Urban Revolt: Ethnic Politics in the Nineteenth-Century Chicago Labor Movement

Urban Revolt is an incisive reexamination of the most highly mobilized urban revolutionary force in American history—the late nineteenth-century Chicago labor movement. By documenting the importance of ethnic origins in accounting for political choice, Eric L. Hirsch completely reconceptualizes the dynamics of urban social movements.

Hirsch links the industrialization of Chicago to the development and maintenance of an ethnically segmented labor market. Urbanization, he argues, fostered et...