Winner of the Merle Curti Award in Intellectual History, Organization of American Historians
Co-Winner of the Society for U.S. Intellectual History Book Award

Thinking Small tells the story of how the United States sought to rescue the world from poverty through small-scale, community-based approaches. And it also sounds a warning: such strategies, now again in vogue, have been tried before, with often disastrous consequences.

"Unfortunately, far from eliminating deprivation and attacking the social status quo, bottom-up community development projects often reinforced them...This is a history with real stakes. If that prior campaign's record is as checkered as Thinking Small argues, then its intellectual descendants must do some serious rethinking... How might those in twenty-first-century development and anti-poverty work forge a better path? They can start by reading Thinking Small."
-Merlin Chowkwanyun, Boston Review

"As the historian Daniel Immerwahr demonstrates brilliantly in Thinking Small, the history of development has seen constant experimentation with community-based and participatory approaches to economic and social improvement...Immerwahr's account of these failures should give pause to those who insist that going small is always better than going big."
-Jamie Martin, The Nation

About the Author
Daniel Immerwahr is Associate Professor of History at Northwestern University.

Awards
Winner of Merle Curti Award 2016 and S-USIH Annual Book Award 2016. Nominated for Stuart L. Bernath Book Prize 2016 and Ellis W. Hawley Prize 2016 and OAH Frederick Jackson Turner Award 2016 and Bancroft Prize 2016 and PROSE Awards 2017 and Francis Parkman Prize 2016 and Mark Lynton History Prize 2016 and New-York Historical Society American History Book Prize 2015 and Theodore Saloutos Memorial Award 2015 and Robert H. Ferrell Book Prize 2016 and President's Book Award 2016 and Morris D. Forkosch Book Prize 2016 and John Hope Franklin Publication Prize 2016 and Albert J. Beveridge Award 2016.



Book Information
ISBN 9780674984127
Author Daniel Immerwahr
Format Paperback
Page Count 272
Imprint Harvard University Press
Publisher Harvard University Press