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Though recognized for their work in the mining and railroad industries, the Chinese also played a critical role in the nineteenth-century lumber trade. This book continues an examination of the impact of Chinese immigrants on the American West by bringing to life the tensions, towns, and lumber camps of the Sierra Nevada during a boom period of economic expansion. Chinese workers, like whites, labored as wood cutters and flume-herders, lumber jacks and loggers. Exploding the myth of the Chinese as a docile and cheap labor army, the book shows Chinese laborers earned wages similar to those of non-Asians. Men working as camp cooks, among other jobs, could even make more. At the same time, the book draws on archives and archaeology to reconstruct everyday existence, offering evocative portraits of camp living, small town life, personal and work relationships, and the production and technical aspects of a dangerous trade. The book examines the role of the Chinese in the lumber trade in the American West during the late nineteenth century, with a focus on the Sierra Nevada in the 1870s to 1890s. It looks at Chinese laborers' contribution to the building of the American West by analyzing their migration, their communities and lifestyles, lived experiences, transnationalism, and their work in relationship to mining and railroad construction.

The post-Civil War Industrial Age brought fundamental changes to the economy and its workers, forcing Americans to reassess the meaning of life and death. This illuminating study of working-class rituals of dying and the politics of death explores how Americans struggled to understand the broader forces transforming their worlds. The book investigates working people's beliefs, rituals of death and dying, and the politics of death by honing in on three overarching questions: How did workers, their families, and their communities experience death? Did various identities of class, race, gender, and religion coalesce to form distinct cultures of death for working people? And how did people's attitudes toward death reflect notions of who mattered in U.S. society? Drawing from an eclectic array of sources ranging from Andrew Carnegie to grave markers in Chicago's potter's field, the book portrays the complex political, social, and cultural relationships that fueled the United States' industrial ascent. The result is an undertaking that adds emotional depth to existing history while challenging our understanding of modes of cultural transmission.

Often dismissed as a nineteenth-century curiosity, spiritualism influenced the radical social and political movements of its time. Believers filled the ranks of the Free Democrats, agitated for land and monetary reform, fought for abolition, and held egalitarian leanings that found powerful expression in campaigns for gender and racial equality. This book considers spiritualism as a political and cultural force in Civil War-era America. It reveals the scope, spread, and influence of the movement, both in its links to reformist causes and its ability to amplify previously marginalized voices. Rooting spiritualism's appeal in the crises of the time, the book considers how spiritualist influences, through the distillation of the war, forced reassessments of the question of Radical Republicanism and radicalism in general. It also delves into unexplored areas such as the movement's role in Abraham Lincoln's re-election and the relationship between Native Americans and spiritualists.

Late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century landowners in the hinterlands of Baltimore, Maryland, cobbled together workforces from a diverse labor population of black and white apprentices, indentured servants, slaves, and hired workers. The Upper South during this period presents a unique perspective on how free and slave labor systems coexisted and interacted during a time when slavery and free labor were moving apart both geographically and ideologically. This book examines the intertwined lives of the poor whites, slaves, and free blacks who lived and worked in this wheat-producing region along the Mason–Dixon Line in the decades preceding the Civil War. The book closely examines a handful of counties in northern Maryland and southern Pennsylvania to illustrate how these rural local communities represented issues of national historical significance, including the dynamic, multifaceted relationship between slave and free labor, the lives of free black and white farmhands, the domestic slave trade's impact on the people of the Upper South, and the struggles of enslaved and free blacks to liberate themselves and their families from bondage through immediate and delayed manumissions. Drawing from court records, the diaries, letters, and ledgers of farmers and small planters, and other archival sources, the book reconstructs how these poorest of southerners eked out their livings and struggled to maintain their families and their freedom in the often unforgiving rural economy.

During the struggle for the eight-hour workday and a shorter workweek, Chicago emerged as an important battleground for workers in “the entire civilized world” to redeem time from the workplace in order to devote it to education, civic duty, health, family, and leisure. This book explores how the city's eight-hour movement intersected with a Protestant religious culture that supported long hours to keep workers from idleness, intemperance, and secular leisure activities. Analyzing how both workers and clergy rewove working-class religious cultures and ideologies into strategic and rhetorical frames, the book shows how every faith-based appeal contested whose religious meanings would define labor conditions and conflicts. As it notes, the ongoing worker–employer tension transformed both how clergy spoke about the eight-hour movement and what they were willing to do, until intensified worker protest and employer intransigence spurred Protestant clergy to support the eight-hour movement even as political and economic arguments eclipsed religious framing. A revealing study of an era and a cause, this book illustrates the potential—and the limitations—of religious culture and religious leaders as forces in industrial reform.

This deeply researched prequel to the author's 2006 study Rough Justice: Lynching and American Society, 1874–1947, analyzes the foundations of lynching in American social history. Scrutinizing the vigilante movements and lynching violence that occurred in the middle decades of the nineteenth century on the Southern, Midwestern, and far Western frontiers, this book offers new insights into collective violence in the pre-Civil War era. The book examines the antecedents of American lynching in an early modern Anglo-European folk and legal heritage. This is the first book to consider the crucial emergence of the practice of lynching slaves in antebellum America, and it also leads the way in analyzing the history of American lynching in a global context. Arguing that the origins of lynching cannot be restricted to any particular region, the book shows how the national and transatlantic context is essential for understanding how whites used mob violence to enforce the racial and class hierarchies across the United States.

This study of medical treatment in the antebellum South argues that Southern physicians' scientific training and practice uniquely entitled them to formulate medical justification for the imbalanced racial hierarchies of the period. Challenged with both helping to preserve the slave system (by acknowledging and preserving clear distinctions of race and sex) and enhancing their own authority (with correct medical diagnoses and effective treatment), doctors sought to understand bodies that did not necessarily fit into neat dichotomies or agree with suggested treatments. Expertly drawing the dynamic tensions during this period in which Southern culture and the demands of slavery often trumped science, this book explores how doctors struggled with contradictions as medicine became a key arena for debate over issues of gender (male vs. female), health and illness, race (black vs. white), and geography (North vs. South).

This book is a study of the telegraph in western North America, concentrating on the latter half of the nineteenth century. A number of distinguished books and articles have been written about the telegraph and the nineteenth-century American experience. For the most part, however, this scholarly work is geographically partial. The standard histories of the American telegraph are stories of the East Coast and the Atlantic Seaboard, the growing Midwest, and service to urban areas. This book looks toward the West. The narrative includes landscapes and ecosystems, meteorology, surveillance, and containment and conflict with Native Americans. Major themes include the high ground, the signal flow, the state secret, and the secure command. Opening with discussion of the first attempts to bring the telegraph to the Trans-Mississippi West, the book concludes with the consolidation of the secure command of electronic communication networks in the White House during the Spanish-American War, detailing the transformation of electronic communication networks from continentalism to globalism. The terrain of the narrative incudes the Great Plains, the Southwest, the Pacific Coast, the Rocky Mountains, the border with Mexico, and the subarctic and arctic areas of North America. This book presents an interpretive approach that centers on environmental, climatological, military, and surveillance issues as key factors in the history of electronic communication networks.