This pathbreaking collection explores the history of occupational safety and health in America from the late nineteenth century of the 1950s. Thirteen essays tell a story of the exploitation of workers as measured by shortened lives, high disease rates, and painful injuries and of the often contentious development of policies and programs to protect them. An interdisciplinary group of scholars examines the history of alternative approaches to protecting and compensating injured workers, the growth of state and federal involvement industrial safety and health, the controversies over the recognition of lead as a poisonous substance and the three emblematic industrial diseases of this century-radium poisoning, asbestos-related diseases, and brown lung.