rails, in packinghouses and farm equipment plants, on construction sites and in hospital wards. Drawing on nearly one thousand interviews collected over more than a decade by oral historians working for the Iowa Federation of Labor, AFL-CIO, Shelton Stromquist presents the resonant voices of the men and women who defined a new, prominent place for themselves in the lives of their communities and in the politics of their state.Told largely in their own restrained yet powerful words, this is a story direct from daily experiences in shop and mine, home and neighborhood. The locus of the story is Iowa, but in a larger sense the experiences of Iowa's workers offer a window on the national changes that American workers brought to their towns and workplaces. Their sit-downs to win recognition, their shopfloor struggles to give meaning to contracts with employers, their day-to-day fights for racial and gender equality are part of a larger story of American workers as agents of their own lives in this century. Their diversity - as women, African Americans, and other minorities, as immigrants and the children of immigrants farmers who left the land, and finally as heirs of a strong union tradition - mirrors the diversity of the American working class.The collective impact of these voices is as deep and rich as Iowa soil. These workers' cumulative experiences give a human face to the changes that swept across the economic landscape of Iowa and the nation in the twentieth century.

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