Dance Hall Days - Randy Mcbee

"Brimming with human detail and adventuresome argument, Dance Hall Days is a major contribution to both labor history and immigration studies. McBee never loses sight of the fact that workers' lives were about romance, intense same-sex friendships, dance, loneliness, longing, and marriage just as surely as they were about jobs. In its intimate portrayal of immigrants' lives, Dance Hall Days demonstrates the critical role of class, along with generation, gender, and community, in shaping the particular ways in which Americans encountered mass culture."

-David Roediger,University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

"In the diffuse and fragmented world of gender history it is rare to find a work of true originality anymore. Randy McBee's Dance Hall Days is, however, such a book. In this vigorously researched study of early twentieth-century heterosocial relations, McBee overturns the long-held consensus that dance hall and new amusement entrepreneurs manipulated the rise of mass culture and hence loosened social relations in the process. McBee's achievement is to see men and women as active agents in the creation of their own heterosocial leisure world, not only in dance halls and amusement parks but in picnics, religious festivals, and even men's social clubs. This often stunning and always surprising book combines traditional scholarly rigor with postmodern wit and savvy. It should become indispensable reading for historians and sociologists of American gender relations for many years to come. A remarkable achievement."

--, -Kevin White,Portsmouth University

"Randy D. McBee's monograph opens up a new space for thinking about immigrant life, ethnicity, and youth in the context of social history."

-The Journal of American History,

"This is a very important book that draws together astute analyses of youth, gender, morals, amusements and ethnic history. After you read it, you will never look into faces on the old dance photos in the same way."

-American Historical Review,

"This book adds important new insights to a growing literature that explores day-to-day immigrant life through the lens of popular amusments."

-Journal of American Ethnic History,

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