The dispossessed

by Jacqueline Jones

The specter of the "underclass" haunts the American imagination. Many books focus on a piece of the problem: either the North or South, blacks or whites, industrial or agricultural workers. Jacqueline Jones's sweeping chronicle of the roots of poverty reveals for the first time the full contours of this American tragedy. In a moving evocation of what it has meant to be down and out in America, this prizewinning historian explores the wrenching displacement of millions of rural Americans, both blacks and whites, beginning with the Civil War, and follows their great trek into the industrial centers and urban ghettos of the North. Through the stories of ordinary families, The Dispossessed systematically dismantles the myth of the "culture of poverty," challenging the central tenets of the underclass debate. Jones shows how family members of both sexes and all ages struggled mightily on cotton plantations, in coal mining camps, and in factory towns to piece together a livelihood through wa