Who built America?

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Workers, women and minorities are the focus of a volume more successful as a textbook than as a history for the general reader. At its best, this offers enlightening glimpses of the impact of white settlers on American Indians, early stirrings of the labor movement, the hardships imposed by slavery, and ``the capacity of ordinary people to alter the very process of history.'' However, the book is marred by sweeping assertions (``More and more people were now making their living in ways that challenged the values of the revolutionary generation''), a careless blunder (that Andrew Johnson was not impeached) and a relentless contempt for wealth: virtue is here the province of those with modest means. Also, this America is inhabited not so much by individuals as by economic groups: the British ``invaders'' (meaning the colonists, not Redcoat soldiers), Northern merchant elite, mill women, landlords and, of course, the ``poor, cringing tenant.'' The text is liberally embellished with contemporaneous drawings, cartoons, photographs and prose excerpts. (Mar.)

Library Journal

Following an earlier volume ( LJ 2/15/90) that ended with the Civil War era, this labor-oriented reinterpretation of U.S. history from the late 1870s highlights the contributions of ordinary men and women to the making of the nation. Heavy emphasis is given to the role of social and economic conflict between workers and industrialists in shaping American society's basic contours. The bottom-up view yields some meaningful insights about the nation's economic and political development, but broader claims--that industrial capitalism left a strong imprint on foreign affairs, popular culture, and intellectual life--are asserted rather than explicated. Occupying an uneasy position somewhere between college text and tract, this is history limned with broad strokes, not a comprehensive, systematic analysis. The many period illustrations are excellent; sidebars with excerpts from documents, newspapers, and oral histories add flavor to an otherwise flat writing style. Suitable for U.S. history collections.-- Harry Frumerman, formerly with Hunter Coll., CUNY