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Copyright of Iluminuras is the property of Revista Iluminuras and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Estudos Ibero-Americanos is the property of EDIPUCRS - Editora Universitaria da PUCRS and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In 1931, Edgar Sydenstricker, the former statistician of the US Public Health Service, challenged the common belief that the 1918 influenza outbreak had affected "the rich and the poor alike." Using data from 112,317 participants in a 1918 US national survey, he observed that, on the contrary, both morbidity and mortality from the flu had been higher among the poor than among the rich. To explain these differences, Sydenstricker stratified the analyses by 2 measures of affluence collected in the survey: "economic status" (from "very poor" to "well-to-do") and household crowding (i.e. number of people per household room). Economic status was associated with influenza attack rates within categories of crowding, but not the opposite, suggesting that characteristics of poverty other than "household congestion" were the culprit of the poor's higher influenza burden. Attack rate ratios for influenza in infants and older adults were greater for the poor or very poor. Sydenstricker reanalyzed an already 12-year-old data set in the context of the Great Depression to build the evidence base relating poverty to ill health. For this purpose he used a stratification approach to assess confounding, mediation, and interaction before the concepts were formally named. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are, however, several descriptions prior to Parkinson's work suggestive of Parkinson's Disease (PD). Common causes of tremor of the head, not usually found in PD or other causes of parkinsonism, are essential tremor and dystonic tremor. Keywords: parkinsonism; Parkinson's disease; James Parkinson; history; diagnosis EN parkinsonism Parkinson's disease James Parkinson history diagnosis 741 743 3 08/05/22 20220801 NES 220801 James Parkinson, a Hoxton apothecary provided the first satisfying description of the shaking palsy and speculated. [Extracted from the article]

Historians of early modern England are aware that the legal testimony of poor, dependent, and subordinated individuals was regarded with suspicion. Contemporaries believed that labouring people would provide false evidence in return for 'gifts' or 'rewards'. To what extent did such assumptions accurately reflect the processes whereby such witnesses came to depose for their 'betters'? This article uses sixteenth‐ and early seventeenth‐century perjury and subornation suits from the court of Star Chamber to reconstruct labouring people's experiences and understandings of the politics of testimony. In explicating the structural and material factors that could militate against their deposing, override their reservations about doing so, and colour the contents of the depositions they gave, it makes two broader contributions to our understanding of the period. On the one hand, it presents a markedly more pessimistic account of the social relations involved in the increase in litigation. On the other, it reappraises a category of source—depositions—that historians have long regarded as providing singularly privileged access to the expressions of social groups that left little trace in the historical record. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Millah: Jurnal Studi Agama is the property of Millah: Jurnal Studi Agama and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

One of the most effective advocates for children was also one of the greatest writers in the history of the English language: Charles Dickens. Physicians seeking an understanding of what poverty and exploitation look like from a child's point of view could hardly find richer sources of insight than such Dickens novels as I Oliver Twist i , I David Copperfield i , I Bleak House i and I Little Dorrit i . The educational worth of Dickens' works is undiminished by time, and it has even been suggested that works such as I Oliver Twist i could serve today as a textbook of child abuse [[10]]. [Extracted from the article]

Throughout the twentieth century, historians debated what happened to the living standards of ordinary men, women, and children during the British industrial revolution. But where this historical question once attracted attention from across the methodological spectrum, the past two decades have seen cultural and qualitative approaches eclipsed by statistical accounts written by economic historians. In this article, I will argue that the marginalisation of social and cultural approaches to historical living standards has been to the detriment of our understanding. Through an analysis of two discrete sources of evidence – nineteenth-century budget data and working-class autobiography – this article sheds new light on the diets and living standards of the labouring poor. It rejects the optimism/pessimism dichotomy that continues to frame quantitative analyses and presents a more nuanced account that examines how experiences varied according to region, gender and age. The article concludes that it is not only that it is possible to incorporate cultural change into our analyses of living standards, but that it is necessary to do so in order to grasp this period in all its complexity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Arrests for participation in the global cocaine trade surged in Peru during the 1970s. This article uses court cases to explore complaints in Ayacucho of wrongful arrests in the cocaine trade, examining claims of innocence, false confessions under torture, and police and judicial misconduct between 1976 and 1981. What emerges is a picture of abuse and lives upended by the cocaine trade's repression, often on dubious