Workers in the United States are losing sleep. In the global economy a growing number of employees hold jobs--often more than one at once--with unpredictable hours. Even before the rise of the twenty-four-hour workplace, the relationship between sleep and industry was problematic: sleep is frequently cast as an enemy or a weakness, while constant productivity and flexibility are glorified at the expense of health and safety."Dangerously Sleepy" is the first book to track the longtime association of overwork and sleep deprivation from the nineteenth century to the present. Health and labor historian Alan Derickson charts the cultural and political forces behind the overvaluation--and masculinization--of wakefulness in the United States. Since the nineteenth century, men at all levels of society have toiled around the clock by necessity: steel workers coped with rotating shifts, Pullman porters grappled with ever-changing timetables and unrelenting on-call status, and long-haul truckers dealt with chaotic life on the road. But the dangerous realities of exhaustion were minimized and even glamorized when the entrepreneurial drive of public figures such as Thomas Edison and Donald Trump encouraged American men to deny biological need in the name of success. For workers, resisting sleep became a challenge of masculine strength.This lucid history of the wakeful work ethic suggests that for millions of American men and women, untenable work schedules have been the main factor leading to sleep loss, newer ailments such as shift work sleep disorder, and related morbidity and mortality. "Dangerously Sleepy" places these public health problems in historical context.

In the definitive history of a twentieth-century public health disaster, Alan Derickson recounts how, for decades after methods of prevention were known, hundreds of thousands of American miners suffered and died from black lung, a respiratory illness caused by the inhalation of coal mine dust. The combined failure of government, medicine, and industry to halt the spread of this disease and even to acknowledge its existence resulted in a national tragedy, the effects of which are still being felt.

The book begins in the late nineteenth century, when the disorders brought on by exposure to coal mine dust were first identified as components of a debilitating and distinctive illness. For several decades thereafter, coal miners' dust disease was accepted, in both lay and professional circles, as a major industrial disease. Derickson describes how after the turn of the century medical professionals and industry representatives worked to discredit and supplant knowledge about black lung, with such success that this disease ceased to be recognized. Many authorities maintained that breathing coal mine dust was actually beneficial to health.

Derickson shows that activists ultimately forced society to overcome its complacency about this deadly and preventable disease. He chronicles the growth of an unprecedented movement from the turn-of-the-century miners' union, to the social medicine activists in the mid-twentieth century, and the black lung insurgents of the late sixties which eventually won landmark protections and compensation with the enactment of the Federal Coal Mine Health and Safety Act in 1969. An extraordinary work of scholarship, Black Lung exposes the enormous human cost of producing the energy source responsible for making the United States the world's preeminent industrial nation."

In the definitive history of a twentieth-century public health disaster, Alan Derickson recounts how for decades after methods of prevention were known hundreds of thousands of American miners suffered and died from black lung, a respiratory illness caused by the inhalation of coal mine dust. The combined failure of government, medicine, and industry to halt the spread of this disease -- and even to acknowledge its existence -- resulted in a national tragedy, the effects of which are still being felt.

The book begins in the late nineteenth century, when the disorders brought on by exposure to coal mine dust were first identified as components of a debilitating and distinctive illness. For several decades thereafter, coal miners' dust disease was accepted, in both lay and professional circles, as a major industrial disease. Derickson describes how after the turn of the century medical professionals and industry representatives worked to discredit and supplant knowledge about black lung, with such success that the ceased to be recognized. Many authorities maintained that breathing coal mine dust was actually beneficial to health.

Derickson shows that activists ultimately forced society to overcome its complacency about this deadly and preventable disease. He chronicles the growth of an unprecedented movement -- from the turn-of-the-century miners' union, to the social medicine activists in the mid-twentieth century, and the black lung insurgents of the late sixties -- which eventually won landmark protections and compensation with the enactment: of the Federal Coal Mine Health and Safety Act in 1969.

An extraordinary work of scholarship, Black Lung exposes the enormous human cost ofproducing the energy source responsible for making the United States the world's preeminent industrial nation.