• Preface


• Chapter One


• The Undeserving Poor: Morals, Culture and Biology


• Chapter Two


• Poverty and the Politics of Liberation


• Chapter Three


• Intellectual Foundations of the War on Poverty and Great Society


• Chapter Four


• Interpretations of Poverty in the Conservative Ascendance


• Chapter Five


• The Rise and Fall of the "Underclass "


• Epilogue


• What Kind of a Problem is Poverty?


• Acknowledgments


• Index

Michael B. Katz is Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History and a Research Associate in the Population Studies Center at the University of Pennsylvania. The author of Why Don't American Cities Burn?, The Price of Citizenship: Redefining the American Welfare State, and In the Shadow of the Poorhouse: A Social History of Welfare in America, he is a past-president of the History of Education Society and the Urban History Association. The first edition of The Undeserving Poor was a semi-finalist for the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award and a finalist for the American Sociological Association's Distinguished Book Award.

The Undeserving Poor is a history of the ideas that underlie America's enduring confrontation with poverty. The book shows that poverty remains a national disgrace in part because of the way we define and think about it - which, in turn, shapes the energy we put, or don't put, into its eradication.