Source: Wikimedia Commons
An apprenticeship in the machine trades in 1965 was a four-year indenture at deliberately low pay, served in a shop where the training was informal, the guarding was…
Source: Wikimedia Commons
Caddying in 1962 was one of the great summer jobs, and almost every element of it is now impossible. A boy of twelve or fourteen turned up at…
Source: Wikimedia Commons
The cannery was one of the great employers of women in twentieth-century industry, and almost nobody writes about it. In fruit and vegetable districts, salmon ports and tomato…
Source: Wikimedia Commons
In 1955 the cotton mill was the largest employer across a wide band of the Southern states, and in hundreds of towns it was the only one. The…
Source: Wikimedia Commons
In 1955 coal mining employed hundreds of thousands of people and killed several hundred of them a year. The work was done largely by hand, the roof was…
Everybody has noticed it. The little pocket sewn inside the right front pocket of a pair of jeans, roughly two and a half inches deep, too small for a phone…