Back of the Yards: The Making of a Local Democracy

Robert A. Slayton's Back of the Yards is one of the finest accounts I have ever read on an urban, working-class neighborhood in twentieth-century America. Its focus on family, politics, and worklife is penetrating and its conclusions reinforce an emerging scholarly picture of ordinary people exercising unique forms of power. -John Bodnar, author of The Transplanted: A History of Immigrants in Urban America