Histories of American welfare have been stories about the state. Like Walter Trattner's widely read From Poor Law to Welfare State, now in its sixth edition, they have offered a narrative about the slow but steady expansion and elaboration of state and federal protections granted to poor and working people, and have usually done so by charting increases in government expenditures, by documenting the institutionalization of welfare bureaucracies, and by tracing rises or declines in poverty, unemployment, and other aggregate measures of well-being. This has been the case even in more critical accounts that emphasize that American social welfare history is not a story just of progress, such as Michael Katz's In the Shadow of the Poorhouse. These narratives have emphasized programs, not people (whether it is the poorhouse, the asylum, and mother's pensions, or the more recent innovations of national unemployment insurance, Social Security, AFDC and TANF, and Medicare and Medicaid). In the investigations of the welfare state that dominate academic research, the content and timing of government policy itself has served as the dependent variable, while the independent variables have been a congeries of interests, institutions, and policy entrepreneurs. Our attention has been focused upon what government has done, why it was done, and what the effects were as measured in official data.

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Precious: Based on the Novel PUSH by Sapphire (2009) (Lee Daniels, director) The Blind Side (2009), (John Lee Hancock, director) With domestic box-office receipts of some $50 million, Precious is the most extended encounter many Americans will have with black welfare recipients, and it reaffirms in every respect the most insidious stereotypes of the Welfare Queen and the rapacious black male.If we inhabited a media world in which images of welfare families and, more generally, poor people of color were common, then perhaps we could and should think differently about Precious. We could judge it based upon how well it captured something about this particular family, or of pre-gentrification Harlem in the late 1980s. We could focus, as many rightly have, on the extraordinary performance of stand-up comic Mo'Nique as one of the worst mothers you've ever seen on film, yet one we come to pity and even understand, if just a bit: she's a cruel, ugly monster, but Mo'Nique makes her a human one, not a caricature, and her more than two dozen Best Supporting Actress awards were earned. We could note the fine debut of Gabourey Sidibe and the wrenching tale of the title character she plays: raped, beaten, and emotionally abused since age three by her father and mother both, at age 16 about to give birth to her second incestuous child, virtually illiterate, homeless for a time, and HIV-positive. Where most would surrender to the impossibility of it all, Clarisse Precious Jones somehow rises up to take control of her life: she enrolls in an alternative school and, thanks to dedicated teaching, sassy classmates, and her own hard labor, even wins a literacy award from the Mayor's office; with the help of a social worker played by Mariah Carey she confronts her mother and separates from that toxic household for good; she flirts with a sexy nurse played by Lenny Kravitz; she reclaims her children (the eldest of whom has Down syndrome), and by the end of the film is on her way toward happiness and high school, though probably not the celebrity she yearns for in the film's dream sequences. The story is typical Hollywood fare, in its way, even if the setting is not.But precisely because the central characters are black welfare recipients, it is not typical fare. American movies offer the public few images of the poor and welfare reliant, and almost never as the main characters. Perhaps not since 1974's Claudine has a relatively mainstream movie had a family on welfare at its heart, although HBO's The Wire does set much of its story in Baltimore public housing projects. It's a curious absence, given how central the demonization of welfare has been to post-1960s backlash politics. Since these are families we so seldom see on film, and places (especially the welfare office) that movies rarely venture into, we have to ask if the director has a social responsibility to explain that the very dark New

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Through the lens of four recent books, this article considers the obstacles faced by those who undertake engaged or activist scholarship in the social sciences, examining professional methodological, theoretical, historical, and rhetorical challenges.