Īrleen Belle, a member of one of the eight families Desmond documents, is a Black single mother struggling to secure housing with her low income.  The families are diverse in race, age, and gender, yet all struggle with rent payments, which consume the majority of their already meager income.  Set in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Matthew Desmond tells the story of eight families and their experiences with eviction and poverty. According to Desmond, “eviction as a cause, not just a condition, of poverty.” He picked the setting of Milwaukee, believing that it captures a broad national experience from an under-represented urban city. In an interview with The Atlantic, author Matthew Desmond expresses his goal of writing about poverty through the lens of eviction, focusing on relationships and interactions among landlords, tenants, and judges. The Pulitzer committee selected the book 'for a deeply researched exposé that showed how mass evictions after the 2008 economic crash were less a consequence than a cause of poverty.' Background Įvicted was well-received and won multiple book awards such as the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction and the Robert F. Through a year of ethnographic fieldwork, Desmond's goal in the book is to highlight the issues of extreme poverty, affordable housing, and economic exploitation in the United States.  Set in the poorest areas of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the book follows eight families struggling to pay rent to their landlords during the financial crisis of 2007–2008. Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City is a 2016 non-fiction book by American author Matthew Desmond.

Poverty and profit in the american city

In 1884, the same year that Douglass married his white secretary, Helen Pitts, Assing killed herself. Douglass’s first wife, Anna Murray Douglass, died in 1882. They remained close friends and were perhaps lovers, as Assing regularly accompanied Douglass on his speaking tours. One such friendship was with Ottilie Assing, a German woman who translated My Bondage and My Freedom into German and then journeyed from Germany to Rochester to meet with Douglass in 1856. The private Douglass remains elusive, though biographers are working to uncover friendships that never became fully public. After the embarrassed Griffiths returned to England, Douglass took a measure of revenge by presenting Garrison as a paternalistic racist in My Bondage and My Freedom. When Douglass decided to start his own newspaper in 1847, Garrison was furious, and by the early 1850s he was lashing out at Douglass, accusing him in The Liberator of having an affair with his British friend Julia Griffiths, who was the managing editor of Douglass’s newspaper. Garrison was the publisher and editor of The Liberator, which became the most popular antislavery newspaper in America. How did Douglass and Garrison become frenemies? Douglass clearly saw himself as being in the romantic tradition of Scott’s James Douglas, a character who is imprisoned as an enemy of the Scottish king but is eventually pardoned and celebrated. When he escaped, he changed his name to Frederick Douglass, taking the surname of one of the rebellious heroes of Sir Walter Scott’s 1810 narrative poem The Lady of the Lake. What does it signify?ĭouglass was born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey. government’s request to set up a naval station there.ĭouglass chose his surname. consul to Haiti, he supported Haiti’s decision to deny the U.S. He collaborated with John Brown, met with Lincoln three times, toured Egypt, attended numerous women’s rights conventions, spoke out against the rise of lynching, and was a political friend of Ulysses Grant.   He published two additional autobiographies- My Bondage and My Freedom and Life and Times-and a novella, The Heroic Slave. What else do you wish people knew?ĭouglass published his most famous autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, in 1845 Garrison was his publisher. Most people know the story of Douglass’s daring escape from slavery and his work with William Lloyd Garrison. When you study Douglass, you read truly superb writing. I’ve had a long fascination with nineteenth-century American literature and culture, and Douglass spanned that period and addressed the big issues of the time: slavery, race, women’s rights, and immigration.

How lucky you are by kristyn kusek lewis