Where We Worked: A Celebration of America's Workers and the Nation They Built - Hardcover

Larkin, Jack

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1599219603 ISBN 13: 9781599219608

Publisher: The Lyons Press, 2010

Synopsis

A celebration of America's workers and the nation they built. Narratives tell the stories, over time, of wheat growers and sharecroppers, mill girls and housemaids, gold miners and railway porters, farmwives and cowboys, newsboys and stenographers.

About this title

About the Author

Jack Larkin is the former museum scholar and chief historian at Old Sturbridge Village inSturbridge, Massachussetts, affiliate professor of history at Clark University, and a frequent consultant and lecturer for museums and historical organizations. A Chicago native and graduate of Harvard College and Brandeis University, Larkin is author of Where We Worked, published with the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and The Reshaping of Everyday Life 1790-1840, which was a Distinguished Finalist for the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for Nonfiction in 1989.

From the Back Cover

A lavishly illustrated tribute to the American worker From the IntroductionHouse and home may be our refuge, but for almost all of us, work is our destiny, and the workplace is our destination. Work--for better or worse--shapes much of who we are, what we know, and how we live. Textile factories and steel mills have almost vanished; farms, mines, and timberlands are worked by great machines. Typewriters, once a symbol of efficiency and modern communication, are relics. This book is built around the remarkable visual resources of the Library of Congress, which from the 1830s into the 1940s provide a great wealth of photographic and other pictorial documentation of American workers and their workplaces. The narratives are intertwined with these images and are based on diaries and travelers' descriptions, reminiscences and autobiographies, eyewitness accounts and oral histories. They tell the stories of wheat growers and sharecroppers, mill girls and housemaids, gold miners and railway porters, farmwives and cowboys, newsboys and stenographers. Those years are now in the fairly distant past, the world of three generations ago and more. Does it still matter to look at how Americans spent those countless days of labor? Only if we want to understand where we came from.

From the Inside Flap

Where We Worked presents a richly illustrated and beautifully evocative panorama of the experience of work and workplaces during America's golden age of labor. Follow this hardworking country from the Industrial Revolution of the 1830s to the monumental task of building an economic and military superpower-a nation that, by 1940, was poised to defeat fascism and, by its example, build the case for democracy throughout the world.Through 400 powerful images of ordinary Americans doing their jobs, first-hand accounts of these men and women at work, and the author's deeply informed and energetic narrative, we stand shoulder-to-shoulder with those who fashioned this nation. Where We Worked will be a treasured keepsake for anyone whose ancestors helped make the United States of America into the modern economy it is today.

Edition details

• Publisher: The Lyons Press
• Publication date: 2010
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1599219603
• ISBN 13: 9781599219608
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 384