Winner of the 2012 Award for Excellence presented by the Greater Hudson Heritage Network The seemingly unremarkable Hudson River town of New Baltimore has had its ups and downs, you could certainly say that. Here, generations of families have worked the fields until the yield tapped out, built and repaired ships and barges until the steam age died, and harvested ice until refrigeration made "icebox" a quaint colloquialism. Yet despite the various economic, social, and military forces that have transformed the town, New Baltimore and its residents have endured, celebrating their triumphs and enduring their tragedies. Drawing on original town board minutes, Greene County surrogate and land records, federal and state military records, land patents, colonial documents, conversations with local residents, censuses, and period newspapers, town historian Clesson S. Bush provides an authentic portrait of a small-town community, making the routine—and drama—of small-town life on the Hudson River come alive.
This book was the first broad exposé of the social and environmental damage inflicted by the growth of corporate agriculture in California. Factories in the Field—together with the work of Dorothea Lange, Paul Taylor, and John Steinbeck—dramatizes the misery of the dust bowl migrants hoping to find work in California agriculture. McWilliams starts with the scandals of the Spanish land grant purchases, and continues on to examine the experience of the various ethnic groups that have provided labor for California's agricultural industry—Chinese, Japanese, Mexicans, Filipinos, Armenians—the strikes, and the efforts to organize labor unions