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Challenging Chicago reveals the survival strategies to which the many people who flocked to the city resorted, especially those of the lower and middle classes for whom urban life was a new experience.
After all the green beer has been poured and the ubiquitous shamrocks fade away, what does it mean to be Irish American besides St. Patrick’s Day? Who’s Your Paddy traces the evolution of “Irish” as a race-based identity in the U.S. from the 19th century to the present day. Exploring how the Irish have been and continue to be socialized around race, Jennifer Nugent Duffy argues that Irish identity must be understood within the context of generational tensions between different waves of Irish immigrants as well as the Irish community’s interaction with other racial minorities. Using historic and ethnographic research, Duffy sifts through the many racial, class, and gendered dimensio...
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, working-class Americans had eating habits that were distinctly shaped by jobs, families, neighborhoods, and the tools, utilities, and size of their kitchensÑalong with their cultural heritage. How the Other Half Ate is a deep exploration by historian and lecturer Katherine Turner that delivers an unprecedented and thoroughly researched study of the changing food landscape in American working-class families from industrialization through the 1950s. Relevant to readers across a range of disciplinesÑhistory, economics, sociology, urban studies, womenÕs studies, and food studiesÑthis work fills an important gap in historical literature by illustrating how families experienced food and cooking during the so-called age of abundance. Turner delivers an engaging portrait that shows how AmericaÕs working class, in a multitude of ways, has shaped the foods we eat today.
In this vivid portrait of life in Chicago in the fifty years after the Civil War, Margaret Garb traces the history of the American celebration of home ownership. As the nation moved from an agrarian to an industrialized urban society, the competing visions of capitalists, reformers, and immigrants turned the urban landscape into a testing ground for American values. Neither a natural progression nor an inevitable outcome, the ideal of home ownership emerged from the struggles of industrializing cities. Garb skillfully narrates these struggles, showing how the American infatuation with home ownership left the nation's cities sharply divided along class and racial lines. Based on research of real estate markets, housing and health reform, and ordinary homeowners—African American and white, affluent and working class—City of American Dreams provides a richly detailed picture of life in one of America's great urban centers. Garb shows that the pursuit of a single-family house set on a tidy yard, commonly seen as the very essence of the American dream, resulted from clashes of interests and decades of struggle.
In the culture of the modern West, we see ourselves as thinking subjects, defined by our conscious thought, autonomous and separate from each other and the world we survey. Current research in neurology and cognitive science shows that this picture is false. We think with our bodies, and in interaction with others, and our thought is never completed. The Fiction of a Thinkable World is a wide-ranging exploration of the meaning of this insight for our understanding of history, ethics, and politics Ambitious but never overwhelming, carrying its immense learning lightly, The Fiction of a Thinkable World shows how the Western conception of the human subject came to be formed historically, how it...
Parading Patriotism covers a critical fifty-year period in the nineteenth-century when the American nation was starting to expand and cities across the Midwest were experiencing rapid urbanization and industrialization. Historian Adam Criblez offers a unique and fascinating study of five midwestern cities—Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, and Indianapolis—and how celebrations of the Fourth of July in each of them formed a microcosm for the country as a whole in defining and establishing patriotic nationalism and new conceptions of what it was like to be an American. Criblez exposes a rich tapestry of mid-century midwestern social and political life by focusing on the nationalisti...
Looks at unionization efforts by Chicago's packinghouse workers and explores the process of class formation in early twentieth-century industrial America.
Can you name America's oldest brewery? If visions of outsized draft horses plod to mind, you're way off. Instead, head for the mountains--of northeastern Pennsylvania. In 1829, in Pottsville, German immigrant D.G. Yuengling set up shop to slake the thirst of immigrants flocking to the region's booming anthracite coalfields. Five generations have steered the family-owned brewery through fires, temperance, depressions, Prohibition, and the whims of changing tastes; outlasted hundreds of local competitors; and turned Yuengling from a regional name into a national institution. For 175 years, the hard-working, hands-on approach of Yuengling has kept it going, and growing, while thousands of other...
When Martin Luther King, Jr. marched in Chicago in 1966, he joined black and white lay Catholics who had worked together for civil rights for more than forty years. One in Christ traces the development of Catholic interracial activism from the ground up, demonstrating that accounting for religion is crucial to understanding race and civil rights in the North.
In the nineteenth century, restaurants served French food to upper-class Americans with aristocratic pretensions, but by the turn of the century, even the best restaurants cooked ethnic and American foods for middle-class urbanites. In Turning the Tables, Andrew P. Haley examines how the transformation of public dining that established the middle class as the arbiter of American culture was forged through battles over French-language menus, scientific eating, cosmopolitan cuisines, unescorted women, un-American tips, and servantless restaurants.