Their Real Estate In The Town example essay topic

1. In 18th century America, no stable system of welfare existed to assist the poor who found themselves without any financial ability for their food, shelter, or medical care. The poor were provided the relief only by local taxes, and these funds were quickly run out. Finally, in order to manage this problem, New England towns established the! ^0 warning out! +/- system stemmed from English law.!

^0 Warning out! +/-, a welfare system to take care of the poor, only covered the town!'s legal inhabitant to abridge its financial aid; thus it was urgent for the town community to define whether the poor is a legal inhabitant or a transient. People, defined as a transient and forced to move from their town to the next, carried letters of introduction in order to establish themselves as legal residents of a new place. This system alleviated each town!'s expense and responsibility to take care of the poor living on the edge and placed the burdened on each town to look after its own. In the case of Providence, Rhode Island, according to the book, this system rarely accomplished its goal: to alleviate the pain from people!'s painful and miserable life. Rather, this system made the poor unsettled, scattered, and questioned themselves about their identities and belongings. Most of the people, once rejected from their dwelling town, kept being rejected over and over again.

Many people failed to be supported by the town community even after they are moved as the town!'s will. The town!'s not by solving, but by avoiding the essence of the problem regarding the poor, this system aggravated their misfortunes. 2. According to the statistics in the book, the poor of Providence, eventually selected as transients and forced to move, consisted of few foreigners, colored people, women, and the whites who didn! t own any their real estate in the town or who were ill or unable to work.

An important thing is that the poor were usually born into families trapped in poverty and all likely to carry forward this legacy of privation. Sometimes, however, others become poor through misfortunes such like disease, accident, natural disaster, or violent misbehavior. 3. Despite the limited opportunity to probate Rhode Island legal history, which had been sporadically researched, Herndon must go from town to town for probate records.

Using the records of the town council meetings required Herndon to read manuscripts in several different cities and towns in order to collect the original cases that she eventually distilled to forty for this book. Few transients appear in vital records, and few appear in 18th century census records. More over, Herndon learned her knowledge using Providence Town Paper, which contain letters, petitions, tax records, and receipts related to 19th century town business. 4. The forty distilled stories illuminate the conflict between the poor and the prosperous. The prosperous deprived the poor of their jobs, neighbors, connections, and a sense of place.

The powerless were suffered from oppression, their economic and social vulnerability, and gendered and racialize d differences in opportunities in the society where the powerful substantially dominated, valuing only fixity place and ownership of real estate. Although the powerful established! ^0 warning out! +/- system for the sake of the welfare for the poor, the results of this system seem virulent no less than those of the slavery system back at the 17th century. 5. Despite extensive detective work, the stories presented here often lack a beginning and an ending. We do not know in every case what trouble led to the examination or what happened to the warned-out family after removal.

The existing records provide only fragments of information that do not satisfy as a whole. Moreover, there is substantially big part of transient life missing in the records; for instances, the children of widow or unmarried women weren! t legally entitled to be recorded. Thus we should wonder about the after life of warned out families and keep in mind that the stilled 40 stories are not the archetype but no more than a part of example.