Written in lucid prose and possessing a useful sweep, This Business of Relief debunks misapprehensions that have had serious and negative consequences for public policy.

—Michael B. Katz, author of In the Shadow of the Poorhouse: A Social History of Welfare in America

Elna Green systematically explores the relationships between southern and national relief practices over a substantial period of time, discovering far more similarity than difference. Unlike typical social-welfare history studies, she casts her net wide, scrutinizing the impact of industrialization, evolving gender roles, race relations, and key social and political developments on poverty and relief. To carry out this project, Green demonstrates impressive command of a broad secondary literature and creative use of primary sources. It is in this last area that This Business of Relief especially shines. Green not only ferrets out a stunning array of primary sources, but she reads them in breathtaking fashion, presenting the lives of the poor through their own eyes and in their own voices.

—Peter J. Rachleff, author of Black Labor in Richmond, 1865–1890

Dispassionately, carefully, and drawing on an array of historical sources, Elna Green reconstructs the history of relief giving in one southern city and in so doing illuminates an aspect of relief that has until now remained in the shadows.

—Frances Fox Piven, coauthor of Poor People's Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail

Green's book represents a maturation of the kind of local study that sparked a new approach to colonial history thirty or forty years ago. . . . Practitioners of current approaches, such as those that emphasize race and gender as the primary determinants of that policy, would be well advised to look at the insights afforded by emphasizing institutions and employing a broad chronological scope and a narrow geographical focus.

—Journal of Interdisciplinary History

This is as good a book on charity in a southern city as we have. It is well written and handsomely illustrated. . . . This book makes sense of the past both on its own terms and in its relationship with the present.

—Journal of Southern History

The breadth of Green’s core age of two centuries of relief for the poor is impressive. . . . This will be of particular interest to those in Virginia, and most especially Richmond, where we can easily recognize the places, and certainly many of the politics, that continue to play themselves out in the twenty-first century.

—Register of the Kentucky Historical Society

Green's work is a provocative and combative piece of prodigious scholarship. . . . This book should be on the short list of every future course in welfare, urban, and Southern history.

—History: Reviews of New Books

Making use of a broad range of secondary literature and an impressive array of primary sources, Green shows how efforts to care for the needy and dependent of the community evolved through warning out and so-called outdoor relief.

—Journal of Southern History