Poverty and Policy in American History is about people who needed help in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is about the ways in which the perception of poverty and other forms of dependence affected the development of public programs and the conduct of voluntary reform. It also about the ways in which people have written about welfare.
The book contains three chapters and opens with a description of the life and death of a poor family in early twentieth-century Philadelphia based on case records. It attempts to show many of the themes in the lives of the poor through the close analysis of one extended example. The second chapter moves back in time and consists of four case studies drawn from the project's empirical research. The first case study takes up the history of a neglected institution, the poorhouse. The second case reports on a survey of the causes of pauperism undertaken by the New York Board of State Charities in the mid-1870s. The third case analyzes a sample of the seven special schedules of the 1880 U.S. census, which enumerated the ""defective, dependent, and delinquent"" population. The final case uses a register of tramps from various places in New York State during the mid-1870s to assess the relation between popular images of tramps and what appeared to be their actual characteristics. The third chapter uses the results of the project's research and other recent work on related topics to examine American historical writing about dependence as a field and offers a sympathetic critique.

PrefaceAcknowledgmentsIntroductionChapter 1 Families and Welfare: a Philadelphia Case The Sullivan Family Themes in the History of the Sullivan FamilyChapter 2 Poorhouses, Paupers, and Tramps Part I From Family Refuge to Old Age Home: the Demographic History of the Erie County, New York, Poorhouse from 1829 to 1886 Aggregate Trends in Poorhouse Composition Conclusion Part II Early Social Science and the Causes of Pauperism The Design of the Report The Sample Institutional Demography: Age, Sex, Birthplace Hoyt and the Causes of Pauperism The Act of 1875 and the Creation of Poorhouse Records Poorhouse Demography Conclusion Part III "The Morphology of Evil" The Problem of Social Categories The Demography of Dependence Conclusion Part IV New York's Tramps and the Problem of Causal Attribution in the 1870s The Tramp Problem The Characteristics of Tramps The Problem of Causal AttributionChapter 3 American Historians and Dependence Historians and Philanthropy: Urban Masses and Moral Order in America as the Culmination of a Historiographical Tradition Historians and Institutions: David Rothman and Asylums The History of Public Welfare: Roy Lubove on Social InsuranceEpilogue: The Significance of Welfare HistoryAppendixIndex