Crucible of Freedom: Workers’ Democracy in the Industrial Heartland, 1914–1960. By Eric Leif Davin

Crucible of Freedom is unlike any scholarly history book I have ever read. Throughout the work, Eric Davin interjects himself into the narrative. He frequently recounts anecdotes from individuals who describe what their grandparents told them about labor organizing in the 1930s and 1940s. Davin’s approach reminded me of William H.Whyte’s Street Corner Society . Much like Whyte, Davin is the participant-observer interpreting an oppositional culture that was—and remains—remote from Main Street America. There are also echoes of David Brooks’s sociological rendering of contemporary professionals in Bobos in Paradise .