Upon the Altar of Work: Child Labor and the Rise of a New American Sectionalism (Working Class in American History)

Upon the Altar of Work is one of those rare historical monographs that asks big, profound questions about American history. It is wonderfully ambitious in its scope, chronicling how both the North and South approached the issue of child labor from before the Civil War when it was tied up with the slavery conflict to the modern period when capitalism (especially the consumer-oriented variety) had taken hold everywhere. This allows her to observe how both the North and South adapted to - and resisted - modern capitalist society. The slavery conflict looms large in this book, as both the starting point and the raison d'etre for "sectionalism" in the first place, influencing everything that came after the Civil War. Her close reading of primary sources (newspapers, legislative debates, popular magazines, court cases, political cartoons, government publications, institutional records, and even novels) is astonishing in depth and scope. Both the depth of the analysis and the breadth of the chronology are impressive as Wood not only introduces a new chronological context in each chapter but she engages an entirely different set of historiographical debates in each: free labor /antislavery, Civil War and emancipation, the New South and industrialization/Reconstruction, the Gilded Age and Progressive Era reform movements, the rise of consumer capitalism / Social Gospel & fundamentalist Christianity movements, World War I/1920s culture, and the Great Depression/New Deal.By my reading, Upon the Altar of Work intervenes in multiple historiographical debates beyond the larger questions she's asking, including the making of modern capitalist society itself (especially the role of Southern capitalists in forging modern conservatism), American religious history (the influence of the Social Gospel on progressive politics and its ultimate decline), whiteness and sectional reconciliation (Wood shows the limits of "sectional reconciliation" and how there were new sectional divisions that emerged despite the language of reconciliation), and anti-modernist movements at the turn of the century (who knew that an organized anti-reform movement defeated an establishment-backed Child Labor Amendment to the U.S. Constitution!? I didn't know until I read Wood's book).While reading Upon the Altar of Work, I realized that the author was also intervening in child labor /child reform historiography - a well-worn field with its own set of concerns - which makes this book all the more impressive. Wood is the first historian with a book-length examination of the history of sectional tensions in child labor debates over time, which is in itself a major scholarly contribution.Although I was most impressed by the analytical sophistication and historiographical breadth, I think it worth mentioning that Upon the Altar of Work is also gorgeously written and creatively structured. Each chapter opens with a Biblical epigraph that encapsulates the moral problem grappled with by the historical actors, which mirrored the legacy of Biblical debates over slavery. And each chapter is tightly organized and succinctly argued, mustering historical evidence masterfully to support the author's conclusions while also artfully telling a riveting story, complete with interesting, quirky historical characters--some likeable, some not--with complicated motivations and moral perception.A brilliant, ambitious, highly original work.

Wood accomplishes the feat of bringing into historical focus the topic of child labor and does so in an engaging and highly accessible way. The works lacks nothing in the way of scholarship and overflows with highly relevant information on a topic that played a major role in American capitalist society. This is a must read for those interested in American history and the history of labor.