Black Milwaukee

The Making of an Industrial Proletariat, 1915-45

Joe William Trotter, Jr author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:University of Illinois Press

Published:12th Dec '06

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

Black Milwaukee cover

An updated version of a fiery classic

Other historians have tended to treat black urban life mainly in relation to the ghetto experience, but in Black Milwaukee, Joe William Trotter Jr. offers a new perspective that complements yet also goes well beyond that approach. The blacks in Black Milwaukee were not only ghetto dwellers; they were also industrial workers.  The process by which they achieved this status is the subject of Trotter’s ground-breaking study. 

This second edition features a new preface and acknowledgments, an essay on African American urban history since 1985, a prologue on the antebellum and Civil War roots of Milwaukee’s black community, and an epilogue on the post-World War II years and the impact of deindustrialization, all by the author. Brief essays by four of Trotter’s colleagues--William P. Jones, Earl Lewis, Alison Isenberg, and Kimberly L. Phillips--assess the impact of the original Black Milwaukee on the study of African American urban history over the past twenty years. 

"Trotter blazed new ground, courageously argued his thesis despite the skeptical eyes of non-Marxists, seamlessly connected local, urban, black, and labor history, and skillfully recounted the ways that black Milwaukeeans forged their own lives. . . . The second edition is well worth reading."--H-Urban


"Thanks to its original methodology, outstanding research and meticulous attention to detail Black Milwaukee has become a seminal work in labour history."--Left History


“This highly readable book is a classic, and rightly so, in the interconnected areas of labor, black, and urban history.”--Labor Studies Journal

ISBN: 9780252074103

Dimensions: 229mm x 152mm x 48mm

Weight: 708g

432 pages

2nd Edition