New Insights on Old Issues

Abstract

At first glance, these three scholarly books might seem to have little in common except for the fact that they all deal with labor and industry. A closer reading suggests that each of these studies not only addresses some aspect of the history of American industry and American labor, but attempts to grapple with issues that historians and economists have examined for many years. Laurence Gross, Gary Fink, and Douglas Flamming contribute new insights to such old issues as what happened to a prominent industry after its heyday, in this pase the famous Lowell factories. Was the southern cotton mill work force as pliable and weak as traditional views have persistently argued? Were unions always so weak and ineffective in the South? Were there at least pockets or locations in the South where workers and unions were indeed more successful than we once thought? Each of these masterly studies addresses these individual issues and questions and presents findings that can only be described as profound and highly original. Gross, Fink, and Flamming, in short, have completed studies that will have to be addressed by any scholar working in the area of American industrial development and/or the history of American labor unions from this point on. For his part, Laurence Gross makes it clear in the very beginning of his work that he was going to test the myths of early Lowell against its ultimate development, to follow through its story and determine how this novel