grounds. Ayacucho police routinely tortured during interrogations, engaging in the kinds of violence that became systematic during counterinsurgent warfare against the Shining Path and its presumed supporters. These cases reveal that many Ayacuchanos profoundly distrusted their police and court systems. That was especially true for impoverished--and predominantly rural and indigenous--men and women who could not afford lawyers or bribes. Ayacuchanos' devastating experiences of cocaine repression fueled anger toward the police, which Shining Path militants capitalized on early in their armed struggle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the nineteenth century, the distribution of corpses to anatomists was based on a reciprocal logic. In exchange for state-funded care, the poor subordinated their bodies to the advancement of science. Recent research has shown that this practice was increasingly contested in continental Europe from the late nineteenth century onwards. In this article, the Belgian debate on dissection without consent is scrutinised from multiple perspectives. I argue that political and legal debates on the treatment of the poor and the ownership of the dead led to changes in the distribution of corpses for dissection. As indigent patients obtained ownership of their bodies, anatomists increasingly had to comply with the standard of consent. By contextualising the emergence of anatomical donation, this article sheds light on a neglected topic in the social history of anatomy and on the changing significance of death customs, which began to express the will of the deceased. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the work of the Charity Organisation Society (COS) in assessing applications for children's admission to care in the late nineteenth‐century. It is based on an archive study of records kept by the ‘Waifs and Strays’ Society in England and Wales between 1882 and 1899, in particular 270 family assessments conducted by the COS. The focus was on parental behaviour rather than children's needs, with a strong narrative of taking children away to relieve parents of a burden. The research illuminates contested assumptions about childhood in the period, with resonance for current issues in policy and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The consumer behaviour of the poor in the long eighteenth century has attracted more historical attention in recent years. Yet, we have little understanding of whether regional factors affected consumption or how the poor's ownership of household goods was influenced by level of poverty and the life-cycle. By focusing on Kent and drawing comparisons to other counties, this article argues that the material lives of the poor were improving by the late eighteenth century, but finds that there were distinct regional differences as the poor acquired more and better goods in London and the Home Counties than in relatively remote areas. Moreover, by using pauper inventories and labourers' probate inventories, the research finds that the poor were not a homogeneous group with similar levels of material wealth, but should be considered in terms of different subgroups which often led very different material lives to one another due to life-cyclerelated problems including sickness and old age. Labourers' probate inventories are found to represent a minority of the poor who were materially richer than most, whilst pauper inventories appear to represent a more typical subgroup of the poor that struggled to make do and owned most types of goods in smaller numbers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives. To evaluate rates of member compliance with Iowa’s Medicaid expansion premium disincentive program. Methods. We used 2014 to 2015 Iowa Medicaid data to construct rolling 12-month cohorts of Wellness Plan and Marketplace Choice members (Iowa’s 2 Medicaid expansion waiver programs for individuals £ 100% and 101%–138% of the federal poverty level, respectively), calculated completion rates for required activities (i.e., wellness examinations and health risk assessments), and identified factors associated with program compliance. Results. Overall, 18.5% of Wellness Plan and 12.5% of Marketplace Choice members completed both activities (P< .001). From 2014 to 2015, completion rates for both activities decreased for Wellness Plan members but increased for Marketplace Choice members. Members who were younger, male, or non-White were less likely to complete required activities. Conclusions. Approximately 81% of Wellness Plan members and 87% of Marketplace Choice members failed to comply with program requirements and should have been subject to paying premiums the following year or face disenrollment. Disparities in completion rates may exacerbate disparities in insurance coverage and health outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: During the past decade, the incomes of poor Americans have fallen or flat‐lined, housing costs have soared and public policy has failed to bridge the gap. As a result, the majority of poor renting families in America now devote at least half of their income to covering housing costs, and eviction has become a common yet consequential event in their lives. While housing is central to the lives of the urban poor, it remains marginal to the sociology of American inequality. This essay begins by charting the growing rent burden among low‐income households, and then draws on the unique contributions of Pierre Bourdieu to the study of the home to sketch an agenda for analyzing the roots and implications of the loss of affordable urban housing, a prerequisite for offering policy prescriptions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much has been written that details the decline in living standards following the 'credit crunch' in the UK. It remains that we