Thomas Dublin – författare

In this prize-winning study, Thomas Dublin explores, in carefully researched detail, the lives and experiences of the first generation of American women to face the demands of industrial capitalism. Dublin describes and traces the strong community awareness of these women from Lowell and relates it to labor protest movements of the 1830s and '40s.

Between 1820 and 1860, tens of thousands of single women streamed from rural New England to find work in the burgeoning factory towns of the region. 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.

A classroom staple, Immigrant Voices: New Lives in America, 1773-2000 has been updated with writings that reflect trends in immigration to the United States through the turn of the twenty-first century. New chapters include a selection of letters from Irish immigrants fleeing the famine of the 1840s, writings from an immigrant who escaped the civil war in Liberia during the 1980s, and letters that crossed the U.S.-Mexico border during the late 1980s and early '90s. With each addition editor Thomas Dublin has kept to his original goals, which was to show the commonalities of the U.S. immigrant experience across lines of gender, nation of origin, race, and even time.