Description
Book SynopsisTrade Review"Skillfully arranged. . . Caldemeyer demonstrates that the world of the Gilded Age working class was not as cut and dried as some of its would-be leadership thought it was -- and that it was not as politically bespoke for as believed by many of the historians who have tried to interpret it." --
Journal of American History"Overall,
Union Renegades offers an engaging account of Midwestern history, which will appeal to lay readers and provide scholars with innovative interpretations of labor history." --
Choice"Dana M. Caldemeyer's
Union Renegades begins with a resonating bang for its reader. . . . A clear and thoughtful reexamination of labor struggles during the Gilded Age. Through six detailed and nuanced instances of dissatisfaction with the union, the book shows that miners navigated a complex world of capitalism and labor as individuals pursuing the best option for themselves as wage workers and miners." --
Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society"For anyone who assumes that joining a union in the late-nineteenth-century coalfields reflected a simple choice,
Union Renegades is a stunning catalog of the various factors that shaped the complex calculation that workers had to make. Caldemeyer’s deeply researched study joins a growing list of scholarship exploring attitudes about unions, capitalism, and power in the rural-industrial heartland. Its lessons are important for our time."--Kenneth Fones-Wolf, coauthor of
Struggle for the Soul of the Postwar South: White Evangelical Protestants and Operation DixieTable of ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction
1 Deceived: Producers in a Dishonest World
2 Undermined: Winter Diggers, Union Strikebreakers
3 “Judases”: Union “Betrayal” and the Aborted 1891 Strike
4 Outsiders: Race and the Exclusive Politics of an Inclusive Union, 1892-1894
5 Unsettled: Non-Union Mobilization and the 1894 Strike
6 Wolves: Fractured Unions in the Gilded Age, 1894-1896
Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography
Index
