...This concluding chapter discusses the theoretical implications of Protestant engagement with the eight-hour movement for developing a broader understanding of the possibilities and constraints surrounding religion as a basis for activism around economic and industrial issues. Protestant beliefs...

... the city's eight-hour movement intersected with a Protestant religious culture that supported long hours to keep workers from idleness, intemperance, and secular leisure activities. Analyzing how both workers and clergy rewove working-class religious cultures and ideologies into strategic and rhetorical...

...This chapter discusses the eight-hour movement. National in scope, the movement for an eight-hour workday prompted the first public recognition of how capitalism—commonly called the “wages system” after its most obvious aspect—was affecting American social life. This public recognition came amid...

...This chapter examines the case of Chicago and nineteenth-century Protestantism, the development of factions within the eight-hour movement, and the relationship between labor reformers, employers, and Protestant clergy in the city. Beneath the manifest economic and political conflicts...

...This chapter looks at the first eight-hour-day campaign of 1866–67 in Chicago, which resulted in the first eight-hour law in the United States. The first eight-hour movement began shortly before the end of the Civil War, spearheaded by Boston mechanic Ira Steward and George McNeill and was soon...