Lunch-Bucket Lives takes the reader on a bumpy ride through the history of Hamilton’s working people from the 1890s to the 1930s. It ambles along city streets, peers through kitchen doors and factory windows, marches up the steps of churches and fraternal halls, slips into saloons and dance halls, pauses to hear political speeches, and, above all, listens for the stories of men, women, youths, and children from families where people relied mainly on wages to survive.

Heron takes wage-earning as a central element in working-class life, but also looks beyond the workplace into the households and neighbourhoods—settlement patterns and housing, marriage, child care, domestic labour, public health, schooling, charity and social work, popular culture, gender identities, ethnicity and ethnic conflict, and politics in various forms—presenting a comprehensive view of working-class life in the first half of the twentieth century.

This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

CRAIG HERON is a professor of History at York University in Toronto and the author of several works in Canadian social history, including Working in Steel: The Early Years in Canada, 1883-1935, The Workers? Revolt in Canada, 1917-1925, Booze: A Distilled History, and The Workers? Festival: A History of Labour Day in Canada. He lives in Toronto.

Craig Heron's profile page

• Short-listed, The Canadian Historical Association Best Scholarly Book in Canadian History Prize
• Winner, CAWLS Book Prize for the Best Book in Work and Labour Studies
• Winner, International Labor History Association, Book of the Year
• Winner, Clio Ontario Prize
• Winner, Fred Landon Award
• Short-listed, Ontario Legislative Assembly Speaker's Book Award

Lunch-Bucket Lives is exhaustively researched and documented,… a thoroughly engaging history… will prove a model as much for historians engaged in labour history as it will for those conducting community or local history.

Fred Landon Award