ebooks New York’s Yiddish Theater: From the Bowery to Broadway by From Museum of the City of New York Staff in History

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Immigrants and their children became the chief component of the U.S. working class during the nineteenth century. Bruce Levine examines the early years of this social transformation; focusing on German-born craft workers and the key roles they played in the economic and political life of the wage-earning population of antebellum America. Interweaving themes often treated separately--immigration; industrialization; class formation; and the political polarization over slavery--Levine sheds new light on the development of the working class; the nature and appeals of partisan politics; and the conflicts that led to sectional war. This study begins by carefully delineating the European background of these emigrants; especially their involvement in the economic; political; and cultural developments that culminated in the revolution of 1848. It then follows them to the New World; where it locates them within the multi-class German-American population. The author subtly analyzes the deepening political divisions within German-America; differentiating conservative; liberal; radical-democratic; and Marxist currents. At the same time; Levine explores the distinctive role that German-American workers played in American society at large--notably; in the multi-ethnic antebellum labor movement and in popular responses to the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854; the rise of the Republican party; and the outbreak of sectional war. Throughout; Levine stresses the way in which European memories; traditions; and values conditioned (and were reshaped by) the immigrants' encounter with industrial; political; and cultural realities in their new land. The volume concludes with a discussion of the legacy of the radicalcraftworker milieu in postbellum decades and an assessment of later attempts to ignore or minimize this aspect of German-American and American working-class history. The Spirit of 1848 offers much new information and insight concerning craftwork; the nature of the antebellum lab