Explore Bridgeport, the most political neighborhood in the most political of cities - home to five Chicago mayors and parades of politicians honoring its power at national conventions. Once a Native American village traversed by Jacques Marquette and Louis Jolliet, as Chicago grew the area was called Hardscrabble, then Cabbage Gardens, and finally Bridgeport. Immigrants built it: the Irish dredged a canal and mined a quarry that led to slaughterhouses, cooperages, rolling mills, and breweries that were worked by Germans, Bohemians, Swedes, and Poles. Held dear as the "Heart of Lithuania," muckrakers described parts of it as a heartbreaking jungle. More immigrants came: Italians, Croatians, Mexicans, Chinese. Against the backdrop of prairies, labor strife, gangways, and Joe Podsajdwokiem, this sometimes uneasy mix lived, worked, and voted together. Bridgeport still has streets that defy the city's orderly grid, settlement houses, language stews, and, for each nationality, churches and taverns. Today, it may welcome artists and expensive housing, but on summer nights stoop sitting and rooting for the White Sox remain social obligations.

A backdrop to the evolving national developments of the New Deal, this study stands at the intersection of political, labor, and ethnic history and provides a new perspective on how working people affected urban politics in the interwar era."--BOOK JACKET.

Located just 14 miles northwest of Philadelphia, Bridgeport is a stone's throw from Valley Forge National Historic Park. Incorporated in 1851, the tiny village of 422 acres had 500 residents living within its boundaries. In 1723, Swedish and Welsh immigrants settled along the Schuylkill River, with the Eastburn and Holstein families among the first to settle. Irish immigrants found work in Bridgeport as early as 1860, and Italian immigrants poured into Bridgeport in the 1890s, finding work in the quarries and along the railroads and canals. Through vintage photographs, Bridgeport celebrates the families and industries that have helped shape this borough.

July the third 1863 it seems, will forever be associated with an event known by almost everyone as "Pickett's Charge" . . . the day more than 12,000 officers and men in Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia charged forward at the Union defenses at Gettysburg. Almost since that day onward, the label given to that assault has focused on the commander of less than half of the troops who made the attack-Major General George Pickett. Pickett whose Division constituted only three of the nine brigades in the afternoon assault has become the namesake of the entire effort. Now, the story is told of the men from North Carolina, Mississippi, Tennessee and Alabama who made that charge.