You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
This pathbreaking volume explores the history of occupational safety and health in America from the late nineteenth century to the 1950s. Thirteen essays tell a story of the exploitation of workers as measured by shortened lives, high disease rates, and painful injuries. Scholars from a variety of disciplines examine the history of protection and compensation for injured workers, state and federal involvement, controversies over the dangers of lead, and the three emblematic industrial diseases of this century -- radium poisoning, asbestos-related diseases, and brown lung.
In the definitive history of a twentieth-century public health disaster, Alan Derickson recounts how, for decades after methods of prevention were known, hundreds of thousands of American miners suffered and died from black lung, a respiratory illness caused by the inhalation of coal mine dust. The combined failure of government, medicine, and industry to halt the spread of this disease—and even to acknowledge its existence—resulted in a national tragedy, the effects of which are still being felt.The book begins in the late nineteenth century, when the disorders brought on by exposure to coal mine dust were first identified as components of a debilitating and distinctive illness. For sev...
Fighting Toxic Ignorance explores conflict over access to information regarding health hazards encountered in the US workplace during the first three-quarters of the twentieth century. Alan Derickson considers risks posed by toxic chemicals and physical and biological agents of disease. By the 1970s, occupational disease was estimated to kill up to 100,000 Americans a year. Derickson unravels the social and political forces and the conflictual process that gave rise to a sustained social movement for a workers' right to know about often-insidious threats. He argues that the decades prior to the emergence of this movement were not a dark age of victimization brought about by enforced ignorance but a time of recurrent battles over the disclosure of needed facts. Workplace warnings—informative signs, labels, and instructions—often saved lives. Fighting Toxic Ignorance covers a broad range of dangerous substances, deals with a large share of the national workforce, and illuminates the many ways that activists endeavored to see that warnings reached workers, especially immigrants and workers of color.
This book provides a glimpse of Aboriginal women in Northern Ontario and it reflects primarily the impact of the European churches and systems on Aboriginal peoples’ way of life. The words of the Aboriginal women are gentle, but these words convey the displacement of their way of life in the most powerful way. The power of this book is not only in the stories and history that are told, but also in how all women in Northern Ontario share a respectful life together in a way that I have not witnessed or felt anywhere else. — Susan Hare, Ojibwe lawer, who practices out of the West Bay First Nation, Manitoulin Island.
Drawing from extensive archival research, Out of the Horrors of War demonstrates that disabled citizens in the World War II era organized a national movement for economic security and full citizenship, reshaping the U.S. welfare state and laying the foundation for the disability rights movement.
Dangerously Sleepy explores the fraught relations between overwork, sleep deprivation, and public health. Health and labor historian Alan Derickson charts the cultural and political forces behind the overvaluation—and masculinization—of wakefulness in the United States.
For seasoned professionals as well as students, A History of Public Health is visionary and essential reading.
Every industrial nation in the world guarantees its citizens access to essential health care services--every country, that is, except the United States. In fact, one in eight Americans--a shocking 43 million people--do not have any health care insurance at all. One Nation, Uninsured offers a vividly written history of America's failed efforts to address the health care needs of its citizens. Covering the entire twentieth century, Jill Quadagno shows how each attempt to enact national health insurance was met with fierce attacks by powerful stakeholders, who mobilized their considerable resources to keep the financing of health care out of the government's hands. Quadagno describes how at fir...
The literary response to the dawning cult of wakefulness A turn-of-the-century influx of new technologies and the enormous impact of the electric light transformed not only individual sleeping habits but the ways American culture conceived and valued sleep. Hannah L. Huber analyzes the works of Henry James, Edith Wharton, Charles Chesnutt, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman to examine the literary response to the period’s obsession with wakefulness. As these writers blurred the separation of public and private space, their characters faced exhaustion in a modern world that permeated every moment of their lives with artificial light, traffic noise, and the social pressure to remain active at all ...
“No journalist knows more about toxic chemicals in the workplace than Jim Morris. The Cancer Factory is the crowning achievement of his estimable career spent walking fence lines, factory floors, and doctor’s offices.” —Dan Fagin, author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning Toms River “The Cancer Factory could not come at a better time, as we reckon with how our bodies pay the price for our nation’s toxic history and as today’s workers fight not for only their rights but for their very lives.… A powerful and essential read.” —Anna Clark, author of The Poisoned City The story of a group of Goodyear Tire and Rubber workers fatally exposed to toxic chemicals, the lawyer who sough...