understand to a lesser degree the lived reality of poverty through the Great Recession and into the era of austerity. This article draws on testimonies of 62 participants from low income households conducted in three different areas of the UK during 2012-13 to document the pressures that this period brought to bear on these households. According to these testimonies, the experience of poverty intensified in key respects: first, participants reported feeling, more than ever before, that they were 'existing, rather than living' due to the meagre budgets they were forced to live on; second, the precarious nature of work and social security contributed to a sense of insecurity that was all pervasive in our participants' lives; third, due to the pejorative political rhetoric and media coverage of poverty, our participants felt that their lives were placed under increased scrutiny which deleteriously impacted their wider relationships and sense of belonging. Our analysis demonstrates the profound consequences for those living on low incomes of the continued shift to residual forms of state welfare and the increased reliance on the 'Big Society' as a means to deal with the pressures identified in this article. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An accumulation of evidence suggests citizens with low incomes have relatively little influence over the policy decisions made by lawmakers in the United States. However, long before elected officials are asked to cast a final vote on a bill's passage, an equally important decision has already been made: the decision for government to focus its limited attention and agenda space on the issue at all. Therefore, it is possible that political inequality is infused earlier in the policymaking process at the agenda-setting stage if the issues held important by some citizens are given attention while the issues held important by others are not. To investigate this question, we develop novel state-level measures of citizens' issue priorities and find sizable differences in which issues poor and rich citizens think are most important and deserving of government attention. We then use bill introduction data from state legislatures to measure government attention and uncover evidence that state legislators are less likely to act on an issue when it is prioritized by low-income citizens as compared to affluent citizens. These findings have important implications for our understanding of political equality and the functioning of American democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In January 1866, journalist James Greenwood entered the Lambeth Workhouse disguised as a vagrant. Greenwood's account of his experience inspired a host of imitators, and inaugurated a mania for slum journalism. Critics have noted the voyeurism and the homoerotic subtext of Greenwood's ‘A Night in a Workhouse', but the impact of Victorian popular theatre on his narrative has received scant attention. This essay recuperates the links between workhouse and theatre: examining paupers' reception, criticism, and appropriation of popular forms of entertainment such as the pantomime and the music hall song, analysing the representation of the workhouse on the Victorian stage, and finally proposing the concept of the workhouse itself as a performance space. Greenwood provides a valuable source of information about the theatregoing habits of the houseless poor, the most marginalised demographic within audiences at the Victorian theatre. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tocqueville’s writings on pauperism have gained renewed attention in the last decade. Scholars study his Memoir on Pauperism (1835) to contextualize his thought in the nineteenth century, to question the extent of his liberalism, or to locate his policy solutions on a spectrum from private charity to state welfare. Yet Tocqueville’s response to pauperism must be interpreted in light of “the social question,” or the problem of how to alleviate not only the material ills of poverty, but also the phenomenon of social exclusion that accompanied it. His discussion of the social question, I argue, illuminates his particular theory of rights and their possibilities. His thoughts on the poor laws culminate in a novel theory of the educative potential of property rights. This theory of rights prompts us to revisit his position on extending political rights and on the role of political participation in overcoming class division. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Poverty is a persistent problem in the United States, affecting millions of people and many areas of public policy. Nevertheless, public officials have said relatively little about poverty in recent years. What do ordinary Americans think about poverty and government's role in fighting it? This article summarizes two decades of survey data-drawing on ANES, Gallup, NORC/GSS, Pew, and other national polls-to help answer these questions. Americans generally feel positively toward the poor, believe that fighting poverty should be a high priority for government, and favor spending more on the poor. But many people remain skeptical of "welfare," worry about dependence on government aid, and are dissatisfied with past efforts to reduce poverty. Thus, officials could interpret existing polls as a sign to increase or decrease government's role. