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