Where We Worked

"'Where We Worked is a superb tribute to the working people whose sweat and labor, intelligence and determination, faith and patriotism built American wealth and power during the great age of industrial revolution from the 1830s to the eve of the Second World War. In words and images informed by a keen grasp of social history “from the bottom up,” Jack Larkin evokes the lost worlds of ordinary people – men and women, native and immigrant, black and white – in fields, forests, and factories, shops and stores, on steamboats, fishing vessels, and railroads and pays these unacknowledged heroes of everyday life the just dues so often denied by their bosses and by later celebrants of American capitalism. In our electronic age, when technology is “virtual,” machines operate through invisible circuits, and the actual labor of extracting raw materials and assembling them into commodities is outsourced beyond our shores, it is instructive to review Larkin's compelling pages and be reminded that the goods and services that make our lives easier are always the product of industrious, often ill-paid people investing hands, hearts, and minds in the work.

– Robert A. Gross, James L. And Shirley A. Draper Professor of Early American History, University of Connecticut