The Dispossessed: America's Underclass from the Civil War to the Present.

• Author: Mundy, Liza

The Dispossessed: America's Underclasses from the Civil War to the Present. Jacqueline Jones. Basic, $25. "Poverty has a history," writes Jones in her sweeping examination of poverty and its handmaiden, landlessness, in the United States. Poverty also has a color and a place. Today, most Americans would tell you that color is black and that place is the urban North, a broadly conceived territory that embraces not only Philadelphia, New York, and Trenton, but also Chicago, Detroit, and Washington, D.C. They'd be wrong.

Poverty in America is not mostly urban: A majority of the poor live outside central cities. Poverty is also white: In 1990, poor whites outnumbered poor blacks two to one, and black recipients of Aid to Families with Dependent Children were a minority. Poverty is also southern: The South has more poor than the Northeast and Midwest combined. Yet, Jones charges, Americans persist in directing their pity and fear at the urban black "underclass," a monster largely of their own imagination.

In this stoutly ideological work, Jones aims to explain who the poor are, and how they got there. By locating the origins of the black underclass in the upheavals wrought by the Civil War and by highlighting other poor groups such as laid-off whites and Mexican migrants, she aims to urge America toward a "class-based" politics instead of one that is founded on race.

These are ambitious goals, and they make for tough going. This book sometimes seems as interminable as injustice itself. Yet thanks to the breadth of Jones's scholarship, it is full of revelations--chief among them its examination of why poor blacks and whites have been unable to forge a permanent coalition based on their considerable collective interests.

The book starts by focusing on the primacy of land in American politics, beginning with the period immediately following the Civil War, a time when patterns of land ownership could have changed drastically but didnt.

Instead of handing freed blacks 40 acres and a mule, the federal government gave in to southern Democrats and returned most confiscated land to its original white owners. Up from slavery, blacks became sharecroppers--dependent on whites for housing, land, food, even farm tools, and physically proscribed by Jim Crow laws, Klan-type terrorism, and an annual contract system that kept cash out of their hands.

At the same time that blacks' movement was limited, it was also compelled. The bulk of the book is devoted to a...