Manchester's Workers

ALTHOUGH ONE TITLE DISGUISES the fact, both these books are about Manchester. Hanlan's study, a revision of his 1979 Clark Ph.D. thesis written under Hareven's supervision, is a community study, conceived the spirit of the developing tradition of a new social (xv) Hareven's volume is a continuation of her ambitious project which has previously resulted in a number of articles and the justifiably highly-praised Amoskeag: Life and Work in an American Factory-City (New York: Pantheon 1978), co-authored by Randolph Langenbach. As Hareven's title suggests, her book stands firmly on the terrain of family history, but it transcends many of the familiar problems of that field by its constant effort to relate family to work. A study of the Amoskeag Mills in Manchester, New Hampshire, in the first three decades of the twentieth century, this volume demands careful reading as the most thorough attempt yet in the North American literature to bring together the insights of family history and working-class history. It manages to disappoint as well as to stimulate. Hareven's project, which commenced in 1971, set out to study the mill workers through a combination of traditional historical research (newspapers, company records, labour sources), kinship reconstitution (based on a sample of the extensive employment records of the company), and oral history. This mix of historical methods results in a study that can actually begin to address many of the questions about which other quantitative social historians, because of their limited sources, can only speculate wildly. The book, however, shares some similar problems with that work. First, the single background chapter, 'The Historical Context, drawn largely from Amoskeag, does not provide

Geography · American Environmental and Regional History · Canadian Identity and History · Historical and Cultural Archaeology Studies