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Christopher Howard focuses on the poor and offers the first comprehensive map of the US social safety net. He chronicles what Americans say about poverty, and what we do about it, capturing the views of ordinary citizens, business and labour organisations, churches and other charities, and public officials. Although the US social safety net is extensive, Howard argues that major gaps remain, particularly impacting Blacks, Hispanics, and individuals who are not employed full-time. Emphasising how we have spent many years investigating the poor, this book also shines a light on the behavior and views of the non-poor.

Despite costing hundreds of billions of dollars and subsidizing everything from homeownership and child care to health insurance, tax expenditures (commonly known as tax loopholes) have received little attention from those who study American government. This oversight has contributed to an incomplete and misleading portrait of U.S. social policy. Here Christopher Howard analyzes the "hidden" welfare state created by such programs as tax deductions for home mortgage interest and employer-provided retirement pensions, the Earned Income Tax Credit, and the Targeted Jobs Tax Credit. Basing his wor

ABSTRACT: In The Machine in the Garden (1964), Leo Marx set American studies on a search for "a distinctively American theory of society" (4). Demonstrating how an image of mechanistic modernity first occurred then recurred throughout cultural depictions of a predominantly rural landscape, Marx examines the impact of industrialization on American society. This essay argues that contemporary southern fiction is displaying a similarly recurring motif of its own, a motif representative of a new perception of place for the region. Place, according to the southern studies conception as a region of constancy capable of informing our identities, no longer exists. The posthumanist subject instead inhabits a shared space suitable for their symbiotic coexistence, and contemporary authors are starting to depict this element of posthuman existence. Marx's machines recur anew, their rusting carcasses re-purposed by the coexisting elements around them. Rather than a shocking intrusion into the rural landscape, the rusting shells of the symbols of modern society are representative of the non-exceptionalism of the posthuman. Using Jesmyn Ward's Where the Line Bleeds, Salvage the Bones , and Sing, Unburied, Sing , this essay will consider how such imagery indicates a shift in the presentation of place in southern fiction.