The Factory Investigating Commission (FIC) grew out of a committee on safety, which was organized and voted on by progressives and socialists at a mass meeting shortly after the fire. With the help of state senators Alfred Smith and Robert Wagner, both of Tammany Hall, the committee was told that they needed a legislative commission to get any reforms done. The FIC was responsible for 25 bills passed in the 1913 legislature that addressed workplace safety.

The International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union was one of the largest labor unions in the United States in the early 20th century. Organized for women who were employed in the clothing industry, the ILGWU was instrumental in advancing women’s rights within organized labor. In 1906, women workers in the garment industry of the Lower East Side formed Local 25 of the ILGWU, which played a major role in the industry-wide general strike of 1909.

A pogrom is a violent riot meant to expel a specific religious or ethnic group from a region. In Chapter 4, Von Drehle examines the wave of Jewish Eastern European immigrants that came to America in the late-19th and early-20th centuries. These waves of immigration were spurred by violent pogroms against Jews in the Russian Empire.