San Antonio College Library

In the years following the Civil War, a veritable army of homeless men swept across America's "wageworkers' frontier" and forged a beguiling and bedeviling counterculture known as "hobohemia." Jealously guarding the American road as the preserve of white manhood, hoboes swaggered onto center stage of the new urban culture. DePastino tells the epic story of hobohemia's rise and fall, drawing on sources ranging from diaries, letters, and police reports...

"In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a major transformation was occurring in many spheres of society: people with every sort of disability were increasingly being marginalized, excluded, and incarcerated. Disabled but still productive factory workers were being fired, and developmentally disabled individuals who had previously contributed domestic or agricultural labor in homes or on farms were being sent to institutions and poorhouses....