Books in the Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Modern History series

Ethnic Differences, first published in 1989, explores how and why the Irish, Italians, Jews, and blacks of Providence, Rhode Island differed in their schooling and economic success. The book offers an integrated study of American ethnicity, education, and social structure.

This book explores important aspects of the American Civil War from the perspective of Capital Hill. It is an effort to reconnoiter some of the possibilities for understanding the congressmen, their relations with one another, and their interaction with President Lincoln.

Historians have so far made few attempts to assess directly the costs and benefits of Britain's investment in empire. This book presents answers to some of the key questions about the economics of imperialism.

Servants in husbandry were unmarried farm workers hired on annual contracts. The institution of service distinguished them in many ways from their chief competitors, day-labourers.

Professor Ueda's book discusses the reasons for the modernisation of the high school at the turn of the twentieth century.

This 1982 book examines the changes in hospital care in New York that occurred around the turn of the twentieth century. Professor Rosner identifies the economic, political and demographic pressures that brought about a reshaping of the health care system, and analyses the dramatic reorganisation of hospitals that took place.

This book explores the changing values and aspirations of settlers in the American Far West by comparing the groups who settled in the Willamette Valley in the 1840s, the Utah Valley in the 1850s, and the Boise Valley in the 1860s.

Professor Winkle explores the influence of migration on rules of suffrage, conduct of elections, patterns of voting, recruitment of political leaders, and local party organizations, as they all emerged before the Civil War.

During the mid-1850s powerful political and cultural forces altered the sources of urban growth in the American West. This book demonstrates that the sectional crisis abruptly transformed St Louis's role in the national economy, redirecting the flow of capital and migrants away from St Louis and toward a smaller western city - Chicago.

This book examines return migration to Italy from the United States from 1870 to 1929. Many imigrants went to the United States to make money to buy land in Italy, and the Italian government came to see this as the best way of promoting economic modernization at home.

Winner of the 1981 Bancroft Prize. Focusing primarily on the middle class, this study delineates the social, intellectual and psychological transformation of the American family from 1780-1865. Examines the emergence of the privatized middle-class family with its sharp division of male and female roles.

Hal Barron reconstructs the social and economic history of a nineteenth-century rural community in America, Chelsea, Vermont. He explores the economic hardships and population loss that most of America at this time experienced growth and geographical expansion. This book provides an innovative contribution to the history of rural America.

Christopher Tomlins offers here a critical examination of the impact of the National Labor Relations Act on American unions. Dr Tomlins shows how public policy has been shaped to confine labour's role in the American economy, and that many of the unions' problems stem from the laws which purport to protect them.

This book examines the rapid spread of uniformed police forces throughout late nineteenth-century urban America. It suggests that, initially, the new kind of police in industrial cities served primarily as agents of class control, dispensing and administering welfare services as an unintentioned consequence of their uniformed presence on the streets.

This book examines a trans-Atlantic chain migration from a Norwegian fjord district to settlements in the nineteenth-century rural Upper Middle West and considers the social and economic conditions experienced in Europe as well as the immigrants' cultural adaptations to America.

In the first comprehensive study of American working-class recreation, Professor Rosenzweig takes us to the saloons, the ethnic and church picnics, the parks and playgrounds, the amusement parks, and the movie houses where industrial workers spent their leisure hours. Focusing on the city of Worcester, Massachusetts, he describes the profound changes that popular leisure underwent.

This book traces the emergence of a recognizable and self-aware 'middle class' between the era of the American Revolution and the end of the nineteenth-century. The author focuses on the development of the middle class in larger American cities, particularly Philadelphia and New York.