Formerly CIP Uk. - Includes bibliographical references and index. - Introduction : the labor question in the late nineteenth century -- The Cant of economy : narratives of depression in the 1870s -- Meat versus rice : anti-Chinese rhetoric and the problem of wage work -- The value of wages :...

Rosanne Currarino traces the struggle to define the nature of democratic life in an era of industrial strife. As Americans confronted the glaring disparity between democracy's promises of independence and prosperity and the grim realities of economic want and wage labor, they asked, "What should...