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Evidence is growing that Wales was a distinctive ‘welfare region’ under the New Poor Law. Higher rates of out-relief, tense relations with London and a deep dislike of the workhouse system marked the Principality out as different. This article considers Welsh distinctiveness in the context of the ‘crusade against out-relief’. Launched in the early 1870s, the crusade saw out-relief numbers tumble nationally. Little is known about the crusade in Wales but it is often assumed that it was a non-event. It is argued here that this is entirely incorrect. Official statistics reveal that tens of thousands of outdoor paupers in Wales had their relief stopped. Crusaders were successful partly due to the misleading way the Poor Law inspectorate used official figures to portray Wales as a district on the brink of crisis. The turning of outdoor paupers into ‘folk devils’ by sections of the Welsh press was also pivotal. Welsh distinctiveness was not eradicated during the crusade, but it was eroded. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study investigates the effects of welfare reform in the United States in the 1990s on voting among low-income women. Using the November Current Population Surveys with the added Voting and Registration Supplement for the years 1990 through 2004 and exploiting changes in welfare policy across states and over time, we estimate the causal effects of welfare reform on women's voting registration and voting participation during the period in which welfare reform unfolded. During this time period, voter turnout was decreasing in the United States. We find robust evidence that welfare reform led to smaller declines in voting (about 3 to 4 percentage points, which translates to about 10% relative to the baseline mean) for women who were exposed to welfare reform compared to several different comparison groups of similar women who were much less exposed. The robust findings suggest that welfare reform had prosocial effects on civic participation, as characterized by voting. The effects were largely confined to presidential elections, were stronger in Democratic than Republican states, were stronger in states with stronger work incentive policies, and appeared to operate through employment, education, and income. (JEL D72, H53, I38, J21) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Historia 396 is the property of Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Valparaiso, Instituto de Historia and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The concept of gentrification has become stretched, both conceptually and geographically, in ways that both erode its utility and displace alternative ways of understanding the displacement of lower-income people by urban transformation. Among the negative consequences that we consider is that the resulting pressure to reframe analysis in terms of gentrification reinforces Anglo-American academic hegemony and increases the difficulty of introducing more appropriate theoretical approaches from scholars in, and of, the global South. We draw on the anthropological concepts of emic and etic analysis to illustrate the dangers of such erasure and displacement of alternative frames of understanding. At the same time, the theoretical extension of the concept of gentrification to replace alternative ways of thinking about the displacement of lower income populations, such as 'urban renewal', has reduced the analytical utility of gentrification itself by confusing different mechanisms by which this is achieved. We illustrate the problems through consideration of the sustained tradition of work on displacement in Hong Kong using other conceptual frames. We encourage greater openness to alternative critical traditions that offer insights into the dislocation of poorer urban populations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The public life of John Baptist de La Salle (165--1719) as saint and educational innovator is better known than his private life as a nonconforming ascetic. This article examines de La Salle's attitudes toward Augustinianism, Jansenism and mortification practices. It then explores the connection between his role as a social subversive and his mental world. While de La Salle's motivations were religious, his renunciation of the privileges of birth, office and wealth often evoked hostility, especially from members of the social elites. Most radical was de La Salle's determination to be poor, which entailed psychological and physical challenges that were powerfully expressed in his relationship with food. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years there has been growing acknowledgement of the place of workhouses within the range of institutional provision for mentally disordered people in nineteenth-century England. This article explores the situation in Bristol, where an entrenched workhouse-based model was retained for an extended period in the face of mounting external ideological and political pressures to provide a proper lunatic asylum. It signified a contest between the modernising, reformist inclinations of central state agencies and local bodies seeking to retain their freedom of action. The conflict exposed contrasting conceptions regarding the nature of services to which the insane poor were entitled.Bristol pioneered establishment of a central workhouse under the old Poor Law; ‘St Peter’s Hospital’ was opened in 1698. As a multi-purpose welfare institution its clientele included ‘lunatics’ and ‘idiots’, for whom there was specific accommodation from before the 1760s. Despite an unhealthy city centre location and crowded, dilapidated buildings, the enterprising Bristol authorities secured St Peter’s Hospital’s designation as a county lunatic asylum in 1823. Its many deficiencies brought condemnation in the national survey of provision for the insane in 1844. In the period following the key lunacy legislation of 1845, the Home Office and Commissioners in Lunacy demanded the replacement of the putative lunatic asylum within Bristol’s workhouse by a new borough asylum outside the city. The Bristol authorities resisted stoutly for several years, but were eventually forced to succumb and adopt the prescribed model of institutional care for the pauper insane. