welfare as we know it."" "Katz argues that in the last decades, three great forces - a ferocious war on dependence, which has singled out the most vulnerable; the devolution of authority within both government and the private sector; and the application of market models to social policy - have permeated all aspects of the social contract. This book shows how these changes have propelled America toward a future of increased inequality and decreased security as individuals compete for success in an open market with ever fewer protections against misfortune, power, and greed."--Dust jacket.

In 1896, W.E.B. DuBois began research that resulted three years later in the publication of his great classic of urban sociology and history, The Philadelphia Negro. Today, a group of the nation's leading historians and sociologists celebrate the centenary of his project through a reappraisal of his book. Motivated by DuBois's deeply humane vision of racial equality, they draw on ethnography, intellectual and social history, and statistical analysis to situate DuBois and his pioneering study in the intellectual milieu of the late nineteenth century, consider his contributions to the subsequent social scientific and historical studies of the city, and assess the meaning of his work for today.

Examines the origins of social welfare in the United States, from the days of the colonial poorhouse through the current tragedy of the homeless, and explains why the disliked and often criticized system still exists.

This book deals with the issue of poverty and our failure to deal with it. The author examines the ideas and assumptions that have shaped pubic policy from Johnson's War on Poverty to Reagan's war on welfare. He probes the categories used to describe poor people ('deserving' and 'undeserving'), reassesses the work of the influential thinkers, and exposes the ideological bias of such controversial concepts as 'the culture of poverty' and, more recently, 'the underclass.' In both the conservative and the liberal camps, he identifies a peculiar American tendency to blame poverty on the individual deficiencies of the poor, rather than on the social forces that generate it. -- Publisher description