Improving Poor People: The Welfare State, the Underclass, and Urban Schools as HistoryThere are places where history feels irrelevant, and America's inner cities are among them, acknowledges Michael Katz, in expressing the tensions between activism and scholarship. But this major historian of urban poverty realizes that the pain in these cities has its origins in the American past. To understand contemporary poverty, he looks particularly at an old attitude: because many nineteenth century reformers traced extreme poverty to drink,