How Welfare Worked in the Early United States: Five Microhistories - Paperback

by Gabriel J. Loiacono (Author)

What was American welfare like in George Washington's day? It was expensive, extensive, and run by local governments. Known as "poor relief," it included what we would now call welfare and social work. Unlike other aspects of government, poor relief remained consistent in structure between the establishment of the British colonies in the 1600s and the New Deal of the 1930s. In this book, Gabriel J. Loiacono follows the lives of five people in Rhode Island between the Revolutionary War and 1850: a long-serving overseer of the poor, a Continental Army veteran who was repeatedly banished from town, a nurse who was paid by the government to care for the poor, an unwed mother who cared for the elderly, and a paralyzed young man who attempted to become a Christian missionary from inside of a poorhouse. Of Native, African, and English descent, these five Rhode Islanders utilized poor relief in various ways. Tracing their involvement with these programs, Loiacono explains the importance
of welfare through the first few generations of United States history.

Author Biography

Gabriel J. Loiacono is Associate Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh. He has spent much of the past two decades studying the ways early Americans responded to poverty. Loiacono has published articles in The Atlantic, Rhode Island History, New England Quarterly, and Journal of
Policy History.