carmenfrachttp://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=12331Russell L. Johnson. Warriors into Workers: The Civil War and the Formation of Urban-Industrial Society in a Northern City. New York: Fordham University Press, 2003. xii + 388 pp. $55.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8232-2269-8.Reviewed by Bruce E. Baker (Department of History, Royal Holloway, University of London)Published on H-CivWar (September, 2006)Hawkeyes in War and IndustryRussell L. Johnson's meticulously researched study is a very successful blend of two, or perhaps three, "new" kinds of history: the new military history, the new labor history, and the new social history. All of these "new" fields, of course, are as old as Johnson himself, but Warriors into Workers is one of the few monographs that attempts to bring these subfields together. By taking a detailed look at a city--Dubuque, Iowa--that was on the verge of major industrialization when the Civil War came along, Johnson examines the extent to which the experience of military service affected the transition of society from one based on farming, some mining, and commerce to one that would be increasingly dominated by industry in the postwar decades. The task he sets himself is to "[trace] the connection between the industrial workplace and the other great centralized, stratified, and authoritarian institution of the nineteenth century, the Union army" (p. 5). Using sophisticated analysis of the 1860 and 1870 censuses and thorough combing of local newspapers and a variety of local records, Johnson is able to present a fine-grained account of how Dubuque changed and how the war changed its veterans.
carmen frac on 01 Jun 12Russell L. Johnson. Warriors into Workers: The Civil War and the Formation of Urban-Industrial Society in a Northern City. New York: Fordham University Press, 2003. xii + 388 pp. $55.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8232-2269-8. Reviewed by Bruce E. Baker (Department of History, Royal Holloway, University of London) Published on H-CivWar (September, 2006) Hawkeyes in War and Industry Russell L. Johnson's meticulously researched study is a very successful blend of two, or perhaps three, "new" kinds of history: the new military history, the new labor history, and the new social history. All of these "new" fields, of course, are as old as Johnson himself, but Warriors into Workers is one of the few monographs that attempts to bring these subfields together. By taking a detailed look at a city--Dubuque, Iowa--that was on the verge of major industrialization when the Civil War came along, Johnson examines the extent to which the experience of military service affected the transition of society from one based on farming, some mining, and commerce to one that would be increasingly dominated by industry in the postwar decades. The task he sets himself is to "[trace] the connection between the industrial workplace and the other great centralized, stratified, and authoritarian institution of the nineteenth century, the Union army" (p. 5). Using sophisticated analysis of the 1860 and 1870 censuses and thorough combing of local newspapers and a variety of local records, Johnson is able to present a fine-grained account of how Dubuque changed and how the war changed its veterans. Dubuque originated in the 1830s, after the Black Hawk War, as a lead-mining town, across the river from Galena, Illinois. By 1855, several railroads had made the city their western terminus, stimulating a brief but powerful commercial boom. The reason for that boom's brevity was the Panic of 1857, which brought Dubuque levels of business failure disproportionate to its size. The business collapse led to concer
