Customer Reviews

Steelworkers in America: The Nonunion Era

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This is an outstanding book. It is incredibly detailed, contains massive (yes, massive!) footnotes, and manages to not only bring alive the struggle of steel and iron workers but to deeply move the reader.

Steelmaking is an industry barely 120 years old, and yet much of the industry's history in its early decades is lost. What remains are self-serving biographies of steel barons and a few historical works here and there on major steel strikes (such as the Homestead strike of 1892). The evolution of work, the issues of steelworkers, the challenges and obstacles they confronted as skilled and yet "common" laborers, the geographical narrowness of the steel industry: These are issues which no other work has, to my knowledge, discussed. Yet, Brody is so good at describing and detailing the work of the steel and iron worker that the reader will come away almost sure that he or she can go to work in a steel mill! That's how evocative and effective this book is.

I was bowled over by the sheer level of detail in this work, too. Authors walk a fine line in including detail. They can get bogged down in it like quicksand. Others end up including so many digressive if colorful details that the main thrust of the historical narrative is lost. But David Brody has managed to create a real world, a palpably real and tangible world of the steel worker. It's almost a Tolkienian accomplishment!

I am simply amazed at how much detail Brody was able to unearth, even when it came to the smallest or most insignificant historical moment. This is real scholarship. In other works of this nature, I find authors glossing over historical incidents simply because they cannot find any published sources to rely on, and don't want to dig to locate primary-source documents or works. Not Brody. No stone is left unturned. No month or year passes by without a clear and detailed look at what happened.

I rank David Brody's work on steelworkers as one of the critical works in American industrial history, as well as one of a very few and rare works which manages to capture almost completely the history of a segment of the American labor movement. It is an astonishing and powerful work.

I consider it one of the best labor histories ever written.