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Joseph Tucciarone
Coal War in the Mahoning Valley
9781467142724
Regular price $24.99 Save Liquid error (snippets/product-template line 248): Computation results in '-Infinity'%The struggles and successes of the industrious coal miners in Ohio's Mahoning Valley.
Year after year, local Welsh coal diggers supplied the ravenous and roaring ironworks in Mahoning Valley but the good times ended in the closing weeks of 1872. The demand for iron slackened, and with it, coal orders fell. Responding to plunging coal prices, mine owners cut wages, but rank-and-file miners would have none of it. On New Year’s Day, they went on strike. The bitter stalemate broke only when operators sidestepped local labor by employing African Americans from Virginia and Italian immigrants crowding the Eastern Seaboard. Violence followed. Yet this vicious strife opened the Mahoning Valley to permanent Italian settlement. Authors Ben Lariccia and Joe Tucciarone uncover this forgotten chapter in the region’s storied labor history.
Kelly Kilcrease
Manchester's Shoe Industry
9781467141420
Regular price $21.99 Save Liquid error (snippets/product-template line 248): Computation results in '-Infinity'%
Famous for its dominance in textile production, Manchester was also affectionately called “Shoe City.” More than seventy different shoe companies once called Manchester home, and thousands of area residents worked tirelessly to produce some of the best-known shoes in America and throughout the world. The largest manufacturers were the F.M. Hoyt Shoe Company, maker of Beacon Shoes, and the granddaddy of them all, the McElwain Company, known for its popular brands, including the iconic Thom McAn shoes. Authors Kelly Kilcrease and Yvette Lazdowski reveal how these and other Manchester-based shoe shops were vital to the area’s economic and employment prosperity, especially among the immigrant population, as well as how the McElwain Company was an integral part of the Melville Corporation, known today as CVS.
Gail Klein
Wisconsin Tobacco Farming
9781467158985
Regular price $24.99 Save Liquid error (snippets/product-template line 248): Computation results in '-Infinity'%“The great concerns of the southern states have made their products so well known that few people realized that tobacco can be grown elsewhere than Virginia and Cuba.” – Clarence Olson, Edgerton Reporter, 1953
Widely known as America’s Dairyland, Wisconsin also has a long, fertile history with tobacco. For centuries, Indigenous tribes cultivated it for spiritual, medicinal, and ceremonial purposes. First introduced commercially in Dane and Rock Counties, and later Vernon County, the crop earned a reputation among generations of local farmers as the "mortgage lifter.” Specializing in the broadleaf tobacco used to bind cigars, local farms became major producers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—a lifeline for newly arrived Norwegian immigrants. Ultimately, the state’s golden age of tobacco spawned the creation of the country’s first cooperative tobacco marketing association.
Author and Wisconsin historian Gail Klein surveys the Badger State’s historic tobacco regions and the agricultural commodity’s lasting impact.
Kristine E. Ellis
Montana Women From the Ground Up
9781467137232
Regular price $21.99 Save Liquid error (snippets/product-template line 248): Computation results in '-Infinity'%
Growing up on the family ranch, Linda Finley fought hard to gain the acceptance and respect as a ranch hand that her brothers took for granted. Arlene Pile barely remembers learning to ride a horse and run machinery—she was so young. She learned to drive on an 8N Ford tractor with a buck rake. Lee Jacobsen became the first woman in the state licensed to artificially inseminate cattle. Meet these and other Montana women passionate about caring for their land and determined to make the lifestyle their own. Many never doubted for a moment that they would spend their lives in agriculture, while others speak of their surprise and delight to find themselves living on the land. All agree that they wouldn't be happy doing anything else.
