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Understanding the roots of metropolitan Chicago
The subtitle understates the scope of this book, which also covers Chicago and suburbs in the plank road age, the canal age and even the highway age. It links rural sites to the metropolitan region and offers critical tools for understanding the types of development that form the whole -- not only the downtown, or the city's community areas, but places that began as agricultural trade centers, satellite cities, railroad commuter suburbs and recreational towns. I was particularly please to see Keating sketch the history of picnic grounds and beer gardens that used to dot the fringes of the city, the best known of which evolved into Riverview Park.

Boring -- and not about railroads
My wife gave me this book last winter. I found it to be a boring, laborious read that included very, very little if anything about the railroads themselves -- the photo of the train on the cover and the book title itself are grossly misleading to the casual observer. The use of the words "Railroad Age" in the title describe only the time period of sprawl highlighted by the book, and not the subject matter. That's what fooled my honey into buying it.

The book is hardly entertaining -- it is a dry and cumbersome social study and written in a tough-to-decipher journalese that reads like a thesis or term paper and Viola! even contains text that is littered with superscript numerals tagged to annoying footnotes. For a railfan it is a complete waste of money. I was very mad that during its too-frequent begging sessions the local PBS station was billing it as "the perfect gift for a railfan." Hardly. Maybe the author, a college history professor, intended this as a textbook for a college-level class studying urban history, and somehow it went on to be widely distributed. However, it does come in handy. I keep it on the nightstand and opening it works better than Ambien.

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Branding is ubiquitous, yet its workings in politics are still untheorized. Drawing on the experiences of three cities on three continents, Eleonora Pasotti fills the gap by showing how cities suffering for decades from poor government, entrenched patronage, lack of development, and social conflict made a transition to a new form of governance: brand politics. Facilitated by the joint presence of direct elections, low party discipline, and high rates of municipal fiscal self-reliance, brand politics breaks a vicious cycle of skepticism and inertia and opens the window for a broad set of reforms. The theory of brand politics shows mayors emulating marketing mavericks: in commerce, consumers aspire to become different people by acquiring products; in politics, citizens support mayors' brands because they seek to become carriers of the same values. Voting and buying have thus become increasingly synonymous in citizens' primal search for a means of expressing their identities. ... Read more

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At the turn of the last century, as industrialists and workers made Chicago the hardworking City of Big Shoulders celebrated by Carl Sandburg, Chicago women articulated an alternative City of Homes in which the welfare of residents would be the municipal government's principal purpose. Seeing With Their Hearts traces the formation of this vision from the relief efforts following the Chicago fire of 1871 through the many political battles of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. In the process, it presses a new understanding of the roles of women in public life and writes a new history of urban America.

Heeding the call of activist Louise de Koven Bowen to become third-class passengers on the train of life, thousands of women "put their shoulders to the wheel and their whole hearts into the work" of fighting for better education, worker protections, clean air and water, building safety, health care, and women's suffrage. Though several well-known activists appeared frequently in these initiatives, Maureen Flanagan offers compelling evidence that women established a broad and durable solidarity that spanned differences of race, class, and political experience. She also shows that these women--emphasizing their common identity as women seeking a city amenable to the needs of women, children, families, and homes--pursued a vision and goals distinct from the reform agenda of Progressive male activists. They fought hard and sometimes successfully in a variety of public places and sites of power, winning victories from increased political clout and prenatal care to municipal garbage collection and pasteurized milk.

While telling the fascinating and in some cases previously untold stories of women activists during Chicago's formative period, this book fundamentally recasts urban social and political history. ... Read more

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From back cover - Zion City was the natural outgrowth of John Dawie fertile imagination for the establishment of a Christian community and a movement he believed would usher in the millennium. As a theocracy it maintained a well-disciplined community where life was based on his interpretations of the Old Testament regulations of moral and religious matters. A study of the greater Zion City era. (Description by http-mart) ... Read more

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Disappointed
I very disappointed I order a new book and received a used book written and high lighted in yellow, No response from Abby Press to fix this issue. ... Read more

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A must read for Chicagoans
I don't usually read books of historical analysis but my love for Chicago combined with the intrigue of the title pulled me in.Garb has a fascinating way of telling the stories of late 19th, early 20th century Chicagoan families; weaving into the discussion of neighborhoods the stories of people's strategies and struggles to own their own homes.I feel a much deeper sense of understanding Chicago, and love the pictures of that era that are now firmly set in my mind,thanks to this book.I recommend this important book to anyone who owns a home in the Chicago area, or to anyone who just wants to know more about the fascinating history of Chicago. ... Read more

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In 1982, twenty thousand Chinese American garment workers - mostly women - went on strike in New York's Chinatown and forced Chinese garment industry employers in the city to sign a union contract. In this pioneering study, Xiaolan Bao penetrates to the heart of Chinese American society to explain how this militancy and organized protest, seemingly so at odds with traditional Chinese female behavior, came about. Blending poignant and dramatic personal stories culled from over a hundred interviews with a detailed history of the garment industry, Chinese immigrant labor, and the Chinese community in New York, Bao shows how the participation of married women in wage-earning labor outside the home profoundly transformed their image and relationships. ... Read more

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Long before today s culture wars, theThird Great Awakeningrocked America. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, evangelists such as Dwight L. Moody and Billy Sunday roused citizens to renounce sin as it manifested in popular culture, moral ambiguity, and the changing role of women. Sin in the City examines three urban revivals in turn-of-the-century Chicago to show how sermons and street activism negotiated that era s perceived racial, sexual, and class threats. It also shows that the legacy of the Third Awakening lives on today in the religious right s sociopolitical activism; crusade for family values; disparagement of feminism; and promotion of spirituality in middle-class, racial, and cultural terms. ... Read more

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Gender Triumphs over Religion
At first glance this book looks like a comparative study of three major evangelistic campaigns in Chicago at the turn of the twentieth century: those of D. L. Moody, J. Wilbur Chapman, and Billy Sunday. In fact, Sin in the City is just a revised 1991 PhD dissertation, a tiresome academic production that rings the changes on race, class, and (especially) gender to the near exclusion of its erstwhile subject, religion.Not surprisingly, the final chapter, which purports to demonstrate a connection between the turn-of-the-century revivals and modern evangelicalism, is especially weak because the author has a limited understanding of modern evangelical religion.

