A journalist describes the years she worked in low-paying domestic work under wealthy employers, contrasting the privileges of the upper-middle class to the realities of the overworked laborers supporting them.

When sixteen-year-old Bri, an aspiring rapper, pours her anger and frustration into her first song, she finds herself at the center of a controversy.

Left on their own in seventeenth-century London, three impoverished children draw upon all their resources to stay together and make their way to the Virginia colony in search of their father.

"Millions of Americans work full-time, year-round, for poverty-level wages. In 1998, Barbara Ehrenreich decided to join them. She was inspired in part by the rhetoric surrounding welfare reform, which promised that a job--any job--can be the ticket to a better life. But how does anyone survive, let alone prosper, on $6 an hour? To find out, Ehrenreich left her home, took the cheapest lodgings she could find, and accepted whatever jobs she was offered....

"A revelatory account of poverty in America so deep that we, as a country, don't think it exists Jessica Compton's family of four would have no cash income unless she donated plasma twice a week at her local donation center in Tennessee. Modonna Harris and her teenage daughter Brianna in Chicago often have no food but spoiled milk on weekends. After two decades of brilliant research on American poverty, Kathryn Edin noticed something she hadn't...

What can you get with twenty-five dollars and a dream?Adam Shepard graduated from college feeling disillusioned by the apathy around him and was then incensed after reading Barbara Ehrenreich's famous work Nickel and Dimed-a book that gave him a feeling of hopelessness about the working class in America. He set out to disprove Ehrenreich's theory-the notion that those who start at the bottom stay at the bottom-by making something out of nothing to...

"Every year, more than 2.5 million children are left homeless in the United States and the number of such families continues to rise annually. In every state, children are living in small quarters packed in with relatives-- in cars, in motel rooms, or in emergency shelters. In this vividly-written narrative, experienced journalist Richard Schweid takes us on a spirited journey through this 'invisible nation,' giving us front-row dispatches of suffering...

Back before the stock market crash, Jack's dad had been working steadily, and their family had had plenty of money. But now, in the middle of the 1930s Depression, there isn't much work for a trombone player-just a gig down in New York City once in a while. So fourteen-year-old Jack is doing his best to help out. He's lucky enough to get a weekend job at the town boat club where the "rich folks" hang out, but Jack wishes his dad would at least try...

In 1933 Congress granted American laborers the right of collective bargaining, but farmworkers got no New Deal. Cindy Hahamovitch's pathbreaking account of migrant farmworkers along the Atlantic Coast shows how growers enlisted the aid of the state in an unprecedented effort to keep their fields well stocked with labor. This is the story of the farmworkers--Italian immigrants from northeastern tenements, African American laborers from the South,...

A classic early example of "muck-racking" journalism, or reporting by reform-minded American journalists who attacked established institutions and leaders as corrupt, "How the Other Half Lives" is a chronicle of the conditions of abject poverty that the residents of the slums of New York endured at the end of the 19th century. Danish immigrant Jacob A. Riis saw first-hand the horrible conditions of the Lower East Side of Manhattan following his immigration...