Sweatshop: The History of an American Idea.(Book review)

Historian, The, March, 2006 by Rimby, Susan

Sweatshop: The History of an American Idea. By Laura Hapke. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2004. Pp. v, 202. $22.95.)

I have nicknamed my son's college apartment, the site of a former candy factory, "the sweatshop." Laura Hapke would understand. According to Hapke, most Americans have some mental picture of a sweatshop. Yet their images are diverse and contradictory. Hapke states, "The sweatshop is as American as apple pie. But what has it meant to the American imagination?" (1). Hapke seeks to answer this question by studying "the language, verbal and pictorial[,] in which the sweatshop was imagined and its stories told" (1). Through this analysis, Hapke uncovers how "... language itself undermines, refashions, challenges, and sometimes...

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