Class Unknown: Undercover Investigations of American Work and Poverty from the Progressive Era to the Present
Mark Pittenger
Abstract
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. This book 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 undercla ... More
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. This book 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, this book offers a new perspective on contemporary debates over how we understand and represent our own society and its class divisions.
Keywords:
working class,
poor,
underclass,
American social thought,
class division,
intellectuals
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2012 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780814767405 |
| Published to NYU Press Scholarship Online: March 2016 |
DOI:10.18574/nyu/9780814767405.001.0001 |
