The Black Shields Book

It's the 100-year anniversary of a major touchstone in union activism, worker's rights: the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, just off of Washington Square, where 146 girls and women died in a factory where fire exits were locked from the outside (to prevent employees from stealing cotton scraps) and fire escapes were flimsy enough to fall right off of the building when anyone tried to use them. The fire lasted 15 or 20 minutes and had immense consequences for labor law, women's rights and immigrant's rights, and even pop culture: the morgues containing the dead girls became a sideshow attracting 200,000 gawkers, while William Randolph Hearst relentlessly tore into sweatshops despite political pressure to downplay the story.

This is a book geared towards Young Adult readers, but it's still terrific for older readers who want a judicious history of the event, its context and its repercussions: New York City's immigrant population and industry barons; the megatrend of the shirtwaist, or a blouse that is puffy on top but narrows into a tiny waist (hence the factory's name, "Triangle"); the history of strikes and strikebreakers, and the explosive consequences of the disaster that reshaped labor and union rights in America.