Over the course of the 20th century, Singapore was divided about where, how, what, and by whom street foods, especially satay, should be sold. Even if satay and hawking were a critical part of culinary infrastructure, municipal and colonial/post-colonial elites defined street hawking as a problem. The dispute, a contest over the use of streets and the meanings of street foods in the colonial and later postcolonial city, boils down to the common sauce pot. Typically, at least until the 1970s, satay diners dipped individual skewers into a large shared pot of satay sauce. If, for some, satay and other street foods were livelihood and favorite tastes, others saw them as unclean contaminants. The common sauce pot could symbolize conviviality. Dipping in the common sauce pot, could also represent threats to public order and health. Linking the delivery of foods to its cultural meanings also offers a useful frame to understand the historical debate over street food regulation in specific locales, suggesting links between how it is understood, remembered, contested, and experienced by those who cook, those who eat, and those who regulate. the ways Singaporeans remembered and represented satay becomes a sensory study of streets, street foods, and regulation.

This article examines how Toronto's Filipina/o food establishments have engaged with military practices of eating together across rank through the boodle fight, in which diners eat with their hands, sharing heaps of rice and viands on a central table covered in banana leaves. It asks: what negotiations do urban ethnic restauranteurs make with the Philippines' history of US imperialism and militarism when they advertise and host boodle fights in their establishments? This study excavates the boodle fight from its West Point origin to its appearances in Philippine militarized civic education and its entry into transpacific diplomatic gatherings and urban diasporic culinary tourism initiatives in North America and the Middle East. It further anchors itself by means of oral histories with restaurateurs and diners-around a boodle fight meal-and explores the entangled narratives of militarism across generations in the Philippine diaspora. While the boodle fight is advertised as a break-down of ranks in favor of a collective Philippine culinary nationalism, it is argued that it never rids itself of military histories and social inequalities reinforced by militarized culture.

Living and Eating Class: Animals, Food, and American Inequality Daniel E. Bender (bio) Dawn Day Biehler. Pests in the City: Flies, Bedbugs, Cockroaches, and Rats. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2013. 360pp. Illustrations, notes, selected bibliography, and index. $34.95 (cloth); $24.95 (paper). David Huyssen. Progressive Inequality: Rich and Poor in New York, 1890–1920. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2014. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $39.95. Katherine Leonard Turner. How the Other Half Ate: A History of Working-Class Meals at the Turn of the Century. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2014. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $65.00 (cloth); $29.95 (paper). Are we living in a new global Gilded Age, and is a new Progressive Era the panacea for twenty-first–century inequality? As these three thoughtful books suggest, there are fundamental flaws with a call for a new progressivism. Inequality is quantifiable, for example, as income differential. Sometimes inequality is measured in qualitative ways: how well does one eat? Are homes safe? Are they free from pests and disease-causing agents? America at the turn of the twentieth century inherited the inequality of the Gilded Age; but the Progressive Era, far from eradicating inequality, actually bequeathed a legacy of class violence. David Huyssen’s Progressive Inequality: Rich and Poor in New York, 1890–1920 is an elegantly written book, moving poetically through encounters across class, culture, and geography. Inequality is described here as the physical manifestations of class that deeply troubled elite and proletarian New Yorkers. Pausing principally on the garment and subway wars that culminated with tragic fires and dramatic politics and strikes, Huyssen revisits mostly well-understood and amply documented episodes. Many superb books have been written about New York’s Progressive Era strikes and cross-class foment, though only the smallest handful of them appear in the footnotes or text. This is not only a flaw of omission but also a missed opportunity to place long historiographies in dialogue. Because the [End Page 528] text curiously passes over so much of the recent historical literature, it misses the opportunity to plumb the relationship between histories of labor and capitalism in the effort to explicate the relationship between class and inequality. Huyssen begins in the last weeks of the old century, as rich and poor New Yorkers gathered in Madison Square Garden. There, the very rich watched from the balcony as the city’s poorest dined well—for a night. The Christmas banquet fittingly represents the reality of a divided city and foretells the drama to come. Inequality persisted, indeed increased, in the Progressive Era. This book is most successful when it demonstrates in textured detail the way inequality catalyzed fraught encounters across lines of class and ethnicity. Class divided, but the Progressive Era forged moments of both cross-class conflict and coalition, along with changing dynamics of class relations. Sometimes—indeed, most often—the very rich understood poverty less as the product of capitalism than as the result of personal and moral failure. Thus, they invaded the tenements as official or self-appointed inspectors penetrating into the heart of the working-class home to challenge the way the very poor lived, washed, ate, and slept. Americans were hardly blind to class, but close analysis of the way rich and poor met on the picket lines or in the elite social clubs exposes the way Americans abandoned efforts to restrain capitalism in the “interest of social harmony” (p. 270). In Huyssen’s reboot of familiar episodes, there remain opportunities to look beyond the words and performances of cross-class confrontations. What was in the soup at the soup kitchen? What foods were served at that Christmas banquet? Katherine Leonard Turner’s How the Other Half Ate: A History of Working-Class Meals at the Turn of the Century tells us a great deal about what working-class Americans ate and just as much about how their diets became the focus of social reform and a measure of class difference. In the rich detail of the meal, the book describes the transformations of diet as cooking became subservient to the rhythms and processes of industrial labor. Class happens, she argues...

