Class Unknown: Undercover Investigations of American Work and Poverty from the Progressive Era to the Present [Hardcover]

Since 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 were shaped by their experiences with the poor, and how despite their sympathy toward working-class people, they unintentionally helped to develop the contemporary concept of a degraded and other American underclass.
While contributing to our understanding of the history of American social
thought, Class Unknown offers a new perspective on contemporary debates over how we understand
and represent our own society and its class divisions.

Pittenger provides a memorable meditation on America's ongoing struggle to come to terms with class division. In charting territories mostly unknown to contemporary scholars in cultural studies and the social sciences and putting the various undercover investigations in their proper social and intellectual contexts, the author has made an invaluable contribution to the historiography of American social thought. A highly original and thorough account...Class Unknownmakes a unique and significant contribution to scholarship on poverty and reform in American history. Mark Pittenger expertly explores this body of work in his engaging new book....Class Unknownmakes important contributions to social science history and cultural studies of labor and should be a staple of upper undergraduate and graduate courses. Mark Pittenger has written a fascinating gem of a book. Pittenger effectively raises the contents, the morals, and the justifications of these down-and-outers....Perhaps the nicest compliment that can be given tlsß