New Books in Economic and Business History

In Shoe Workers in Hannibal, Missouri: The Rise and Fall of Manufacturing in America’s Hometown, 1890–1970 (LSU Press, 2026), Dr. Gregg Andrews examines the history of factory laborers
in a celebrated Mississippi River town. In the late 1890s, shoe
manufacturing transformed Mark Twain’s boyhood home from a steamboat
village to a factory town. By the mid-1920s, the St. Louis–based
International Shoe Company, the world’s largest shoe manufacturer at the
time, controlled all shoe production in Hannibal and continued to do so
until it shut down production lines in the 1960s. The company kept a
tight grip on the town as it battled to keep out unions and maintain labor
at a low cost and in a malleable state. When Hannibal’s shoe workers
claimed their right to organize under the New Deal during the Great
Depression, the shoe corporation was defiant. The company’s stance
sparked mob violence against outside union organizers, nurtured a
company union, pitted unionists against company loyalists, and badly
divided Hannibal. At the same time, the town was engaged in yearlong
festivities to celebrate the centennial of Mark Twain’s birth and the
opening of a museum named in his honor.

Dr.
Andrews’s study of shoe manufacturing and its production workers is
thick in detail and rich with the human stories of those whose lives
were shaped by the rise and fall of the shoe industry in Hannibal.
Andrews captures the shoe workers—white and Black, men and women—in
their own words as they describe their jobs, family struggles, and
battles to unionize.

Dr. Andrews examines the prevailing conditions that led the company to
close its production facilities in Hannibal, leaving shoe workers and
the town to confront the early shock waves of deindustrialization. His
study of an industry that has virtually disappeared in the United States
leaves a record for the families of thousands of American shoe workers
and the citizens of Hannibal to better understand their history and the
role shoe manufacturing played in it.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book
focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty
negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative
analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find
Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.
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In
the bustling market towns and growing cities of medieval England
between 1200 and 1600, public works were the lifelines of urban society.
In Urban Infrastructure in Medieval England: Sustainability and Resilience (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2026), Dr. Roberta J. Magnusson offers
the first comprehensive study of how medieval towns built, financed,
and sustained their defenses, bridges, streets, water systems, and harbors.

Dr.
Magnusson reveals how even modest communities, like the Warwickshire
town of Atherstone, boldly pursued projects that reshaped their futures.
Grants of tolls and taxes funded paving initiatives, bridge repairs,
and fortified walls, while enterprising lords and abbots sponsored
sluices, conduits, and quays. These efforts were not confined to
England's great cities; small towns with limited means also sought
to enhance their competitive edge, even when such investments strained
their resources. Drawing on royal records, municipal archives, and
archaeological evidence, Dr. Magnusson situates these civic undertakings
in their broader social and environmental contexts. She shows how
townsmen adapted traditional obligations of labor
and charity alongside innovative fiscal tools to sustain projects that
could span generations. Yet the balance was fragile. The crises of the
fourteenth century—famine, plague, and the harsher climate of the Little
Ice Age—undermined local resources, leaving many communities to
struggle with maintenance or watch their infrastructures decline.

At
once a history of engineering, economy, and community, this study
illuminates how medieval people conceived of security, health, and
prosperity through the material fabric of their towns. By tracing the
rise, transformation, and survival of these infrastructures, Dr.
Magnusson demonstrates how urban communities navigated centuries of
change while shaping the very landscapes in which they lived.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book
focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty
negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative
analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find
Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. 
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dan Rood’s In the Shadow of the Great House (W.W.
Norton & Co., 2026) is one of the first contemporary books to focus
on the primary engine of slavery, race, and capitalism in this country:
the plantation. The plantation was invented on the small Atlantic
island of São Tomé in the 1500s, and the island also became the site,
soon enough, of the first slave revolt. The brutal technology was then
perfected in Barbados, where planters worked tens of thousands of
African captives to their deaths in sugar factories. But it was in the
United States, Rood shows, that the plantation found its most powerful
manifestations. In Virginia, Carolina, and then the Deep South,
successive plantation revolutions transformed slavery into a much more
rigid and oppressive institution. Incomparably wealthy planters now
insisted on a rightless, eternally available, “increasing” source of
labor, and in the process reinvented human bondage and stamped it onto a
single race. But the plantation did not die after the Civil War. It
metastasized. From the advent of sharecropping in the late nineteenth
century to the rise of cotton in mid-twentieth century California to
today’s chicken processing plants, the plantation has cast a long shadow
over American life. Rood further documents the “dark retreats” carved
out of plantation life by the enslaved. It was the enslaved who offered
the most clear-eyed understanding of what the plantation behemoths told
us, and still tell us, about our country.
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Who gets to be a creative worker? In Blame the Intern: On (Not) Breaking Into the Creative Economy, (Princeton University Press, 2026) Alexandre Frenette, an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Vanderbilt University,
examines the relationship between work and education in the difficult
moment of the early career transition from university to industry.
Drawing on a detailed case study of the music industry, the book
explains and critiques the way internships have come to dominate routes
into many careers in contemporary society. An accessible yet
theoretically rich read, the book will be of interest to creative
workers at any point in their career, as well as sociologists and
humanities scholars, along with any reader interested in how and why our
workplaces are so unequal.
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A revealing look at the decline in formal employment in favor of
hiring contractors, freelancers, temps, and marginal workers, who are
excluded from traditional benefits and career ladders.

Companies cannot exist without workers, but they are increasingly
reluctant to have employees. Instead of providing the benefits and
protections that have traditionally come with employee status,
businesses are turning to tactics that let them treat people as
interchangeable parts, to be used and discarded as needed. Drawing on an
original survey of over 6,000 workers, Disposable Workers: The Transformation of Employment (Harvard University Press, 2026) reveals
the striking extent of this transformation across the occupational
hierarchy, affecting everyone from janitors to nurses.

Paul Osterman identifies three distinct categories of disposable
workers: contractors, freelancers, and marginal employees. The marginal
category, unique to Osterman’s analysis, describes workers who are
employees from a narrow legal standpoint but are held at arm’s length by
their firm—left without job security, skill training, or opportunities
for promotion. Many low-wage service workers toil in marginal jobs, but
so do white-collar professionals such as adjunct university faculty and
staff attorneys at law firms. When the three categories are added up,
they account for more than 35 percent of the American workforce.

Not all disposable workers object to their arrangements. But most
contractors and marginal employees would prefer standard employment, and
there is a significant cost to their current status. In response, Disposable Workers
offers a range of policy recommendations, including mechanisms to
prevent over-reliance on contracting and freelancing as well as reforms
to improve job quality for part-timers and marginal employees. As the
deconstruction of employment affects more and more workers, the
importance of such measures will only grow.

Paul Osterman is Professor Emeritus of Human Resources and Management
at the MIT Sloan School of Management. His numerous books include Good Jobs America, Who Will Care for Us? (Russell Sage, 2011); and The Truth about Middle Managers (Harvard Business School Press, 2009), Who Will Care For Us: Long Term Care and the Long Term Workforce (Russell Sage,2017), Gathering Power: The Future of Progressive Politics in America (Beacon Press, 2003); Securing Prosperity: The American Labor Market: How It Has Changed and What to Do About It (Princeton University Press, 1999), and Working In America: A Blueprint for the New Labor Market (MIT Press, 2001).
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