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In 2008, an era of unprecedented growth and prosperity came to an end, and the world was plunged into the Great Recession, a Global Financial Crisis (GFC)-the worst since the 1930s Great Depression. We examined whether it is low- or high-SES people that are most affected psychologically-and most likely to express concern about the future vitality of their group-by uncertainty associated with economic instability. In two experiments, we found that even though those lower in SES report more collective angst than their wealthier counterparts, those who are higher in SES are more likely to become concerned when presented with information that the economy is a bubble about to burst, elevating their collective angst levels. Both studies also showed that collective self-definitions as competent and warm were affected by wealth but not by economic instability. Competence ratings increased with increasing wealth, whereas warmth ratings were lower for those both lower and higher in wealth, compared to those with moderate wealth. In Experiment 2, we also found that opposition to immigration was higher for the high-income group in the unstable than in the stable economic prospect condition. We conclude that even though those lower in income experience chronic collective angst, collective angst levels for those higher in income are elevated when they fear they may be living in a bubble economy-a bubble that may burst any moment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper advocates a greater emphasis on racialization research, and consists of observations and research questions that could add to our understanding of racialization. Such understanding will be useful and perhaps even necessary, as a variety of world events result in continuing population movements as well as economic and political crises that could increase intra and international conflicts. Any of these could lead to the further racialization of refugees, migrants, earlier immigrants and others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the existing research on poverty/low income, there are emerging initiatives to use multiple thresholds of low income instead of a single threshold and to analyze persistent low income over several years instead of low income in a single year. Although most recent studies have identified low-income incidences for multiple years (at least one year, at least four years, or at least six years) associated with multiple low-income thresholds, they unintentionally bury short-run low-income spells (for one to three years) in longer low-income spells (for four to six years). In this article, we review the debates on measures of low income and attempt to differentiate the short-run low-income spells clearly from their chronic counterparts. We further identify the characteristics of Canadians who are trapped under these two types of low-income spells. Using our approach and the 1999-2007 Canadian Survey of Labour and Income Dynamics (SLID) data, we have found that approximately 73% of low-income Canadians are in short-run low income, while about 27% are in chronic low income. Short-run low income is generally associated with life cycle transitions, while chronic low income is generally associated with certain high-risk groups. These findings are fairly robust across various thresholds of low income. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reexamines the anxiety over poor whites that emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century, positing the ‘poor white problem’ as a distinctively transnational phenomenon, concerned with the spectre of a racial degeneracy and decline that respected no national borders. Focusing specifically on the Carnegie commission's 1932 report into the condition of poor whites in South Africa, this paper considers transnational theories of racial decline and the transnational team of experts put together to investigate the causes of ‘poor whiteism’ and to offer solutions to the problem. The Carnegie commission is presented as a form of transnational governmentality, directed at the management of poor whites wherever they were found. Entirely consistently, however, poor whiteism was put forward as the product of different circumstances in different places, to be met with contrasting remedies. The cause was constructed as hookworm in the United States, for instance, and in South Africa as malaria. The Carnegie report's findings are thus transnational both in their racial and biopolitical framing, and in their specifics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Though Dutch poor relief has been appreciated by historians for the financial stability and generous assistance given to the poor, this paper examines the harsh reality to poor relief in the late eighteenth-century Netherlands. Using archival material from the Reformed Diaconate in Rotterdam, this paper deals with regulations for poor relief, compliance with them and its achievements and attempts at reform to show that not only strangers but also residents were often unable to receive (additional) alms due to strict regulations. This work also demonstrates that the notion of 'overly generous poor re lie f and 'lazy poor' shared by the Deaconate and city authorities led to the tightening of the rules for almsgiving and adherence to them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The dynamics of rapid urbanisation and urban trends in the present neoliberal context, which arise from the production of space in the capitalist mode of production, are evident in the peripheries recently produced for and by low-income populations. This article examines these peripheries in representative southern African cities, with Maputo as the main case study, analysed in relation to Luanda and Johannesburg. Basing my argument on the overarching theory of the production of space, I seek to understand how the interventions undertaken by the state and low-income people, and the interrelationship between these two main agents and the urban morphology, vary according to the historical, political and socio-economic specificities of each country. I argue that in Maputo, more than in the other two cities, these specificities, expressed in the morphology of these peripheral areas, benefit some crucial aspects of the living and housing conditions of Maputo’s low-income population, which is the city’s most vulnerable social group. