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For decades the small, quiet town of Hamlet, North Carolina thrived thanks to the railroad. But by the 1980s, it had become post-industrial backwater, a magnet for businesses looking for cheap labor with little or almost no official oversight. One of these businesses was Imperial Foods, which paid its workers a dollar or so above the minimum wage to stand in pools of freezing water for hours on end, scraping fat off frozen chicken breasts, and fined them if they went to the bathroom too many times during a shift. Then on the morning of September 3, 1991 - the day after Labor Day - this factory that had never been inspected caught fire. Twenty-five workers - mostly single mothers, many of whom were black - perished behind locked doors. 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But by the 1970s, it had become a postindustrial backwater, a magnet for businesses in search of cheap labor and almost no oversight. Imperial Food Products was one of those businesses. The company set up shop in Hamlet in the 1980s. Workers who complained about low pay and hazardous working conditions at the plant were silenced or fired. But jobs were scarce in town, so workers kept coming back, and the company continued to operate with impunity. Then, on the morning of September 3, 1991, the never-inspected chicken-processing plant a stone's throw from Hamlet's city hall burst into flames. Twenty-five people perished that day behind the plant's locked and bolted doors. It remains one of the deadliest accidents ever in the history of the modern American food industry.  Eighty years after the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, industrial disasters were supposed to have been a thing of the past in the United States. However, as award-winning historian Bryant Simon shows, the pursuit of cheap food merged with economic decline in small towns across the South and the nation to devalue laborers and create perilous working conditions. The Hamlet fire and its aftermath reveal the social costs of antiunionism, lax regulations, and ongoing racial discrimination. Using oral histories, contemporary news coverage, and state records, Simon has constructed a vivid, potent, and disturbing social autopsy of this town, this factory, and this time that exposes how cheap labor, cheap government, and cheap food came together in a way that was destined to result in tragedy.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50097360863505,"sku":"CIN1469660261VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50116294181137,"sku":"CIN1469660261G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51028149895441,"sku":"NIN9781469660264","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1469660261.jpg?v=1752929163"},{"product_id":"boardwalk-of-dreams-book-bryant-simon-9780195167535","title":"Boardwalk of Dreams","description":"During the first half of the twentieth century, Atlantic City was the nation's most popular middle-class resort--the home of the famed Boardwalk, the Miss America Pageant, and the board game Monopoly. By the late 1960s, it had become a symbol of urban decay and blight, compared by journalists to bombed-out Dresden and war-torn Beirut. Several decades and a dozen casinos later, Atlantic City is again one of America's most popular tourist spots, with thirty-five million visitors a year. Yet most stay for a mere six hours, and the highway has replaced the Boardwalk as the city's most important thoroughfare. Today the city doesn't have a single movie theater and its one supermarket is a virtual fortress protected by metal detectors and security guards.\n In this wide-ranging book, Bryant Simon does far more than tell a nostalgic tale of Atlantic City's rise, near death, and reincarnation. He turns the depiction of middle-class vacationers into a revealing discussion of the boundaries of public space in urban America. In the past, he argues, the public was never really about democracy, but about exclusion. During Atlantic City's heyday, African Americans were kept off the Boardwalk and away from the beaches. The overly boisterous or improperly dressed were kept out of theaters and hotel lobbies by uniformed ushers and police. The creation of Atlantic City as the \"Nation's Playground\" was dependent on keeping undesirables out of view unless they were pushing tourists down the Boardwalk on rickshaw-like rolling chairs or shimmying in smoky nightclubs.\n Desegregation overturned this racial balance in the mid-1960s, making the city's public spaces more open and democratic, too open and democratic for many middle-class Americans, who fled to suburbs and suburban-style resorts like Disneyworld. With the opening of the first casino in 1978, the urban balance once again shifted, creating twelve separate, heavily guarded, glittering casinos worlds walled off from the dilapidated houses, boarded-up businesses, and lots razed for redevelopment that never came. Tourists are deliberately kept away from the city's grim reality and its predominantly poor African American residents. Despite ten of thousands of buses and cars rolling into every day, gambling has not saved Atlantic City or returned it to its glory days.\n Simon's moving narrative of Atlantic City's past points to the troubling fate of urban America and the nation's cultural trajectory in the twentieth century, with broad implications for those interested in urban studies, sociology, planning, architecture, and history.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50345445720337,"sku":"CIN0195167538G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51693589922065,"sku":"CIN0195167538VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52473700286737,"sku":"NLS9780195167535","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0195167538.jpg?v=1751101591"},{"product_id":"fabric-of-defeat-book-bryant-simon-9780807824016","title":"A Fabric of Defeat","description":"The author of this study seeks to bring to life the politics of white South Carolina millhands during the first half of the 20th century. 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They built restrooms with gold-domed entrances and ornamented stall doors to inspire cleanliness and order.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBut officials soon grew anxious about who might take advantage of this privacy: gay men, the unhoused, and eventually drug users. And as the civil rights movement challenged segregation, officials in the north and south closed public toilets rather than integrate them. By the end of the twentieth century, only people with means could use private bathrooms while out and about—provided they made a purchase at a business. Today, as the fights over trans rights reveal, bathroom access remains a flash point across the country. 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