The Healthiest City shows how a coalition of reform groups brought about community education and municipal action to achieve for Milwaukee the title of “the healthiest city” by the 1930s. This highly praised book reminds us that cutting funds and regulations for preserving public health results in inconvenience, illness, and even death.    “A major work. . . . Leavitt focuses on three illustrative issues—smallpox, garbage, and milk, representing the larger areas of infectious disease, sanitation, and food control.”—Norman Gevitz, Journal of the American Medical Association    “Leavitt’s research provides additional evidence . . . that improvements in sanitation, living conditions, and diet contributed more to the overall decline in mortality rates than advances in medical practice. . . . A solid contribution to the history of urban reform politics and public health.”—Jo Ann Carrigan, Journal of American History

    In this, the definitive comprehensive history of Philadelphia, the reader will discover a rich and colorful portrait of one of America's most vital, interesting, and illustrious cities.

    First published in London in 1937, it was quickly reprinted. Though very well received in England and a best-seller in Dublin, some questioned its quiet recall of an elysian rural Ireland before the Land War, its image of a contented Victorian world in the rich lands of east Limerick that rather jarred with the rhetoric of De Valera’s Ireland. Its woodcut images seemed English not Irish, and its ambiguous authorship gave ammunition to the doubters – was this really the voice of old Mary Fogarty, née O’Brien, or the heavily edited text produced by an Anglo-Irish friend and littérateur, Mary Lady Carbery? The text was indeed crafted by Mary Carbery, a sharp observer and accomplished essayist, but the strength of the book rests on Mary Fogarty’s contribution: the draft notes and papers that she sent over to Mary Carbery, fleshed out by information supplied by other members of the O’Brien clan. Her memories provide what remains an entirely convincing account of the lost world of the strong-farm family in post-famine Munster, one far more secure in its social status than that of other Catholic writers such as Charles Kickham or Canon Sheehan. Eighty years later, there are still few histories and even fewer fictional accounts of that rural Catholic middle class like the O’Briens, who confidently expected to be the inheritors of the earth in a HomeRule Ireland. Their world has rarely been evoked so sensitively as in this beguiling and most engaging narrative

    In "Farm to Factory" Thomas Dublin has selected five sets of letters in order to provide a personal view of the first generation of American women employed for wages outside their own homes. The letters he has selected provide a unique perspective on early industrial capitalism and its effects on women.The second edition of what has become a classic work contains a new introduction, placing the women's correspondence in the context of broader economic developments in early-nineteenth-century New England, and a new set of letters written by Emeline Larcom from Lowell, Massachusetts. Like thos in the first edition, these letters will lure you back in time, offering a broadened view of women's lives in the nineteenth century.