Joiner's writing is not that bad when compared to similar productions of the academy.Still, there are a lot of sentences like, "Revivalism's ritualistic construction and expression of these dichotomies--in a heightened public sphere--provided both the means and the opportunity to encode these cultural assumptions with spiritual or immanent meanings." (16)

Academic authors regularly have difficulty taking the behavior of their historical characters at something approaching face value. So, for instance, when revivalists made profitable use of the notion that mothers' prayers followed their wayward children, they wouldn't consider investigating the possibility that mothers might actually have been doing a lot more long-distance praying for wayward children during this period than would have been the case earlier (when families were less separated geographically) or later (when mothers were less religious and more preoccupied with careers and personal lives).Or, when revivalists claimed that cities were more sinful than rural areas, that they had more than adequate evidence that this was indeed the case.

Some long-suffering graduate students will probably be required to find profundity in Joiner's book, but for the reader interested in investigating turn-of-the-century Chicago, the "Third Great Awakening," or modern evangelicalism, I suggest ignoring the thesis as much as possible and skimming the text for bibliography and occasional nuggets of useful information, especially material about women connected to the Chicago campaigns.
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What could be more "liberal" than believing in society's responsibility for crime--that crime is less the product of free will than of poverty and other social forces beyond the individual's control? And what could be more "progressive" than the belief that the law should aim for social, not merely individual, justice? This work of social, cultural, and legal history uncovers the contested origins and paradoxical consequences of the two protean concepts in the cosmopolitan cities of industrial America at the turn of the twentieth century. ... Read more

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Laurie Mercier's hard-hitting study of 'community unionism' examines the tenacity of union loyalty and communal values within the confines of a one-industry town: Anaconda, Montana, home to the world's largest copper smelter and the namesake of the Anaconda Copper Mining Company. Mercier depicts the vibrant life of the smelter city at full steam, incorporating the candid, sometimes wry commentary of the locals ('the company furnished three pair of leather gloves ...and all the arsenic [dust] you could eat'). She documents the early history of the town and the distinctive culture of cooperation and activism that residents fostered in the 1930s and 1940s. Ultimately, their solidarity and discontent with the company converged in the successful 1934 strike and sustained five decades of devoted unionism. During the cold war years, Anacondans held to their communal values and to unions in the face of antilabor and anticommunist pressures, embracing an 'alternative Americanism' that championed improved living standards for working people, rather than unlimited corporate power, as the best defense against communism.Mercier chronicles the bitter struggle between two rival unions - the anticommunist United Steelworkers of America and the red-tainted International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers - that undercut the town's labor solidarity in the postwar years. She also explores how gender definitions - especially the male breadwinner ideology and the limits placed on women's political, economic, and social roles - shaped the nature and outcome of labor struggles. Mercier carries her investigation through the closing of the smelter in 1980, covering debates over the environment and the community's transformation into a deindustrialized, nonunion town. Underscoring the role of the community in molding working-class consciousness, Anaconda offers important insights about the changing nature of working-class culture and the real potential for collective action under the midday sun of American industrial capitalism. ... Read more

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Poor, Downtrodden Women in the West:Victims?
I found the flavor of this book to be somewhat disturbing in that it consistently sought to portray women as victims of oppressive men--this is a tired philosophy as far as I am concerned.Yes, women were victims, but resulting from the norms of the era in which they lived, married, raised families and worked. My own mother would have been prohibited from keeping her job as a clerk at the local five & dime store in 1934 by the local clerks' union had she married--married women were not allowed to hold union-protected jobs.My mother and her love eloped and kept their marriage a secret so that she could continue to work and help raise money to start their new household.Unfortunately, her husband was killed in a car wreck 2 months after their secret marriage, and then the whole "world" knew of their marriage, but as she was suddenly single again, she was allowed to keep her job. Yes, women were beaten by their husbands, and all sorts of dire things happened in family life in Anaconda.However, there are just as many, if not more, happy stories of good families, loving and respectful husbands and employers.These stories are also important to ensure the presence of honesty in the mosaic that is Anaconda's history.

Unfortunately, women's stories although numerous, were most often limited to mere phrases or to one or two brief sentences--how much nicer and more valuable it would have been, I think, for the writer to have concentrated her researcher's energies on capturing more in-depth knowledge of these women.

Anaconda:labor,Community, and Culture in Montana's Smelter C
There have been a few books written on Anaconda's rich history, but this book reveals areas "whispered" about but not previosly written about.As Ms. Mercier mentions in her book, it was a "City of whispers".The book covers controversial events, such as women working in the community, women's roles at home, and the male dominated working class.The book explains how the Unions came to be dominate in the community and why they were needed.It also covers the Union battles with each other for control. It also talks about the Urban Renewal Era and how the community attempts to survive after severe employment cut-backs as a result of the Anaconda Company's blunders in management.Ms. Mercier spent years interviewing people now deceased, and has added insight how things happen in a one company town. I think she tried to cover both sides of the controversies, but there were some areas that were skimpy with information.In all,it is good reading not only for locals, but for anyone interested in the roles of women in a working class community and the problems that arise in a "Company Town". ... Read more