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the influence of social welfare and tax policies on rates of chronic and transient poverty in the United States for the full population and subgroups. I use longitudinal data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (n = 10,210) over a recent 11-year time frame (1998-2008), with individuals categorized as poor using the Supplemental Poverty Measure. Results show that including government transfers in family resources reduces the overall transient poverty rate by more than one-sixth and the chronic poverty rate by nearly four-fifths, with a greater influence on the chronic rate in part because some individuals shift from chronic into transient poverty. Income and payroll tax liabilities have negligible influence on poverty rates net of tax credits. Medical expenses are largely associated with an increase in the transient poverty rate. Results imply that there is value to examining the effects of social policy on poverty from more than just the traditional cross-sectional perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The eighteenth century witnessed a renewed interest in debating the classification of the poor. What principles did the Enlightenment employ to distinguish the poor from the vagrant? The present study focuses on. the debate that throughout the eighteenth century elaborated on the dichotomy between the deserving poor and the idle vagrant, paying particular attention to how the intellectual elite, the Crown, and the populace negotiated the contours of the vagrant. Economic and normative discourses as well as judicial practices regarding the policing of vagrancy are subject to examination. The monarchy primarily focused on its economic goals promulgating royal decrees, which punished unproductivity, but the identification of the idle vagrant was problematic. Tensions between the law and its application, between individuals and civil servants, and the resistance of the so-called vagrant to such classification highlight the ambiguity of the concept. This essay studies the archive where the uneven power between administrators and common people negotiated the idea of vagrancy and its corresponding discipline. Claims in court delineated the limits of royal power but, ultimately, difficulties agreeing on the meaning of vagrancy increased the number of men over whom the Crown exercised its right to impose forced labor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Historia Agraria is the property of Historia Agraria and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article talks about the history of poorhouses in counties of Kansas as the centerpiece for relief for the poor locals. Topics discussed include the concept of a poor farm originating in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century legal and social traditions such as the English Poor Law of 1601, creation of workhouses for able-bodied poor in 1697, and the English law of 1788 that established almshouses for the sick, aged and women and children unable to work.

Electoral research in post-apartheid South Africa was initially dominated by those advocating a variously racial-cum-ethnic census approach, later challenged by analysts who argued for less race-reductionist models of understanding voting behaviour. The core of the ‘racial census’ approach was to question the possibility of democracy finding genuine purchase where victory for the party of liberation was assured because black majoritarianism was blind to corruption, ineptitude or worse, and open only to race. The innate pessimism about South African democracy, which this perspective introduced, has deepened, notably after the recall of President Mbeki and the subsequent installation of President Zuma. After 20 years of democracy, many commentators have written off the ruling African National Congress (ANC) as corrupt, inept, authoritarian and set on a path of decline that will drag South Africa inexorably towards becoming ‘the next Zimbabwe’. This was the core narrative that informed attacks on the ANC by opposition parties in the election of May 2014. However, a more nuanced set of arguments is emerging, which asserts that the ANC, and South Africa, are not on an ineluctable path to collapse and failure. This article analyses these competing narratives, and the archetypes from which they derive. However, it argues that a deeper, more complex challenge is facing South African democracy. Using empirical voter behaviour data, generated, inter alia, via commingling census and official voting-district-level data on registration and turn-out, the article shows that voting-age people from the poorest deciles have stopped registering and/or voting in significant and growing numbers since 2004, that the electorate increasingly comprises the better-off, and suggests that these trends should be focal areas for those concerned with South African democracy: political pluralism at the expense of the poor seems to be a very high price to pay. