The Strolling Poor: Transiency in Eighteenth-Century Massachusetts

Jones, Douglas Lamar

doi:10.1353/jsh/8.3.28

Cited by 31 publications

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“…69 Douglas L. Jones has presented evidence for an increase in transiency and declining levels of residential continuity in the province as a whole as the eighteenth century progressed. 70 Mobility did increase, but the continuity of population still remained high. Jones's work further illustrates the persistent efforts to exercise social control over transients.…”

Section: IVmentioning

confidence: 97%

Crime and Social Control in Provincial Massachusetts

Flaherty

1981

Hist. J.

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The first object of this article is to present some findings from an analysis of criminal activity in an early modern society, as measured primarily through various records of the Massachusetts Superior Court of Judicature, Court of Assize, and General Jail Delivery (the Assizes) from its creation in 1692 to the eve of the American Revolution. Since the amount of serious criminal behaviour revealed by this evidence seems small, the article will then seek to identify the most important components of the system of social control over criminality evidently at work in provincial Massachusetts. These include a conscious effort to maintain a homogeneous population, a pattern of collective settlement in townships, an effective system of prosecuting serious breaches of the criminal law, the commitment of elite groups in town, church, county, and province to law and order, and the role of the family in teaching and assuring appropriate behaviour.

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Section: IVmentioning

confidence: 97%

Crime and Social Control in Provincial Massachusetts

Flaherty

1981

Hist. J.

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“…There were relatively few specifi c restrictions on intercolonial or interstate migration. There were, in some locations, restrictions regarding pauper residence and parish infl ows, as in the English Poor Laws, and rules about times of residence needed for voting (see, for example, Jones 1975). In the nineteenth century, there were state laws concerning the movement of free blacks and of slaves, based on state laws, but, in general, there were no restrictions for whites (Farnam 1938, 211-24).…”

Section: Education Health Migrationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Free Labor and Slave Labor.

2023

An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans

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Policies regarding the level and growth rate of the stock of human capital were among the important decisions to be made at the founding of the new nation. At the start, the ratio of land to labor was extremely high; to make effective use of available land, it was necessary to attract more labor. Indeed, land itself would serve as a means of attracting labor. The changing ratio of the labor input to the settlement of what became the United States was infl uenced by legislation as well as by natural forces. The major sources of labor supply were the following:• Rates of natural increase of the population, (the difference between fertility and mortality) for European descendents as well as Native Americans and slave labor.

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“…18 Late 19th-century America would castigate as "tramps" those whom New England colonists somewhat more delicately referred to as the "strolling poor." 19 In the early decades of the 20th century, America's "hobo" performed the same economic functions as Canada's "bunkhouse man." 20 And, curiously, when in 1959 the Saturday Evening Post asked, "Will ours be the century of homeless people?"…”

Section: Varieties Of Homelessnessmentioning

confidence: 99%

Homelessness old and new: The matter of definition

Hopper

1991

Housing Policy Debate

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The contemporary emphasis on the pathologies of shelter denizens and streetdwellers tends to conceal the great variety of makeshift ways of life that have characterized "homelessness" over the centuries. Diversity notwithstanding, those considered "vagrants" were historically marked as suspect members of a poor apart, even when their numbers increased sharply. Because kin ties have consistently proven to be the first line of defense against "literal homelessness," skid row researchers thought their absence (along with the lack of associated ties to work and community) to be diagnostic of the condition. Indeed, earlier research tended to see as "homeless" any "disaffiliated" persons, housed or not, who lived alone in unconventional dwellings. Not only have the new homeless poor, by contrast, proven to be more diverse-their geographic locus, age, gender, ethnicity, and signal disabilities having all changed-but their common element is less often ascribed to faulty social connectedness than to sheer absence of shelter. This paper discusses such changes and reviews definitions of homelessness and several approaches to its social construction. The paper argues that, although definitions owe as much to political as to logical considerations, it makes both practical and historical sense to view the streets and shelters as but one variant of a class of informal or makeshift residential settings that increasingly characterizes the marginally situated.

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The Strolling Poor: Transiency in Eighteenth-Century Massachusetts

Cited by 31 publications

References 0 publications

Crime and Social Control in Provincial Massachusetts

Crime and Social Control in Provincial Massachusetts

Free Labor and Slave Labor.

Homelessness old and new: The matter of definition

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