Trousson, Raymond / Vercruysse, Jeroom (dir.), Dictionnaire general de Voltaire. (Champion classiques, references et dictionnaires 18) 1272 p. 2020:10 (Champion, FR) <670-9>
ISBN 978-2-38096-016-7 paper ¥7,064.- (税込) EUR 38.00

Fahrenthold, Stacy D., Unmentionables: Textiles, Garment Work, and the Syrian American Working Class. (Worlding the Middle East) 320 pp. 2024:12 (Stanford U. Pr., US) <725-1339>
ISBN 978-1-5036-3808-2 hard ¥25,872.- (税込) US$ 120.00
ISBN 978-1-5036-4130-3 paper ¥6,468.- (税込) US$ 30.00

As weavers, garment workers, and peddlers, Syrian immigrants in the Americas fed the early twentieth-century transnational textile trade. These migrants and the commodities they produced-silk, linen, and cotton; lace and embroidery; undergarments and ready-wear clothing-moved along steamship routes from Beirut through Marseille and Madeira to New York City, New England, and Veracruz. As migrants and merchants crisscrossed the Atlantic in pursuit of work, Syrian textile manufacturing expanded across the hemisphere. Unmentionables offers a history of the global textile industry and the Syrians, Lebanese, and Palestinians who worked in it. Stacy Fahrenthold examines how Arab workers navigated processes of racialization, immigration restriction, and labor contestation. She writes women workers-the majority of Syrian garment workers-back into US labor history. She also situates the rise of Syrian American industrial elites, who exerted supply chain power to combat labor uprisings, resist unionization, and stake claim to the global textile industry. Critiquing the hegemony of the Syrian peddler in histories of this diaspora, Unmentionables introduces alternative narrators: union activists who led street demonstrations, women garment workers who shut down kimono factories, child laborers who threw snowballs at police, and the diasporic merchant capitalists who contended with all of them.

Wood, Alexander, Building the Metropolis: Architecture, Construction, and Labor in New York City, 1880-1935. (Historical Studies of Urban America) 496 pp. 2025:1 (U. Chicago Pr., US) <725-1340>
ISBN 978-0-226-83696-6 hard ¥7,546.- (税込) US$ 35.00

A sweeping history of New York that chronicles the construction of one of the world's great cities. Between the 1880s and the 1930s, New York City experienced explosive growth as nearly a million buildings, dozens of bridges and tunnels, hundreds of miles of subway lines, and thousands of miles of streets were erected to meet the needs of an ever-swelling population. This landscape-jagged with skyscrapers, rattling with the sound of mass transit, alive with people-made the city world-famous. Building the Metropolis offers a revelatory look at this era of urban development by asking, "Who built New York, and how?" Focusing on the work of architects, builders, and construction workers, Alexander Wood chronicles the physical process of the city's rapid expansion. New York's towering buildings and busy thoroughfares aren't just stylish or structural marvels, Wood shows, but the direct result of the many colorful personalities who worked in one of the city's largest industries. This development boom drew on the resources of the whole community and required money, political will, creative vision, entrepreneurial drive, skilled workmanship, and hard physical labor. Wood shows this to be an even larger story as well. As cities became nodes in a regional, national, and global economy, the business of construction became an important motor of economic, political, and social development. While they held drastically different views on the course of urban growth, machine politicians, reformers, and radicals alike were all committed to city building on an epic scale. Drawing on resources that include city archives and the records of architecture firms, construction companies, and labor unions, Building the Metropolis tells the story of New York in a way that's epic, lively, and utterly original.