Books by David Wagner

This book closely examines controversial claims and beliefs surrounding poverty and anti-poverty programs in the United States. It authoritatively dismantles falsehoods, half-truths, and misconceptions, leaving readers with an unbiased, accurate understanding of these issues.Poverty and Welfare in America: Examining the Facts, like every book in the Contemporary Debates series, is intended to puncture rather than perpetuate myths that diminish our understanding of important policies and positions; to provide needed context for misleading statements and claims; and to confirm the factual accuracy of other assertions. This book clarifies some of the most contentious and misunderstood aspects of American poverty and the social welfare programs that have been crafted to combat it over the years. In addition to providing up-to-date data about the extent of American poverty among various demographic groups in the United States, it examines the chief causes of poverty in the 21st century, including divorce, disability, and educational shortfalls. Moreover, the book provides an evenhanded examination of the nation's social welfare agencies and the effectiveness of various social service programs managed by those agencies in addressing and reducing poverty.

The New Temperance questions the constant mantra in the media and in political debates about the dangers of personal behavior and challenges America's love affair with repression. It reviews the Republican strategy on sin developed in the 1960s and 1970s.

Hide in Plain Sight offers a powerful examination of the effects of Hollywood's blacklist era, taking up the question of how blacklistees fared after they were driven out of the mainstream. A good number entered careers in television, with many finding work in children's and family programs, writing for shows like Rocky and Bullwinkle, Lassie, and Flipper. Many also wrote adult sitcoms such as Hogan's Heroes,The Donna Reed Show, The Dick Van Dyke Show, M*A*S*H, Maude, and All in the Family. Ultimately, many returned to Hollywood in the sixties and seventies to work creatively on films that contained a dose of radical politics and influenced the creative outburst of that decade. The list of impressive films from the survivors of HUAC includes Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia, and Midnight Cowboy. Hide in Plain Sight completes Paul Buhle and Dave Wagner's trilogy, which includes Tender Comrades (1998) and Radical Hollywood (2002). Together these books provide a thorough and disturbing portrait of the McCarthy era's impact on an important aspect of American culture and society.

No Longer Homeless is a powerful look at a group of people we rarely hear about-those who have formerly been on the streets-sharing the details of their lives to help individuals, organizations, and communities learn to better support the ongoing challenges of homelessness.

Explores the lives of poor people during the three decades after the Civil War using their biographies and official records.

This book, based on in-depth interviews of radical social workers, who at one time were associated with the Catalyst collective, explores through oral history the social psychological effects of upward mobility on political ideology.

Annie Sullivan taught the blind and deaf Helen Keller, and the philanthropist Franklin Sanborn saved Sullivan from the poorhouse. This is their story.

The New Temperance contrasts the new obsession with personal behavior in America during the last two decades with the brief period of relative freedom in the 1960s and early 1970s and suggests strong consistencies with our past.