Class and Community is about the impact the industrial revolution and factory systems had on the small village of Lynn Massachusetts. It is an in depth view of Lynn shoemakers and their transition from life of preindustrial labor to their life after the industrial revolution and after the introduction of factory system labor. Alan Dawley’s purpose of the book was to point out the limits of class conflict and the corruptness of factory employers by describing the hardships the workers lived through and the extremes the workers went to, to improve their conditions. The pursuit of equal rights by the shoemakers of Lynn made them a microcosm of the industrial revolution because shoemaking was seen as a small step for the inventing of new things
