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I could not leave this book aside nor, among so many worthy others, could I choose another. It interested me, crooned to me, and in the end I loved it. I hope he writes many more. Read it. You will see why.'' — Dave Smith ''A poet whose own craft is beyond dispute and whose gifted heart has something to tell us about our ordinary selves we had ......
Class, Gender, and Protest in the New England Shoe Industry, 1780-1910
''Blewett challenges historians to incorporate gender analysis and a tradition of working women's protest into the history of the American labor movement.''-- Georgia Historical Quarterly ''[Blewett's] detailed reconstruction of feminist perspectives in shoeworker protest and the divisions created by the competing loyalties to sisterhood and to ......
''A fascinating story that holds the reader's interest from beginning to end. It is well written and thoroughly researched, and makes a real contribution to American labor history.'' -- Journal of Economic History ''Nelson has, to my mind, written the definitive account of one of the most dramatic episodes in American labor history. It should ......
''Carefully documents the ruin waiting for almost all those ill-advised enough to become professional boxers. He confirms all the legends, of crime, of swindling, of the miserable economic rewards allotted to the vast majority of fighters . . . the traditional racism of the American ring. . . . No one, reading Sammons, can doubt that it is ......
Whether peonage in the South grew out of slavery, a natural and perhaps unavoidable interlude between bondage and freedom, or whether employers distorted laws and customs to create debt servitude, most Southerners quietly accepted peonage. To the employer it was a way to control laborers; to the peon it was a bewildering system that could not ......
''This marvelous book captures in a most poignant and accurate way what life is like for the millions who still make up the 'blue collar' backbone of American industry.'' -- Barry Bluestone, author of The Deindustrialization of America ''A richly detailed, well-crafted portrait of a cross section of autoworkers in the midst of an identity crisis ......
More than 4,200 residents of Detroit's ''Poletown'' community lost their homes in the 1980s when the neighborhood was razed to accommodate construction of a Cadillac plant on land where generations of Polish immigrants had lived, worked, and worshipped. Poletown is the story of the only group in Detroit to oppose the construction plan: the Poles ......
Remarkable for its relentless truth-telling, and the depth and thoroughness of its investigation, for the freshness of its sources, and for the shock power of its findings. Even a reader who is not unfamiliar with the sources and literature of the subject can be jolted by its impact.--C. Vann Woodward, New York Review of Books ''Dark Journey is a ......
In 1843 Margaret Fuller, already a well-established figure in the Transcendental circle of Emerson and Thoreau, traveled by train, steamboat, carriage, and on foot to make a roughly circular tour of the Great Lakes. ''Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 was Margaret Fuller's first original book-length work, the product of her journey through what was ......