Poverty, Ethnicity and the American City, 1840-1925: Changing Conceptions of the Slum and Ghetto

The debate about the relationships among poverty, minorities and the inner city is rooted in evaluations of policies initiated decades ago but the issues of this debate have a much longer ancestry. In many respects the underlying arguments of this debate were formulated during the second quarter of the nineteenth century when the first wave of mass immigration from Europe exacerbated anxieties about the social order of the rapidly growing seaports of the north-eastern United States. This bo...