Working Americans, 1880-1999: The working class

Book excerpt: The introduction identifies this volume as the first in a multi-volume set; v.2 will cover the middle class, but after that, it's not clear what's planned. Volume 1 is a compendium focusing on the working class (which is nowhere defined). Each section deals with a decade and opens with a brief overview. Numerous reproductions of cartoons, advertisements, posters, and photographs of families, workers, and working conditions, as well as portions of magazine articles and quotations are interspersed with information about significant events of the decade and bits of social and economic information. Family profiles (74 in all) are fictional composites intended to represent the financial and social situations of families from an array of ethnic groups and occupations. The author's credentials are not identified, though he draws heavily on another of his works from the same publisher called The Value of a Dollar. Inexplicably, the volume lacks an index, making it more of a "browse" than a useful reference. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR