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

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter New York University Press Backlist eBook-Package 2000-2013
• VerfasserIn: Pittenger, Mark,
• Place / Publishing House: New York, NY : : New York University Press, , [2012]; ©2012
• Year of Publication: 2012
• Language: English
• Series: Culture, Labor, History ; 4
• Physical Description: 1 online resource

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.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- PART I. A WORLD OF DIFFERENCE -- 1. Writing Class in a World of Difference -- PART II. BETWEEN THE WARS, 1920–1941 -- 2. Vagabondage and Efficiency -- 3. Finding Facts -- PART III. THE DECLINING SIGNIFICANCE OF CLASS, 1941–1961 -- 4. War and Peace, Class and Culture -- 5. Crossing New Lines -- PART IV. CONCLUSION -- 6. Finding the Line in Postmodern America, 1960‒2010 -- Notes -- Index -- About the Author