Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Uses of Charity: The Poor on Relief in the Nineteenth-Century Metropolis

The Uses of Charity: The Poor on Relief in the Nineteenth-Century Metropolis

Mandler, Peter

Hardcover

Series: Anniversary Collection

General SociologyPoverty & Social Work

ISBN10: 0812282140
ISBN13: 9780812282146
Publisher: Univ Penn Pr Anniversary Colle
Published: Jan 29 1990
Pages: 264
Weight: 1.23
Height: 0.63 Width: 6.14 Depth: 9.21
Language: English

Who were the poor of the world's first metropolises, and how did they survive? This collection of eight original essays proposes a revisionist perspective on poverty and its relief in the nineteenth-century city, emphasizing the position of women and children and the importance of charity and welfare in their lives.

Historians have tended to focus on the motives and achievements of the benefactors and institutions, in part because donors left behind such rich documentation. These essays, taking their cue from recent trends in the social sciences, address charity from below, as experienced from the point of view of the recipients, and challenge assumptions about the marginality and dependency of the poor.

The authors find that the demand for charity was constant, that the forms in which it was offered rarely matched the forms in which it was needed, that the poor used considerable ingenuity in adapting both the gifts and themselves to meet their needs, and that their attitudes toward charity often were not what either donors or historians have believed.

The Uses of Charity is a valuable resource for students and scholars of history, anthropology, sociology, and women's studies.

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