| Book Review | The Michigan Historical Review, 33.2

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| Book Review | The Michigan Historical Review, 33.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Reviews

Steve Leikin. The Practical Utopians: American Workers and the Cooperative Movement in the Gilded Age. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005. Pp. 233. Bibliography. Illustrations. Index. Notes. Cloth, $44.95.

The nineteenth-century cooperative movement, in spite of its enormous appeal to American workers, has received little scholarly attention. Steve Leikin's readable analysis of Gilded Age cooperation addresses this lacuna. The first three chapters take a broad national view of the subject, with analyses of the origins of cooperation in the aftermath of the Civil War, the ideological struggle over its form and aims, and the cooperative movement's promising but troubled relationship with the Knights of Labor. The final two chapters—colorful case studies of producers' cooperatives among shoemakers in Stoneham, Massachusetts, and coopers in Minneapolis—are the book's strongest.

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