Examines formation, growth and change in the Milwaukee water department. Combining history, technology, politics and policy-making, the author explains how municipal decision-making processes determine technological determinations throughout the history of water works.

Two times there was a wholesale destruction of Jacksonville's official records – in the War Between the States and by the fire of May 3, 1901. The author's effort in this work was to collect all of the available authentic matter for permanent preservation in book form. The record closes as of December 31, 1924. The record is derived from many sources – long forgotten books and pamphlets; old letters and diaries that have been stored away as family memorials of the past; newspapers beginning with the St. Augustine Herald in 1822 (on file at the Congressional Library at Washington) fragmentary for the early years, but extremely valuable for historical research; almost a complete file of local newspapers from 1875 to date; from the unpublished statements of old residents of conditions and outstanding events within the period of their clear recollection; and from a multitude of other sources of reliability. The search through the highways and the byways for local history was in the spare moments of the author stretching over a period of a score of years, a pastime "hobby" with no idea of making money out of it. No attempt has been made to discuss the merits of any incident, but only to present the facts, just as they were and just as they are, from the records and sources indicated.

'...from time to time a study comes along that truly can be called ‘path breaking,’ ‘seminal,’ ‘essential,’ a ‘must read.’ How the Irish Became White is such a study.' John Bracey, W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies, University of Massachussetts, Amherst The Irish came to America in the eighteenth century, fleeing a homeland under foreign occupation and a caste system that regarded them as the lowest form of humanity. In the new country – a land of opportunity – they found a very different form of social hierarchy, one that was based on the color of a person’s skin. Noel Ignatiev’s 1995 book – the first published work of one of America’s leading and most controversial historians – tells the story of how the oppressed became the oppressors; how the new Irish immigrants achieved acceptance among an initially hostile population only by proving that they could be more brutal in their oppression of African Americans than the nativists. This is the story of How the Irish Became White.