A penetrating look at one of the cities where America's Industrial Revolution began - Lawrence, Massachusetts, in whose redbrick mills wave after wave of European immigrants once found ready employment, a city as reflective of American life today as it was in 1900. In Huddle Fever, Jeanne Schinto, herself a granddaughter of Italian immigrants, makes vivid Lawrence's history: the great textile mills, the influx of Europeans, the huddled tenements, the seminal Bread and Roses strike.

More importantly, she shows how today, as the United States undergoes another profound revolution in work, immigrants (mostly from Latin America and Asia) are still arriving in Lawrence. But they find few jobs - only welfare - and an unwelcoming older populace locked in ethnic divisions and the sense that the American Dream has passed them by.