![]() The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.Ī master storyteller’s character-driven account of a storied year in the American Revolution.Īgainst world systems, economic determinist and other external-cause schools of historical thought, McCullough ( John Adams, 2001, etc.) has an old-fashioned fondness for the great- (and not-so-great) man tradition, which may not have much explanatory power but almost always yields better-written books. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions. ![]() He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. Hardcover: $39.00, 0-8229-3710-7 paper: $19.95, 0-8229-5478-8.)Įlie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children. Demarest and others: an excellent collection of eyewitness accounts, newspaper reproductions, contemporary photos, etc., woven together with commentary by several scholars. (Illustrations-not seen.) (Those interested in reading further about Homestead should note that the publisher is bringing out simultaneously ``The River Ran Red,'' ed. The definitive work on Homestead and its significance for American labor, with lessons still valid a century later. Ten years later, though, the unity of the town and its workers could not survive an occupation by National Guard troops, recruitment of scab labor, and charges of murder and treason against strike leaders, and the union was broken, effectively ending the power of organized labor in the US steel industry for nearly 40 years. In contrast to steelworkers in Pittsburgh, who were split into divisive factions, the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers in the nearby town of Homestead won an important victory during a strike against the forced signing of a company contract in 1882. This mechanical frame of reference-plus the emergence of ``machine politics'' as practiced by mill owners in the second half of the 19th century-brought on a ferocious battle with organized labor as workers sought to retain a livelihood that would allow them a measure of economic security. ![]() Technological advances in steelmaking-especially the Bessemer process, which eliminated the need for certain skills in ironworking-were, he explains, part of a program by industrialists to mechanize their plants as much as possible, reducing the role of human laborers. of British Columbia) is able to produce a multifaceted, comprehensive analysis. By taking a broad view of the strike and incorporating discussion of earlier conflicts at Andrew Carnegie's Homestead Steel Works, as well as developments in relations between capital and labor generally, Krause (History/Univ. ![]() A solid and thorough history of the Homestead Strike of 1892, in which a powerful steelworkers' union was destroyed in a lockout and protracted struggle. ![]()
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