San Antonio College Library

Does the American Dream still exist when nearly 30 million Americans live in families in which workers find a paycheck and poverty in the same envelope? Just as Michael Harrington's The Other America shocked the nation with its disclosure of poverty in the 1960s, John E. Schwarz and Thomas J. Volgy's The Forgotten Americans exposes the breadth of poverty that exists today among responsible, hardworking Americans. At the end of the prosperous 1980s,...

"In No Shame in My Game, anthropologist Katherine Newman presents a view of inner-city poverty radically different from that commonly accepted. The all-too-prevalent picture we get of the poor today - in the media, in the political sphere, and in scholarly studies - is of alienated minorities living in big-city ghettos, lacking in values and family structure, criminally inclined, and permanently dependent on government handouts." "What Newman reveals,...

In this timely work, William Kelso analyzes how the persistence of poverty has reversed liberal and conservative positions during the last thirty years. While liberals in the 1960s hoped to eliminate the causes of poverty, today they increasingly seem resigned to merely treating its effects. The original liberal objective of giving the poor a helping hand by promoting equal opportunity has given way to a new agenda of entitlement and equal results....

Eberstadt argues that the official poverty rate is incapable of accurately representing long-term trends for material want in modern America, and that standards of living for the official poverty population are far higher today than they were in 1964 or 1965, at the start of the War on Poverty.

"Twenty years after the 'long hot summer'... In February of this year, former Senator Fred Harris told a Today Show audience that the plight of black Americans has worsened since 1968, and the New York Times ran a feature article, '20 Years After the Kerner Report: Three Societies, All Separate." The famous Kerner Report shocked the nation almost as much as the rioting that had prompted President Johnson to appoint the commission, headed by Governor...

This book gives voice to the 57 million Americans--including 21 percent of the nation's children--who are sandwiched between poor and middle class. While government programs help the needy and politicians woo the more fortunate, the "Missing Class" is largely invisible and ignored. Through the experiences of nine families, sociologists Newman and Chen trace the unique problems faced by individuals in this large and growing demographic--the "near poor"--Who...

Presents an examination of the working poor in the United States. Several families describe their lives as members of the working poor community where one unexpected expense, sudden illness, or a missed payment could mean financial ruin. The genesis of the show was a book by David Shipler, "The Working Poor."