Progress and History

About This Book

2013 Notable Title in American Intellectual History from the Society for U.S. Intellectual HistorySince 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...