Shantytown, USA

As an academic who has also spent time working with homeless and near-homeless people, I find that Lisa Goff's book makes a tremendous contribution and clarifies many issues in our history. Americans are quick to forget their history; this amnesia is greater regarding poor people than with other subjects. Goff traces a history of shantytowns from the early part of the nineteenth century through today. Shanties are makeshift homes crafted from a variety of objects (wood, nails, boards, even mud and poles) united by their unofficial status and by their sociability across groups. Defining a “shanty” is a fascinating task, and Goff's first and second chapters, on Henry David Thoreau and Concord, Massachusetts, and on the western frontier, are powerful. Thoreau, the great outdoor adventurer, made his cabin in part from a “shanty” that an Irish railroad laborer had lived in. For the “degraded poor,” as Thoreau saw them, living in shanties was awful, but his cabin was an experiment entered into by a middle-class Yankee (p. 7). Similarly, on the frontier, even middle-class trendsetters acknowledged that many housing units were substandard. Advisers and critics warned that shanties were temporary settings not fit for permanent settlement, and if a person or family continued to live in this way they were seen as a harbinger of disorder and were not fit to occupy settled communities (pp. 27–32). Interestingly, no agreed-upon word derivation exists for shanty and no one definition: the status lies greatly in the occupants, Goff suggests, not the building qualities

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