A compulsively-readable social history and a brilliant new addition to New Press' acclaimed People's History series in which Pimpare vividly describes poverty from the perspective of poor and welfare-reliant Americans from the big cities to the rural countryside. Through prodigious archival research and lucid analysis, Pimpare details the ways in which charity and aid for the poor have been inseparable from the scorn and disapproval of those who could help them.