TY  - BOOK
AU  - SenGupta,Gunja
TI  - From Slavery to Poverty: The Racial Origins of Welfare in New York, 1840-1918 
SN  - 9780814708866
AV  - HV99.N59 S43 2009 
U1  - 362.509747109034 
PY  - 2009///]
CY  - New York, NY : 
PB  - New York University Press, 
KW  - African Americans
KW  - New York (State)
KW  - New York
KW  - History
KW  - Public welfare
KW  - HISTORY / United States / State & Local / Middle Atlantic (DC, DE, MD, NJ, NY, PA)
KW  - bisacsh
KW  - SenGupta
KW  - benevolence
KW  - citizenship
KW  - citys
KW  - definition
KW  - gendered
KW  - interlocking
KW  - municipal
KW  - network
KW  - poverty
KW  - private
KW  - promoted
KW  - racialized
KW  - relief
KW  - reveals
KW  - that
N1  - Frontmatter --; Contents --; Acknowledgments --; List of Illustrations --; Introduction --; PART I --; 1 Subaltern Worlds in Antebellum New York --; 2 The White Republic and “Workfare” --; 3 Not White, but Worthy --; PART II --; 4 The Color of Juvenile Justice --; 5 Celtic Sisters, Saxon Keepers --; PART III --; 6 Black Voluntarism and American Identities --; Epilogue --; Appendix --; Notes --; Index --; About the Author; restricted access
N2  - The racially charged stereotype of "welfare queen"-an allegedly promiscuous waster who uses her children as meal tickets funded by tax-payers-is a familiar icon in modern America, but as Gunja SenGupta reveals in From Slavery to Poverty, her historical roots run deep. For, SenGupta argues, the language and institutions of poor relief and reform have historically served as forums for inventing and negotiating identity.Mining a broad array of sources on nineteenth-century New York City’s interlocking network of private benevolence and municipal relief, SenGupta shows that these institutions promoted a racialized definition of poverty and citizenship. But they also offered a framework within which working poor New Yorkers-recently freed slaves and disfranchised free blacks, Afro-Caribbean sojourners and Irish immigrants, sex workers and unemployed laborers, and mothers and children-could challenge stereotypes and offer alternative visions of community. Thus, SenGupta argues, long before the advent of the twentieth-century welfare state, the discourse of welfare in its nineteenth-century incarnation created a space to talk about community, race, and nation; about what it meant to be “American,” who belonged, and who did not. Her work provides historical context for understanding why today the notion of "welfare"-with all its derogatory “un-American” connotations-is associated not with middle-class entitlements like Social Security and Medicare, but rather with programs targeted at the poor, which are wrongly assumed to benefit primarily urban African Americans
UR  - https://doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9780814708866.001.0001
UR  - https://www.degruyter.com/isbn/9780814708866
UR  - https://www.degruyter.com/document/cover/isbn/9780814708866/original
ER  -