Description: Phelps investigates the on-the-ground implementation of President Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty during the 1960s and 1970s and argues that the fluid interaction between federal policies, urban politics, and grassroots activists created a significant site of conflict over the meaning of American democracy.
Brief description: WESLEY G. PHELPS is an assistant professor of history at Sam Houston State University.
Review Quotes: Wesley Phelps reveals a largely unacknowledged Houston. He tells a story of poverty and power through a series of moments when a diverse group of local people told a generation how things had to be different. Battling over ideas from prophetic Christianity, the radical New Left, the emerging Sunbelt, the Old South, and the controversial War on Poverty, they launched a fierce argument about the kind of power that working Americans should have and the kind of Houston that would emerge from the end of Jim Crow.--Kent B. Germany "author of New Orleans after the Promises: Poverty, Citizenship, and the Search for the Great Society"