Class Unknown : Undercover Investigations of American Work and Poverty from the Progressive Era to the Present / Mark Pittenger.

9780814724293

New York, NY : : New York University Press, [2012]

©2012

English

In English.

1 online resource

10.18574/nyu/9780814767405.001.0001 doi

HN90.S6 P58 2012

305.50973

Since the Gilded Age, social scientists, middle-class reformers, and writers have left the comforts of their offices to "pass" as steel workers, coal miners, assembly-line laborers, waitresses, hoboes, and other working and poor people in an attempt to gain a fuller and more authentic understanding of the lives of the working class and the poor. In this first, sweeping study of undercover investigations of work and poverty in America, award-winning historian Mark Pittenger examines how intellectuals were shaped by their experiences with the poor, and how despite their sympathy toward working-class people, they unintentionally helped to develop the contemporary concept of a degraded and "other" American underclass. While contributing to our understanding of the history of American social thought, Class Unknown offers a new perspective on contemporary debates over how we understand and represent our own society and its class divisions.

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Culture, Labor, History ; ; 4

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