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Social Science Poverty & Homelessness

Toronto’s Poor

A Rebellious History

by (author) Bryan D. Palmer & Gaétan Héroux

foreword by Frances Fox Piven

Publisher
Between the Lines
Initial publish date
Nov 2016
Category
Poverty & Homelessness, Social History, General, Urban
  • Paperback / softback

    ISBN
    9781771132817
    Publish Date
    Nov 2016
    List Price
    $34.95
  • eBook

    ISBN
    9781771132824
    Publish Date
    Dec 2022
    List Price
    $33.99 USD

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Description

Toronto’s Poor reveals the long and too often forgotten history of poor people’s resistance. It details how people without housing, people living in poverty, and unemployed people have struggled to survive and secure food and shelter in the wake of the many panics, downturns, recessions, and depressions that punctuate the years from the 1830s to the present.

Written by a historian of the working class and a poor people’s activist, this is a rebellious book that links past and present in an almost two-hundred year story of struggle and resistance. It is about men, women, and children relegated to lives of desperation by an uncaring system, and how they have refused to be defeated. In that refusal, and in winning better conditions for themselves, Toronto’s poor create the possibility of a new kind of society, one ordered not by acquisition and individual advance, but by appreciations of collective rights and responsibilities.

About the authors

BRYAN D. PALMER is Professor Emeritus and former Canada Research Chair, Canadian Studies, Trent University, Peterborough, Canada. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, former editor of Labour/Le Travail, and has published extensively on the history of labour and the revolutionary left. Among his many books are Canada’s 1960s and the co-authored, Toronto's Poor: A Rebellious History. He lives in Warkworth, Ontario.

Bryan D. Palmer's profile page

Gaétan Héroux is a long time anti-poverty activist with the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty.

Gaétan Héroux's profile page

Frances Fox Piven is on the faculty of the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She is the author, most recently, ofChallenging Authority: How Ordinary People Change America.

Frances Fox Piven's profile page

Awards

  • Winner, CAWLS Book Prize for the Best Book in Work and Labour Studies

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