| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.5 | The History Cooperative

Todd DePastino. Citizen Hobo: How a Century of Homelessness Shaped America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2003. Pp. xxv, 325. $32.50.
When an army of unemployed men marched on Washington, D.C., in 1894, it launched more than a century of fascination with the "hobo." By no means was homelessness an invention of the 1893 depression, Todd DePastino notes in this book, but from the Gilded Age onward homeless Americans were more mobile, more vulnerable to unemployment, and more numerous.	1
DePastino's goal is not to write "a comprehensive history of American homelessness" (p. xix) but to explore "what Americans have meant by home—and, by extension, its absence—since modern homelessness first emerged" (p. xviii). He argues that "the specter of white male homelessness so haunted the American body politic between the end of the Civil War and the onset of the Cold War that it prompted the creation of an entirely new social order and political economy" (pp. xviii-xix). If his book falls short of proving this ambitious argument, it succeeds on many other counts. Whereas labor historians by definition tend to study people who worked, DePastino offers a fascinating look at a little-known sector of the laboring class that often did not work. In so doing he contributes to a welcome trend in which historians are redirecting attention from the workplace to the community in order to understand more fully the texture of working-class life.	. . .

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