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the extent of local government support for the elderly, in the form of poor relief, in Victorian England. It presents newly constructed estimates of old age pauperism rates for each of England's ten registration divisions from 1861 to 1908, the year the Old Age Pension Act was adopted. My estimates show that the share of persons aged 65 and older receiving government assistance in the nineteenth century was far larger than most contemporaries, and many historians, believe. The share receiving poor relief declined after 1871, largely as a result of changes in relief administration, but on the eve of the adoption of the Old Age Pension Act more than one in five persons over 65 was in receipt of public assistance. In sum, government support for the elderly is not a post-welfare state phenomenon. Old age pauperism rates differed substantially across registration divisions and in general were higher in southern than in northern England. I present evidence that much of the north-south differential was due to differences in wage rates and employment opportunities and differences in the administration of poor relief, although differences in welfare customs might have played a role. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Copyright of Tiempos Modernos is the property of Tiempos Modernos and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

'Miserable persons' - including widows, orphans and 'the poor' - were entitled to petition their city governors free of charge, because of their destitution. Which 'poor' qualified for such entitlement is hard to derive from normative sources. Historiography offers inconsistent interpretations. Simona Cerutti, on the one hand, has asserted for eighteenth-century Turin how poverty related first and foremost to ignorance of local laws and lack of local ties, and less to material circumstances. Katherine Lynch, on the other hand, has stressed the importance of early modern poor relief to local poor in the creation of civic communities. If such interpretative scheme is applicable to 'pro deo' petitioning, the local belonging of such petitioners instead of lack of local ties must have been characteristic. A full-text analysis of 213 petitions offered to the Antwerp city government during the eighteenth century helps to explore the nature of poverty of social groups who managed to access the city government free of charge. They did so to acquire some relief in the form of an allowance, an authorisation or-more often than not-the arbitration of interpersonal conflicts. All in all, little pro deo petitions were registered in the so-called rekwestboeken. It appears that only a specific group among the large sections of urban poor qualified for the status of 'persona miserabilis'. They more often than not belonged to the local community, their poverty was a fairly recent experience and related to downward social mobility. The article also argues that only those who found a legal professional willing to help submitting a 'pro deo' petition, managed to do so. In short, the city government of eighteenth-century Antwerp was difficult to approach by lower social groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the history of poverty in Turin, Italy through an analysis of the Hospital of Charity of Turin charitable institution and the demographic aspects of those receiving assistance and subsidies. Emphasis is given to topics such as the number of the city's beggars, occupations of the poor, the impact of immigration, and the division of labor between spouses.

Poverty concentration reflects long-standing inequalities between neighborhoods in the United States. As the poverty concentration paradigm gained traction among policymakers and social scientists, assisted housing policy was overhauled. New assisted housing programs introduced since 1970 have dramatically reduced the geographic concentration of assisted housing units, changing the residential location of many low-income residents. Was this intervention in the housing market enough to reduce poverty concentration? Using national longitudinal data, I find that the deconcentration of assisted housing from 1977 to 2008 only modestly reduced poverty concentration in the 100 largest metropolitan areas. The results are driven by the deconcentration of assisted housing after 2000, when policies had a greater focus on dispersal of assisted housing to low-poverty neighborhoods. My results suggest that even a substantial shift in housing policy cannot make great strides in deconcentrating poverty given the existing landscape of durable urban inequality. Assisted housing policy exists alongside many other structural forces that cluster poor residents in neighborhoods, and these factors may limit its ability to reduce poverty concentration. Moreover, new housing programs rely on the private market to determine the location of assisted units, and the enduring place hierarchy among neighborhoods may influence both where assisted housing is located and its effect on the residential choices of non-assisted residents in ways that undermine poverty deconcentration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The conditional cash transfer (CCT) programme Bolsa Família (Family Allowance), introduced in Brazil in 2003, is one of the largest such programmes in the world. Bolsa Família has played a role in the recent reduction of poverty and income inequality in Brazil. But what has been its impact on democracy? An assumption in the literature on social policy, derived from the European experience, is that targeted programmes such as Bolsa Família divide citizens, erode trust between citizens and between citizens and the state, and weaken democracy. This article challenges that assumption, showing that there is considerable evidence that Bolsa Família has strengthened the citizenship rights of the poor and enhanced democracy. The Brazilian experience suggests that, in highly unequal developing countries under conditions of 21st-century capitalism, the argument that targeted social programmes will inevitably undermine democracy is incorrect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]