In the early Victorian age, the streets of East London were home to migrants from different regions and religions. In the midst of this area lay the famous Rag Fair street market, sustained by trade routes stretching across the globe. The market’s history demonstrates that it was not only a place of economic exchange, but also an intercultural contact zone where Jewish and Irish migrants mingled, entered client relationships and forged political alliances. Reconstructing the varied (partly multiethnic) group-building processes operating in the market, Rag Fair draws on approaches across migration history, economic history, economic anthropology and the sociology of political movements to uncover the social mechanisms at work in the old clothing trade.

Winner, 2016 Best First Book Prize from the Immigration and Ethnic History Society Finalist, 2016 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature Winner, 2015 Book Prize from the Southern Jewish Historical Society Finalist, 2015 Jordan Schnitzer Book Award from the Association for Jewish Studies Winner, 2014 National Jewish Book Award in American Jewish Studies from the Jewish Book Council The majority of Jewish immigrants who made their way to the United States between 1820 and 1924 arrived nearly penniless; yet today their descendants stand out as exceptionally successful. How can we explain their dramatic economic ascent? Have Jews been successful because of cultural factors distinct to them as a group, or because of the particular circumstances that they encountered in America? The Rag Race argues that the Jews who flocked to the United States during the age of mass migration were aided appreciably by their association with a particular corner of the American economy: the rag trade. From humble beginnings, Jews rode the coattails of the clothing trade from the margins of economic life to a position of unusual promise and prominence, shaping both their societal status and the clothing industry as a whole. Comparing the history of Jewish participation within the clothing trade in the United States with that of Jews in the same business in England, The Rag Race demonstrates that differences within the garment industry on either side of the Atlantic contributed to a very real divergence in social and economic outcomes for Jews in each setting.

Walter Richard Sickert (1860-1942) was an artist of prodigious creativity. For sixty years, in his roles as painter, teacher, and polemicist, he was a source of inspiration and influence to successive generations of British painters. With his roots in the Victorian era, Sickert broke all taboos. He was uncompromisingly truthful, revealing beauty in the squalid as in the sublime: in cockney music halls, the crumbling streets of Dieppe, the grand sites of Venice, and the low-life of Camden Town. Decades before Warhol, he exploited the potential of photo-based imagery and of studio production lines to create iconic portraits of the grandees of theatrical, social, and political life. This catalogue is divided into two parts: essay chapters describe Sickert's chronology in terms of stylistic and technical development, and a fully illustrated catalogue presents more than 2800 drawings and paintings, many of which have never been published before.

As a writer, businessman and magistrate, Henry Fielding was in a singular position to textualize eighteenth-century English cultural conditions and materially to author the text of his society. Not only did he extol employment, he co-owned an employment agency. Not only did he commit fictional criminals to paper, he committed actual criminals to prison. And he could and did commit actual criminals to prison and paper simultaneously. Henry Fielding at Work examines the intersections of Fielding's practice as magistrate, businessman, and writer, and explores the ways Fielding's experience in those capacities affected the conception, form and articulation of his final literary works.