Harvard University Press
Thinking Small: The United States and the Lure of Community Development
Key Metrics
- Daniel Immerwahr
- Harvard University Press
- Paperback
- 9780674984127
- 9.2 X 6 X 0.8 inches
- 0.9 pounds
- History > United States - 20th Century
- English
Secure TransactionBook Description
Winner of the Merle Curti Award in Intellectual History, Organization of American Historians
Co-Winner of the Society for U.S. Intellectual History Book Award
Thinking Small tells the story of how the United States sought to rescue the world from poverty through small-scale, community-based approaches. And it also sounds a warning: such strategies, now again in vogue, have been tried before, with often disastrous consequences.
Unfortunately, far from eliminating deprivation and attacking the social status quo, bottom-up community development projects often reinforced them...This is a history with real stakes. If that prior campaign's record is as checkered as Thinking Small argues, then its intellectual descendants must do some serious rethinking... How might those in twenty-first-century development and anti-poverty work forge a better path? They can start by reading Thinking Small.
--Merlin Chowkwanyun, Boston Review
As the historian Daniel Immerwahr demonstrates brilliantly in Thinking Small, the history of development has seen constant experimentation with community-based and participatory approaches to economic and social improvement...Immerwahr's account of these failures should give pause to those who insist that going small is always better than going big.
--Jamie Martin, The Nation
Author Bio
Daniel Immerwahr (Ph.D., Berkeley, 2011) is a professor of history, specializing in twentieth-century U.S. history within a global context. His first book, Thinking Small (Harvard, 2015), offers a critical account of grassroots development campaigns launched by the United States at home and abroad. It won the Merle Curti Award in Intellectual History from the Organization of American Historians and the Society for U.S. Intellectual History's annual book award.
His second book, How to Hide an Empire (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019), tells the history of the United States with its overseas territory included in the story. That book was a national bestseller, a New York Times critic's choice for one of the best books of 2019, and the winner of the Robert H. Ferrell Prize from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. Immerwahr's writings have appeared in the New York Times, The Guardian, the Washington Post, The New Republic, The Nation, Dissent, Jacobin, and Slate, among other places.
Source: Department of History of Northwestern University
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