Michael B. Katz, Stanley I. Sheerr Professor of History, University of Pennsylvania will deliver the Harry Girvetz Memorial Lecture on "The Price of Citizenship: Redefining America's Welfare State" at 4 P.M. on Monday, May 7 in the McCune Conference Room, 6020 Humanities and Social Sciences Building. This lecture is based on his just released book (by the same title) which is a broad-gauged analysis of the sweeping changes in U.S. social welfare policy over the past two decades, and their implications for social provision in the future. Courtesy of the UCSB Bookstore, copies of "The Price of Citizenship" will be available for purchase and signing at this event.

From the earliest poor laws to “the end of welfare state as we know it,” the definitive examination of the question underlying all political debate in America: What does the government owe the individual? In "The Price of Citizenship," the culmination of twenty years of research and writing, historian Katz traces the evolution of the welfare state from colonial relief programs to the war on poverty to our own age of “compassionate conservatism.” He argues that in the last decades three great forces-a ferocious assault on dependence; the devolution of authority from the federal government to the states; and the application of market models to social policy-have affected every element of the social contract and redefined both Republican and Democratic policy and rhetoric. Katz shows how these changes are propelling America toward a future of increased inequality and decreased security, while transforming citizenship from a right of birth to a privilege available only to the fully employed.

Michael B. Katz has written widely about the history of U.S. social welfare policy, urban history, race and poverty, and education. He is the author of ten books, including "In the Shadow of the Poorhouse: A Social History of Welfare" (rev. ed. 1996), a definitive history of the welfare state that has recently been revised to include "the end of the welfare" and the debates around it. Among his other works are "The Irony of Early School Reform (1968)," "Poverty and Policy in American History" (1983), "The Undeserving Poor: From the War on Poverty to the War on Welfare" (1989), and "The 'Underclass' Debate: Views from History" (1993). Stanley I. Sheerr Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania, Katz is also a Fellow of the Princeton Institute of Advanced Studies and the Russell Sage Foundation.

The Harry Girvetz Memorial Lecture is presented by the Harry Girvetz Memorial Lecture Committee and the UCSB Interdisciplinary Humanities Center. This event is being cosponsored by the UCSB Department of History, Department of Political Science, Women’s Studies Program, Center for Black Studies, and Institute for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Research.