This study reframes Civil War-era history, arguing that the Franco-Prussian War contributed to a dramatic pivot in Northern commitment to African-American rights.

David Ward examines the geographical relationship between migrants and the inner city and the creation of slums and ghettos.

A concise history of labor and work in America from the birth of the Republic to the Industrial Age and beyond From the days of Thomas Jefferson, Americans believed that they could sustain a capitalist industrial economy without the class conflict or negative socioeconomic consequences experienced in Europe. This dream came crashing down in 1877 when the Great Strike, one of the most militant labor disputes in US history, convulsed the nation’s railroads. In The Dawning of American Labor a leading scholar of American labor history draws upon first-hand accounts and the latest scholarship to offer a fascinating look at how Americans perceived and adapted to the shift from a largely agrarian economy to one dominated by manufacturing. For the generations following the Great Strike, “the Labor Problem” and the idea of class relations became a critical issue facing the nation. As Professor Greenberg makes clear in this lively, highly accessible historical exploration, the 1877 strike forever cast a shadow across one of the most deeply rooted articles of national faith—the belief in American exceptionalism. What conditions produced the faith in a classless society? What went wrong? These questions lie at the heart of The Dawning of American Labor. Provides a concise, comprehensive, and completely up-to-date synthesis of the latest scholarship on the early development of industrialization in the United States Considers how working people reacted, both in the workplace and in their communities, as the nation’s economy made its shift from an agrarian to an industrial base Includes a formal Bibliographical Essay—a handy tool for student research Works as a stand-alone text or an ideal supplement to core curricula in US History, US Labor, and 19th-Century America Accessible introductory text for students in American history classes and beyond, The Dawning of American Labor is an excellent introduction to the history of labor in the United States for students and general readers of history alike.

Women's Wisconsin: From Native Matriarchies to the New Millennium, a women's history anthology published on Women's Equality Day 2005, made history as the first single-source history of Wisconsin women. This unique tome features dozens of excerpts of articles as well as primary sources, such as women's letters, reminiscences, and oral histories, previously published over many decades in the Wisconsin Magazine of History and other Wisconsin Historical Society Press publications. Editor and historian Genevieve G. McBride provides the contextual commentary and overarching analysis to make the history of Wisconsin women accessible to students, scholars, and lifelong learners.

This is an annotated bibliography of 20th century books through 1983, and is a reworking of American Studies: An Annotated Bibliography of Works on the Civilization of the United States, published in 1982. Seeking to provide foreign nationals with a comprehensive and authoritative list of sources of information concerning America, it focuses on books that have an important cultural framework, and does not include those which are primarily theoretical or methodological. It is organized in 11 sections: anthropology and folklore; art and architecture; history; literature; music; political science; popular culture; psychology; religion; science/technology/medicine; and sociology. Each section contains a preface introducing the reader to basic bibliographic resources in that discipline and paragraph-length, non-evaluative annotations. Includes author, title, and subject indexes. ISBN 0-521-32555-2 (set) : $150.00.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, hundreds of thousands of German and Irish immigrants left Europe for the United States. Many settled in the Northeast, but some boarded trains and made their way west. Focusing on the cities of Fort Wayne, Indiana and St Louis, Missouri, Regina Donlon employs comparative and transnational methodologies in order to trace their journeys from arrival through their emergence as cultural, social and political forces in their communities. Drawing comparisons between large, industrial St Louis and small, established Fort Wayne and between the different communities which took root there, Donlon offers new insights into the factors which shaped their experiences—including the impact of city size on the preservation of ethnic identity, the contrasting concerns of the German and Irish Catholic churches and the roles of women as social innovators. This unique multi-ethnic approach illuminates overlooked dimensions of the immigrant experience in the American Midwest.

Rolling green hills dotted with Holstein cows, red barns, and blue silos. The Great Lakes ports at Superior, Ashland, and Kenosha. A Polish wedding dance or a German biergarten in Milwaukee. The dappled quiet of the Chequamagon forest. A weatherbeaten but tidy town hall at the intersection of two county trunk highways. Ojibwa families gathering wild rice into canoes. The boat ride through the Dells. The upland ridges of the Driftless Area, falling away into hidden valleys. . . . These are images of Wisconsin's land and life, images that evoke a strong sense of place. This book, Wisconsin Land and Life, is an exploration of place, a series of original essays by Wisconsin geographers that offers an introduction to the state's natural environment, the historical processes of its human habitation, and the ways that nature and people interact to create distinct regional landscapes. To read it is to come away with a sweeping view of Wisconsin's geography and history: the glaciers that carved lakes and moraines; the soils and climate that fostered the prairies and great northern pine forests; the early Native Americans who began to shape the landscape and who established forest trails and river portages; the successive waves of Europeans who came to trade in furs, mine for lead and iron, cut the white pines, establish farms, work in the lumber and paper mills, and transform spent wheatfields into pasture for dairy cattle. Readers will learn, too, about the platting and naming of Wisconsin's towns, the establishment of county and township governments, the growth of urban neighborhoods and parishes, the role of rivers, railroads, and religion in shaping the state's growth, and the controversial reforestation of the cutover lands that eventually transformed hardscrabble farms and swamps into a sportsman's paradise. Abundantly illustrated with photos and maps, this book will richly reward anyone who wishes to learn more about the land and life of the place we know as Wisconsin.