"Gregg Andrews, a gifted historian of labor and transnationalism, gives us a stirring and timely history that lays bare the strategies of management and the varied responses of shoe workers in the river city put on the map by Mark Twain. Shoe Workers in Hannibal, Missouri shows how the largest shoe company in the early 1900s moved manufacturing outside the Midwest center of production in St. Louis for cheap labor, leaving governments and workers in the smaller cities to compete for investment and jobs. The strategy aimed to undermine the power of organized labor and community solidarity, but, as Andrews shows, it never extinguished the multiple forms of resistance by workers seeking better pay, safer conditions, and a thriving community." - David Roediger, author of An Ordinary White: My Antiracist Education "Gregg Andrews brings us another eye-opening account of working-class life: a David and Goliath story of the multigenerational struggles of shoe workers in Hannibal. Workers and their families battled a St. Louis shoe industry strategy designed to extract wealth from the rural hinterlands. Mark Twain would have been proud that Andrews restores his hometown's shoe workers to the historical record.

Richly textured with a deep understanding of local, national, and global developments, Shoe Workers in Hannibal, Missouri will awaken readers to the massive battles that had to be waged just to get by, even in the glorified days of the New Deal." - Rosemary Feurer, author of Radical Unionism in the Midwest, 1900-1950 "Shoe Workers in Hannibal, Missouri describes the industrial transformation of the American heartland not as the quiet workings of the marketplace but as an aggressive business plan by the shoe manufacturers in St. Louis who remade the largely rural communities into factory towns. Andrews's study explores the experience of those who responded to the non-negotiable siren song of the factory whistle." - Mark A. Lause, author of Free Labor: The Civil War and the Making of an American Working Class.