This book is tripe, with an illogical thesis (government spending bad, prolonged Great Depression! Proof! Government spending during World War II, which finally spent country out of Depression) It's only useful for smacking ideologues upside the head (figuratively. Books should only be used as weapons on ideas. Although mine is hardbound. . .).

Laurie B. Green's study examines an iconic event in the fields of both civil rights history and labor history--the Memphis sanitation workers' strike in 1968, when Martin Luther King was assassinated. Green's study shows that the roots of this struggle reach back into the early 20th century, and that the battle was over basic rights for all African Americans in Memphis. An outstanding and thorough study, highly recommended.

John Dittmer, The Good Doctors: The Medical Commitee for Human Rights and the Struggle for Social Justice in Health Care (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2009), 311 pages.

In a long-awaited follow-up to the Bancroft Award-winning Local People, John Dittmer lucidly lays out the story of the Medical Committee for Human Rights (MCHR) and their role in the Civil Rights Movement. Inspired by the devotion and courage of civil rights protestors, medical professionals around the country came together in the MCHR to "do their part." Members initially saw their role as providing first aid and other immedicate medical assistance to protestors injured in confrontations with police and other hostile southern whites. Exposure to the prevailing jim crow medical system in the South, however, led many to become advocates for the ending of apartheid in that region, and advocates of "Health Care is a Human Right."

Many of the early leaders of the MCHR were Jewish doctors, nurses, and other health care professionals who had suffered discrimination of one sort or another themselves. Frustrated that the American Medical Associtation (AMA) refused to call on southern hospitals to grant black doctors hospital privileges, MCHR members also began documenting instances of discriminatory practice as they observed it happening--particularly after the Supreme Court held that hospitals built with federal monies could not discriminate on the basis of race.

The membership of the MCHR was largely white, since show more that was the makeup of a large portion of the medical professional field. This created tensions withing the civil rights movement, however. Mississippi became the focal point for both the Student Non-violent Co-ordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE) in 1963. After suffering a year of extreme violence for this choice, the decision was made to recruit white college students to aid in the voter registration drives in Mississippi during the summer of 1964, because violence visited upon middle class white college students would be newsworthy.

Dittmer's book makes a valuable contribution to the literature on the Civil Rights movement, because he makes this growing tension between white liberals and African Americans in the movement the centerpiece of the book. Many whites within the MCHR made significant contributions to the movement, but in the end most moved back north, leaving African Americans, whose contributions were more significant, if largely overlooked, to deal with the consequences. Dittmer has produced a worthy successor to Local People show less

Mann provides a solid synthesis of the scholarship and controversies in anthropological studies focused on the America's. This is of little use to scholars in the field, but to interested laymen (like this author), Mann provides a wealth of information. Mann also provides a bibliography, so that one can pursue further some of the points that he touches on in this book. A must-have for those outside the discipline of anthropology who are interested in the lives of the native peoples before their "discovery" by Europeans

Witwer provides a thorough analysis of what we "know" about the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT)--that the union is one of the most corrupt organizations in the labor movement--and examines how "corruption" is defined. While not portraying the IBT leaders as anti-heroes, like Thaddeus Russell did for Jimmy Hoffa in Out of the Jungle, Witwer does provide a more nuanced view of why corruption was less of a concern within the union than it proved to be on the outside.

Nearly 100 years after Upton Sinclair first alerted Americans to the dangers of mass-produced food, Eric Schlosser demonstrates that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Schlosser examined not only the effects of fast food on the health of consumers (a major contributing factory to the growind obesity problem in the United States), but the effects of fast food on the landscape, and on the workforce that prepares the food at all stages. Schlosser shows that workers in slaughterhouses suffer numerous injuries from repetitive motions, as well as cuts and the loss of digits (or more), from handling dulled knives because they don't have time to keep them sharp. The slaughterhouses themselves have moved out of "The Jungle" of urban areas, and into rural areas--that have few resources to deal with the large number of immigrant families that are attracted by the promise of steady work.

Sinclair is famously noted for claimin that in this book he "aimed for the heart, and hit the stomach," because of the outrage produced over his (true) depiction of the handling of animal carcasses and by-products, but little reaction over the working conditions of the plants. To today's audience, the melodrama is a bit over the top; the protagonist loses both his young wife and son to the conditions that existed in the neighborhood and the workplace. Or, at least, we like to think that it is melodrama. The book remains a classic because it portrays a slice of life that was just beginning to be examined by "muckrakers" when the book was first published in 1905.

Nelson explores the connections between mythology and history, and spinkes in a bit of historical methodology as well--and makes the whole thing fun to read. He demonstrates what a lot of persistence and a little imagination can accomplish. Reynolds was able to trace the legend of John Henry to its source (a free black man from New Jersey imprisoned in Virginia in the early days of Reconstruction)--and finds the real John Henry only stood 5 foot 1. He then follows the creation of the giant of legend.

For the teachers out there, I think this would work for an upper level college course (its main market, I believe), but would also work for a really bright high school class as well.