Dearinger has added a thoughtful and well-researched contribution to this genre of scholarship.
Labour/Le Travail An important contribution to American history and should have an exceptionally profound effect on our understandings of western history and the transportation frontier in particular.
Montana: The Magazine of Western History Dearinger builds upon the work of scholars such as Gunther ... Read morePeck and Andrew Urban to reincorporate waged work, reframed in Western and global historiographical turns, within the newer history of capitalism that has tended to emphasize the importance of slavery, commodification, and finance. The Filth of Progress deserves a wide readership.
American Historical Review Dearinger illustrates how class, ethnicity, and gender intersected in workers' quests to reorient their personal
and, perhaps, the nation's
destiny.
Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas The Filth of Progress offers important directives for Gilded Age historians. It urges us to remember who built the infrastructure that defined the Gilded Age. It asks us to consider the legacies of their work in the last decades of the nineteenth century. It reminds us that creating the idea of progress was also laborious. And, in suggesting just how much Gilded Age ideas about nation, citizenship, masculinity, and work were shaped by omitting Irish, Mormon, and Chinese workers, it reminds us of the power and perils of forgetting.
Journal of the Gilded Age & Progressive Era The Filth of Progress... [gives] voice to those absent from the official records: here Dearinger's work triumphs and becomes a fascinating study of a tumultuous period of American history and the formation of American identity.
Journal of American Culture The Filth of Progress provides fresh insight into the United States' 19th-century infrastrastructure projects by illuminating their 'dark underbelly' . . . . Dearinger's success and originality lie in his comparative framework, which examines how Irish, Chinese, and Mormon and other native-born workers struggled for identity. . . . An excellent analysis.
Pacific Northwest Quarterly Despite navigating such huge geographical and cultural boundaries, The Filth of Progress is able to present a coherent history, which hardly veers off the main tracks of its arguments... an instant classic.
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