Researching Poverty in the United States

This is a collection of 750 articles in three volumes exploring the causes, history and enduring effects of poverty. The scope of this encyclopedia encompasses the relative individual and societal aspects of poverty, and examines the institutions that focus on the alleviation of poverty.

This encyclopedia offers over 170 entries on policies implemented to alleviate poverty--their historic contexts, rationales, and legacies–from the colonial period to the present. It also features separate essays on how poverty has been addressed at federal, state, local, and Native American tribal levels throughout U.S. history as well a chronology and a collection of primary documents.

Some 300 entries by historians, sociologists, political scientists and others on the history of poverty in the United States with an emphasis on the 20th century, and the evolution of public policy and the impact of critical movements in social welfare such as the New Deal, the War on Poverty, and, more recently, the "end of welfare as we know it."