An original examination of legislative clashes over the singular issue of the glass house boys, who performed menial tasks, received low wages, and had little to say on their own behalf while toiling in glass bottle plants. Flannery reveals the many societal, economic, and political factors at work that allowed for the perpetuation of child labor in this industry and region.

Accession no. 93.67.3.

Named one of the fifty best books of 1992 by Publishers Weekly More than a century has passed since the infamous lockout at the Homestead Works of the Carnegie Steel Company. The dramatic and violent events of July 6, 1892, are among the mst familiar in the history of American labor. And yet, few historians have adequately addressed the issues and the culture that shaped that day. For many Americans, Homestead remains simply the story of a bloody clash between management and labor. In The Battle for Homestead, Paul Krause calls upon the methods and insights of labor history, intellectual history, anthropology, and the history of technology to situate the events of the lockout and their significance in the broad context of America’s Guilded Age. Utilizing extensive archival material, much of it heretofore unknown, he reconstructs the social, intellectual, and political climate of the burgeoning post-Civil War steel industry. The Battle for Homestead brings to life many of the individuals -both in and outside Homestead- who played a role in the events leading to July 1892. From the inventor of the modern Bessemer steel mill to the most obscure immigrant workers, from Christopher L. Magee, the “boss” of Pittsburgh machine politics, to Thomas A. Armstrong, the tireless editor of the National Labor Tribune, from the “Laird of Skibo” himself (Andrew Carnegie) to the labor leader and mayor of Homestead, “Old Beeswax” (Thomas W. Taylor), Krause shows how all these lives became intertwined, often in surprising and unpredictable ways, as the drama of the lockout unfolded. As the nineteenth century was drawing to a close, the Homestead Lockout dramatized the all-important question: Can the land of industry and technological innovation continue to be “the land of the free”? Can material progress, with its inevitable social and economic inequities, be made compatible with the American commitment to democracy for all? Twentieth-century history has demonstrated all too clearly the intesity of this dilemma. In addressing some of the thorniest issues of the last century, The Battle for Homestead demonstrates the enduring legacy and relevance of Homestead over a century later.

Conservative journalist Malkin provides an eclectic journey of American capitalism, from the colonial period to the Industrial Age to the present, spotlighting little-known "tinkerpreneurs" who achieved their dreams of doing well by doing good. Learn how Paul Revere became America's first tech titan, how famous patent holders Abraham Lincoln and Mark Twain championed the nation's unique system of intellectual property rights, and more.

At the close of the 19th century, more than 2 million American children under age 16--some as young as 4 or 5--were employed on farms, in mills, canneries, factories, mines and offices, or selling newspapers and fruits and vegetables on the streets. The crusaders of the Progressive Era believed child labor was an evil that maimed the children, exploited the poor and suppressed adult wages. The child should be in school till age 16, they demanded, in order to become a good citizen. The battle for and against child labor was fought in the press as well as state and federal legislatures. Several federal efforts to ban child labor were struck down by the Supreme Court and an attempt to amend the Constitution to ban child labor failed to gain enough support. It took the Great Depression and New Deal legislation to pass the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 (and receive the support of the Supreme Court). This history of American child labor details the extent to which children worked in various industries, the debate over health and social effects, and the long battle with agricultural and industrial interests to curtail the practice.

Between 1870 and 1920, the clerical sector of the U.S. economy grew more rapidly than any other. As the development of large corporations affected both the scale and the content of office work, the accompanying sexual stratification of the clerical workforce blurred the relationship between the new clerical work and earlier perceptions of white-collar status. Sons and Daughters of Labor reassesses the existence and significance of the "collar line" between white-collar and blue-collar occupations during this period of clerical work's greatest expansion and the beginning of its feminization.