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The Battle For Homestead, 1880-1892: Politics, Culture, and Steel (Pittsburgh Series in Social & Labor History) Paperback – June 23, 1992
| Paul Krause (Author) Find all the books, read about the author, and more. See search results for this author |
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- Print length584 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherUniversity of Pittsburgh Press
- Publication dateJune 23, 1992
- Dimensions6.13 x 1.6 x 9.25 inches
- ISBN-100822954664
- ISBN-13978-0822954668
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Product details
- Publisher : University of Pittsburgh Press; 1st edition (June 23, 1992)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 584 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0822954664
- ISBN-13 : 978-0822954668
- Item Weight : 1.8 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.13 x 1.6 x 9.25 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #254,891 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- Customer Reviews:
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With respect to narrative disarray, one of the book’s many examples will suffice. In Chapter 12, Krause tells the story of the successful workers’ strike that took place at Homestead in 1882, before Andrew Carnegie owned the plant. The author appears to complete the story about half way through the chapter only to restart the narrative with a new set of anecdotes. The chapter’s second half merely identifies additional participants or provides more disconnected details about previously mentioned participants. This chapter has not been highlighted because it represents one of the worst examples, but because it represents one of the least mangled and most understandable sequences.
Equally damaging to the cause of readable and persuasive prose, the author tries to inflate basic human desires into heroic grandeur. He presents workers, for example, as champions of traditional republican theory. The author’s claim that a laborer’s desire to have work and make a decent living is rooted in republican theory may be worth a journal article or merit a few paragraphs in the preface, but it adds an unnecessary layer of rhetorical flourish to fundamentally economic issues. Likewise, the author tries to transmute the anger of Homestead women who beat or shrieked at Pinkerton agents during the 1892 lockout into a political “assertion of their power and rights, of their place and stake in the workers’ republic… [and into a refusal] to be domesticated, interiorized, or harnessed for the purpose of lovely embroidery” (326) It seems more likely that their rage came from bitterness, not nobility.
Excessive repetition also weakens the book’s arguments and makes for a grindingly difficult read. Apart from relentless and overwrought justifications for a workers’ republic, unions, and laborers’ occasionally violent tactics, the author repeats several quotes and countless phrases. Most of the repetitions were brief and therefore difficult to recover. An obvious example was his use of the same long passage from the poem “Peter Puddler” on pages 117 and 221. It often seemed as if Krause believed he had something important to say but lost his thread and fell back on what he had said earlier.
This apparently well-researched volume has valuable and pertinent details about political and social influences of the labor movement in the Pennsylvania steel industry in the late 19th century. Unfortunately, readers must sort through disorganized data, ignore theoretical pretensions, and filter out repetition to find the nuggets.


