A Shoemaker's Story: Being Chiefly about French Canadian Immigrants, Enterprising Photographers, Rascal Yankees, and Chinese Cobblers in a Nineteenth-Century Factory Town

On a June morning in 1870, seventy-five Chinese immigrants stepped off a train in the New England factory town of North Adams, Massachusetts, imported as strikebreakers by the local shoe manufacturer. They threaded their way through a hostile mob and then—remarkably—their new employer lined them up along the south wall of his factory and had them photographed as the mob fell silent. So begins A Shoemaker's Story. Anthony Lee seeks to understand the social forces that brought this now-famous...