PARAMA ROY, Alimentary Tracks: Appetites, Aversions, and the Postcolonial, Durham: Duke University Press, 2010, pp. 277.

Journal Article Dangerously Sleepy: Overworked Americans and the Cult of Manly Wakefulness Get access Alan Derickson. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. xiv, 224 pp. $49.95.) Journal of American History, Volume 101, Issue 3, December 2014, Pages 951–952, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jau527 Published: 01 December 2014

Book Review| March 01 2010 Bodies of Work: Civic Display and Labor in Industrial Pittsburgh Bodies of Work: Civic Display and Labor in Industrial Pittsburgh Edward Slavishak Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008 x + 368 pp., 30 illustrations, $89.95 (cloth); $24.95 (paper) Daniel E. Bender Daniel E. Bender Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Labor (2010) 7 (1): 138–140. https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-2009-071 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Daniel E. Bender; Bodies of Work: Civic Display and Labor in Industrial Pittsburgh. Labor 1 March 2010; 7 (1): 138–140. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-2009-071 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsLabor Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Labor and Working-Class History Association2010 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Book Reviews You do not currently have access to this content.

This article focuses on settlement house work and social reform as efforts to reconcile concerns about the survival of the unfit with the desire for reform and charity. Self-described progressives regarded themselves as shaping the evolution of the race and their work as an expression of civilization. While the social history of reform is rich, historians know less about its intellectual underpinnings. This article shifts the focus from the methods of reformers to their fears of failure and their desire for racial progress. Settlement house workers worried about the perils of degeneration. To understand degeneration, they turned to a language of civilization that historians generally associate only with imperialism to divide populations into savage and civilized. When settlement house workers advocated organized play and boys clubs and began milk stations and better baby contests, they believed that they were civilizing the immigrant urban savage. They believed that the acquired characteristics of civilization could be passed on to a new generation. Yet reformers still worried that their efforts were also preserving the Unfit who, in a more savage society, would have perished. Their concern about saving the fit while helping the extinction of the degenerate opened the door to eugenics.

Book Review| December 01 2007 Waves of Opposition: Labor and the Struggle for Democratic Radio Waves of Opposition: Labor and the Struggle for Democratic Radio Elizabeth Fones-Wolf Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006 xviii + 307 pp., $60.00 (cloth); $25.00 (paper) Daniel E. Bender Daniel E. Bender Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Labor (2007) 4 (4): 125–127. https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-2007-043 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Daniel E. Bender; Waves of Opposition: Labor and the Struggle for Democratic Radio. Labor 1 December 2007; 4 (4): 125–127. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-2007-043 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsLabor Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Labor and Working-Class History Association2007 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Book Reviews You do not currently have access to this content.

Book Review| December 01 2006 Sewing Women: Immigrants and the New York City Garment Industry Sewing Women: Immigrants and the New York City Garment Industry Margaret M. Chin New York: Columbia University Press, 2005 viii + 197 pp., $50 (cloth) Daniel E. Bender Daniel E. Bender Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Labor (2006) 3 (4): 99–100. https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-2006-025 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Daniel E. Bender; Sewing Women: Immigrants and the New York City Garment Industry. Labor 1 December 2006; 3 (4): 99–100. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-2006-025 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsLabor Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Labor and Working-Class History Association2006 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Book Reviews You do not currently have access to this content.

Journal Article A Nation of Realtors®: A Cultural History of the Twentieth-Century American Middle Class. By Jeffrey M. Hornstein (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005. 264 pp. Cloth $79.95, Paperback $22.95) Get access Daniel E. Bender Daniel E. Bender University of Toronto Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Social History, Volume 40, Issue 2, Winter 2006, Pages 487–489, https://doi.org/10.1353/jsh.2007.0003 Published: 01 December 2006