Tani's Jotwell Review of Dauber's "Sympathetic State"

My LHB coblogger Karen Tani has posted on Jotwell a review of Michele Landis Dauber's The Sympathetic State: Disaster Relief and the Origins of the American Welfare State (University of Chicago Press, 2012). It commences:

The inner city deserves a disaster relief plan,” wrote Reverend Jesse Jackson, on the eve of Detroit’s bankruptcy filing and in the wake of Hurricane Sandy. The storm-ravaged coastal communities “all deserve[d] aid,” Jackson emphasized, but in cities around the country a “disaster” was unfolding that was “equally devastating, equally beyond anyone’s fault, and yet essentially ignored at the national level.”1 Readers may disagree about the merits of the analogy or the wisdom of Jackson’s proposal, but the structure of the argument should surprise no one—at least not after reading Michele Landis Dauber’s important new book, The Sympathetic State.

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