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Matthew G Lasner, In Levittown's Shadow: Poverty in America's Wealthiest Postwar Suburb, Journal of American History, Volume 111, Issue 3, December 2024, Pages 614–615, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jaae237
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Discussion of poverty in the global North once centered on documenting immiserating conditions: from the thick descriptions of Friedrich Engels to the photographs of Jacob Riis to the reports, novels, and plays of John Steinbeck. With the rise of the welfare state, however, priorities shifted. Instead of minding conditions of poverty in general, advocates, critics, and scholars turned toward policy itself. Once the state intervened, in other words, attention turned toward policy impact.
U.S. urban and suburban history are exemplary of this dynamic. Early work may have scrutinized street car suburbs. But for decades, the primary thrust has been to evaluate public policies that held the promise of eliminating poverty (if rarely the tools or funds)—from cash welfare programs to those for transportation, housing, and jobs. What is the bulk of Kenneth T. Jackson's landmark Crabgrass Frontier (1985), if not a paean to a more expansive New Deal?
Tim Keogh's In Levittown's Shadow makes a rich and rewarding break from the policy turn. Like a recent wave of histories of post-1965 immigrant communities, Keogh's book concerns a terra incognita: poverty in America's “ur-suburb”—Long Island, New York.
