A Coat of Many Colors: Immigration, Globalization, and Reform in New York City's Garment Industry - Hardcover

9780823224869: A Coat of Many Colors: Immigration, Globalization, and Reform in New York City's Garment Industry

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0823224864 ISBN 13: 9780823224869

Publisher: Fordham University Press, 2004

This specific ISBN edition is currently not available.

For more than a century and a half―from the middle of the 19th century to the end of the 20th―the garment industry was the largest manufacturing industry in New York City, and New York made more clothes than anywhere else.

For generations, the industry employed more New Yorkers than any other and was central to the city’s history, culture, and identity. Today, although no longer the big heart of industrial New York, the needle trades are still an important part of the city’s economy―especially for the new waves of immigrants who cut, sew, and assemble clothing in shops around the five boroughs.

In this valuable book, historians, sociologists, and economists explore the rise and fall of the garment industry and its impact on New York and its people, as part of a global process of economic change. Essays trace the rise of the industry, from the creation of a Manhattan garment district employing immigrants from nearby enements to the contemporary spread of Chinese-owned shops in cheaper neighborhoods. The tumultuous
history of workers and their bosses is the focus of chapters on contractors and labor militants and on the experiences of Italian, Chinese, Jewish, Dominican, and other ethnic workers. The final chapter looks at air labor, social responsibility, and the political economy of the offshore garment industry.

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About the Author

Daniel Soyer is Associate Professor of History at Fordham University and the author of Jewish Immigrant Associations and American Identity in New York, 1880–1939, co-winner of the Saul Viener Prize of the American Jewish Historical Society.

Review

Offers both historical and contemporary takes on the garment industry in New York. (―American Jewish History)

Historians and other scholars of labor, business, urban geography, gender, ethnicity, and internatioanl relations will find this book an indispensable resource. The uniformly accessible prose and high level of scholarship make it ideal for adoption in undergraduate courses. (―Journal of American History)

...the contributors address the topic from a wide variety of new perspectives that have resulted from the fruitful interaction of labor historians and scholars and practitioners in other fields. (Michael Naas ―Choice)

. . .A well-crafted book, an important resource, ad a very good read. (―Journal of American Ethnic History)

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