Sweatshop : the history of an American idea / Laura Hapke.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Hapke, Laura.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Sweatshops--United States--History.

Sweatshops.

History.

United States.

Physical Description:

ix, 202 pages, 8 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

New Brunswick, N.J. : Rutgers University Press, [2004]

Summary:

Arguing that the sweatshop is as American as apple pie, Laura Hapke surveys over a century and a half of the forms, verbal and pictorial, in which the sweatshop has been imagined and its stories told. Drawing on sources including antebellum journalism, Progressive era surveys, modern movies, and anti-sweatshop Web sites, Hapke illustrates how the sweatshop has been a facilitator of assimilation, a promoter of upward mobility, the epitome of exploitation, a site of ethnic memory, a venue for political protest, and an expression of twentieth-century managerial narratives. An important contribution to the real and imagined history of garment industry exploitation, this book provides a valuable new context for understanding contemporary sweatshops that now represent the worst expression of an unregulated global economy.

Contents:

Narrating the shop

A shop is not a home: dirt, ethnicity, and the sweatshop

Surviving sites: sweatshops in the progressive era and beyond

Newsreel of memory: the WPA sweatshop in the Great Depression

The sweatshop returns: postindustrial art

Spinning the new shop: El Monte and the Smithsonian furor

Nike's sweatshop quandary and the industrial sublime

Watching out for the shop.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 181-189) and index.

ISBN:

0813534666

0813534674

OCLC:

54029506