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… (more)