Examining the social and economic lives of the Victorian working classes and the poor. By Liza Picard / 10.14.2009 English Historian Photographs of a Glasgow slum by Thomas Annan, 1868 / British Library, Public Domain The Victorians liked to have their social classes clearly defined. The working class was divided into three layers, the lowest being[…]
New facial reconstruction of a man buried in a medieval hospital graveyard discovered underneath a Cambridge college sheds light on how ordinary poor people lived in 13th century England. 03.20.2017 The audience of an event at this year’s Cambridge Science Festival found themselves face-to-face with a fellow Cambridge resident – one who had spent the last 700 years[…]
Boston Almshouse Meeting the eligibility requirements of the Poor Laws was not easy in pre-1935 America. By Dr. David Wagner Emeritus Professor of Social Work and Sociology University of Southern Maine For an amazingly long three hundred years prior to the passage of the Social Security Act of 1935, the only aid available to people[…]
Homeless children. Moscow, 1930s / Institute of Modern Russia How have societies solved this basic problem? Why have they adopted certain solutions, and then abandoned them almost immediately? And what has happened when the poor have taken matters into their own hands? By Dr. Aaron Cavin / 06.09.2016 Visiting Assistant Professor of History Miami University Few[…]