Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939

Author: Lizabeth Cohen
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Format: Paperback
Condition: Used
Pages: 544
Published: October 25, 1991

Making a New Deal is a groundbreaking history of working-class life in Chicago between the World Wars. Historian Lizabeth Cohen explores how immigrant and industrial workers Italians, Poles, African Americans, Mexicans, and others—transformed their neighborhoods, workplaces, and political alliances in the face of economic crisis and cultural change.

Through detailed research, Cohen shows how consumer culture, mass media, labor unions, and the Great Depression reshaped working-class identity and paved the way for the New Deal coalition. The book highlights how ordinary people adapted, resisted, and ultimately influenced the course of American politics and society.

Winner of the Bancroft Prize, Making a New Deal is widely recognized as one of the most important works of U.S. labor and urban history.