David Wagner

This book uniquely explores the rare event of poor people who become nationally or internationally famous. This book describe how poverty is a severe disability that stunts areas of growth and opportunity among children. Nevertheless, using a sample of 27 people including Charlie Chaplin, Billie Holiday, Marilyn Monroe, Richard Pryor, Babe Ruth, Oprah Winfrey, and Malcolm X, the book shows how these figures both coped, but faced life-long challenges...

Though poorhouses (sometimes also known as almshouses or poor farms) were around United States' history for nearly four centuries, there has been little written about them. Not only was this institution critical to the history of social welfare and the poor but also for the disabled, correctional institutions, and aged. The book not only reviews history, but it analyzes how institutional care has in recent years regained its dominance in social welfare....

This is a first-time study of formerly homeless people showing how people become and then leave the state of homelessness. Using a sample of people from across the nation and of different sexes, races, and ethnicities, Wagner suggests the key variables in ending homelessness for individuals as well as communities.

This is the first history of the three progressive movements in the twentieth and twentieth-first century: The original Progressives primarily in the first two decades of the twentieth century; the Popular Front progressives of the 1930s and 1940s; and recent progressives in the Democratic Party from Jesse Jackson to Bernie Sanders. Although characterized by much rhetoric, none of these movements have broken out of the reformist bounds of liberalism....

When a school friend who is now senior in the Italian Art Squad recruits Rick for an unofficial undercover role to flush out priceless burial urn traffickers, he soon becomes a suspect a suspect in the death of a gallery employee.

Orvieto -- its very name brings to mind priceless art, colorful ceramics, and straw-colored wine. And the most famous cathedral facade in Italy, a structure of gothic spires, arches, statues, and mosaics. But as Rick Montoya discovers, this jewel of Umbria can have an ugly side as well. When Rick Montoya moved to his mother's Italy from his father's Santa Fe, New Mexico, to work as a freelance translator using his dual heritage, he didn't expect to...

"Winding up an interpreter in Bassano del Grappa at a conference on artist Jacopo da Bassano, a famous native son, Rick Montoya looks forward to exploring the town. And it would be fun to look into the history of two long-missing paintings by the master, a topic that caused the only dust-up among the normally staid group of international scholars attending the seminar. Bassano has much to offer to Rick the tourist, starting with its famous covered...

Van Wilder is a seventh year student with no plans to graduate. He has a coed in every closet and a party to go to every night. He meets reporter Gwen when she decides to do a story featuring his life on campus.

One morning a child gazes through a bedroom window and watches as amazing things happen. The backyard is transformed to reveal what lived there hundreds, thousands, and millions of years ago.