My book's out in paperback now, so that's cool. As long as I'm posting about that, some similar stuff... as I mentioned before I was on the Reel Abstractions podcast and there were a couple reviews of my book. Since then I've been on some more podcasts - Working People, No Easy Answers, Left Anchor, and New Books in History - if you want to hear my Illinois accent at work. It was really nice to get to talk with people about my book and to hear other people engaging with the book. There's also been another review in the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, and another in the journal Continuity and Change. And the other day I was looking at labor history books in the public library catalog and seeing what the subject headings were that they were categorized under. That made me curious how they were categorizing my book, so I looked. I don't remember what the categories were but I found this blurb on my book from the library publication Choice, published by the Association of College & Research Libraries. This is a screenshot, I couldn't figure out how to copy the text.
I can't remember if I said this on here before - my book also won the Honorable Mention for the Merle Curti Intellectual History Award given by the Organization of American Historians. The OAH conference program said "Injury Impoverished: Workplace Accidents, Capitalism, and Law in the Progressive Era (Cambridge University Press) is a beautifully written and moving study that unearths the values and assumptions that shaped the development of workers’ compensation law in the early twentieth century. Through careful and rigorous research, Holdren highlights the moral and bodily consequences of this new legal regime for accident victims, compellingly suggesting that workers’ compensation law reinforces the injustices of capitalism rather than producing what he calls the “justice of recognition.” This book offers new and compelling insights for various fields of study, including legal history, histories of capitalism, and disability history."
My book also won the Philip Taft Labor History Award. The Award Committee described my book this way: "Nate Holdren’s book, Injury Impoverished: Workplace Accidents, Capitalism, and Law in the Progressive Era, published by Cambridge University Press, is both elegantly and elegiacally written. Throughout the book, Holdren lays out the ways in which the early 20th century capitalistic legal system commodified workers’ body parts in what he terms two different types of tyrannies: “the tyranny of the table” and the “tyranny of the trial.” Unlike those who manufactured these tyrannies, Holdren never loses sight of the very real humanity of those who experienced workplace accidents. During this pandemic year, it seems fitting that we celebrate a work which so deftly reverberates beyond historical understandings of injury and harm and considers those of obligation, dignity and justice."
So that's nice. I wanted intellectual and labor historians to like the book but wasn't sure if they would - those are both fields I'm interested in and want to be better read in - so I was especially delighted for the book to win these awards in particular. Above all I'm very honored and excited that people have engaged with it and thought about it.
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