The Triangle Fire: A Brief History with Documents (Bedford Series in History and Culture) - Softcover

Argersinger, Jo

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1319048854 ISBN 13: 9781319048853

Publisher: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2016

Synopsis

In 1911, a fire at the Triangle Waist Company in New York City claimed the lives of 146 workers, mainly young immigrant women, who either leaped to their deaths or were trapped in the blaze by locked doors and inadequate fire escapes. The tragedy brought national attention to the unsafe working conditions, long hours, and low pay that had prompted a national garment workers’ strike a year before. Jo Ann Argersinger’s volume examines the context, trajectory, and impact of this Progressive Era event. An introduction explores the demands industrialization placed upon urban working women, their fight to unionize, and the Triangle fire’s significance in the greater scope of labor reform. Documents from newspaper reports to the personal stories of labor agitators and fire survivors continue the story, giving voice to the "girl strikers," their enemies and upper-cl allies in the effort to reform the garment industry, and the public outrage that followed the fire. Document headnotes, a chronology, questions for consideration, a selected bibliography, and an index enrich students’ understanding of this historical moment.

About this title

About the Author

Jo Ann E. Argersinger (PhD, George Washington University) is a professor of history at Southern Illinois University, where she teaches courses on World War II, the Cold War, and labor in the United States, including a history of women and work. She is the author of Making the Amalgamated: Gender, Ethnicity, and Class in the Baltimore Clothing Industry (1999) and Toward a New Deal in Baltimore: People and Government in the Great Depression (1988). She is the coauthor of Twentieth-Century America: A Social and Political History (2005) and of The American Journey (Sixth Edition, 2010). She is currently writing a book on public housing and transnational perspectives, and her article entitled Contested Visions of American Democracy: Citizenship, Public Housing, and the International Arena is forthcoming in the Journal of Urban History. She will appear in a PBS documentary on the Triangle Fire, scheduled to air in March 2011, marking the hundredth anniversary of the fire.

Edition details

• Publisher: Bedford/St. Martin's
• Publication date: 2016
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1319048854
• ISBN 13: 9781319048853
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 160