Making the Empire Work
Making the Empire Work

Author: Daniel E. Bender

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2015-07-17

Total Pages: 382

ISBN-13: 1479871257

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Millions of laborers, from the Philippines to the Caribbean, performed the work of the United States empire. Forging a global economy connecting the tropics to the industrial center, workers harvested sugar, cleaned hotel rooms, provided sexual favors, and filled military ranks. Placing working men and women at the center of the long history of the U.S. empire, these essays offer new stories of empire that intersect with the “grand narratives” of diplomatic affairs at the national and international levels. Missile defense, Cold War showdowns, development politics, military combat, tourism, and banana economics share something in common—they all have labor histories. This collection challenges historians to consider the labor that formed, worked, confronted, and rendered the U.S. empire visible. The U.S. empire is a project of global labor mobilization, coercive management, military presence, and forced cultural encounter. Together, the essays in this volume recognize the United States as a global imperial player whose systems of labor mobilization and migration stretched from Central America to West Africa to the United States itself. Workers are also the key actors in this volume. Their stories are multi-vocal, as workers sometimes defied the U.S. empire’s rhetoric of civilization, peace, and stability and at other times navigated its networks or benefited from its profits. Their experiences reveal the gulf between the American ‘denial of empire’ and the lived practice of management, resource exploitation, and military exigency. When historians place labor and working people at the center, empire appears as a central dynamic of U.S. history.

Child Labor
Child Labor

Author: Hugh D Hindman

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-09-16

Total Pages: 434

ISBN-13: 1315290839

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Despite its decline throughout the advanced industrial nations, child labor remains one of the major social, political, and economic concerns of modern history, as witnessed by the many high-profile stories on child labor and sweatshops in the media today. This work considers the issue in three parts. The first section discusses child labor as a social and economic problem in America from an historical and theoretical perspective. The second part presents child labor as National Child Labor Committee investigators found it in major American industries and occupations, including coal mines, cotton textile mills, and sweatshops in the early 1900s. Finally, the concluding section integrates these findings and attempts to apply them to child labor problems in America and the rest of the world today.

Slavery's Capitalism
Slavery's Capitalism

Author: Sven Beckert

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2016-07-28

Total Pages: 417

ISBN-13: 0812293096

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During the nineteenth century, the United States entered the ranks of the world's most advanced and dynamic economies. At the same time, the nation sustained an expansive and brutal system of human bondage. This was no mere coincidence. Slavery's Capitalism argues for slavery's centrality to the emergence of American capitalism in the decades between the Revolution and the Civil War. According to editors Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman, the issue is not whether slavery itself was or was not capitalist but, rather, the impossibility of understanding the nation's spectacular pattern of economic development without situating slavery front and center. American capitalism—renowned for its celebration of market competition, private property, and the self-made man—has its origins in an American slavery predicated on the abhorrent notion that human beings could be legally owned and compelled to work under force of violence. Drawing on the expertise of sixteen scholars who are at the forefront of rewriting the history of American economic development, Slavery's Capitalism identifies slavery as the primary force driving key innovations in entrepreneurship, finance, accounting, management, and political economy that are too often attributed to the so-called free market. Approaching the study of slavery as the originating catalyst for the Industrial Revolution and modern capitalism casts new light on American credit markets, practices of offshore investment, and understandings of human capital. Rather than seeing slavery as outside the institutional structures of capitalism, the essayists recover slavery's importance to the American economic past and prompt enduring questions about the relationship of market freedom to human freedom. Contributors: Edward E. Baptist, Sven Beckert, Daina Ramey Berry, Kathryn Boodry, Alfred L. Brophy, Stephen Chambers, Eric Kimball, John Majewski, Bonnie Martin, Seth Rockman, Daniel B. Rood, Caitlin Rosenthal, Joshua D. Rothman, Calvin Schermerhorn, Andrew Shankman, Craig Steven Wilder.

The Industrial Revolution in America [3 Volumes]
The Industrial Revolution in America [3 Volumes]

Author: Kevin Hillstrom

Publisher: ABC-CLIO

Published: 2005-04-25

Total Pages: 922

ISBN-13: 1851096205

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An impressive set of books on the Industrial Revolution, these comprehensive volumes cover the history of steam shipping, iron and steel production, and railroads--three interrelated enterprises that helped shift the Industrial Revolution into overdrive. The first set of volumes in ABC-CLIO's breakthrough Industrial Revolution in America series features separate histories of three closely related industries whose maturation fueled the Industrial Revolution in the United States during the late 19th and 20th centuries, fundamentally changing the way Americans lived their lives. With this set, students will learn how the steamship--the first great American contribution to the world's technology--helped turn the nation's waterways into a forerunner of our superhighways; how the Andrew Carnegie-led American steel industry surpassed its British rivals, marking a momentous power shift among industrialized nations; and how the railroads, spurred by some of the United States's most dynamic entrepreneurs (Cornelius Vanderbilt, John Pierpont Morgan, Jay Gould), moved from a single transcontinental link to become the most influential and far-reaching technological innovation of the Industrial Age, extending into virtually every facet of American culture and commerce. Sidebars--many featuring primary documents--include topics such as Mark Twain's days as a river pilot, Andrew Carnegie's libraries, and the impact of railroads on immigration, giving students fascinating insights into key issues and figures Includes in-depth biographical profiles and a comprehensive index of people, places, and key terms for easy access to information on specific topics

Reinventing Free Labor
Reinventing Free Labor

Author: Gunther Peck

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2000-05-22

Total Pages: 332

ISBN-13: 9780521778190

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One of the most infamous villains in North America during the Progressive Era was the padrone, a mafia-like immigrant boss who allegedly enslaved his compatriots and kept them uncivilized, unmanly, and unfree. In this history of the padrone, first published in 2000, Gunther Peck analyzes the figure's deep cultural resonance by examining the lives of three padrones and the workers they imported to North America. He argues that the padrones were not primitive men but rather thoroughly modern entrepreneurs who used corporations, the labour contract, and the right to quit to create far-flung coercive networks. Drawing on Greek, Spanish, and Italian language sources, Peck analyzes how immigrant workers emancipated themselves using the tools of padrone power to their own advantage.

Worker Centers
Worker Centers

Author: Janice Ruth Fine

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 9780801472572

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As national policy is debated, a locally based grassroots movement is taking the initiative to assist millions of immigrants in the American workforce facing poor pay, bad working conditions, and few prospects to advance to better jobs. Fine takes a comprehensive look at the rising phenomenon of worker centers, fast-growing institutions that improve the lives of immigrant workers through service advocacy and organizing.—from publisher information.

Immigration and American Unionism
Immigration and American Unionism

Author: Vernon M. Briggs, Jr.

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2018-08-06

Total Pages: 229

ISBN-13: 150172231X

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In the year 2000 the AFL-CIO announced a historic change in its position on immigration. Reversing a decades-old stance by labor, the federation declared that it would no longer press to reduce high immigration levels or call for rigorous enforcement of immigration laws. Instead, it now supports the repeal of sanctions imposed against employers who hire illegal immigrants as well as a general amnesty for most such workers. In this timely book, Vernon M. Briggs, Jr., challenges labor's recent about-face, charting the disastrous effects that immigration has had on union membership over the course of U.S. history.Briggs explores the close relationship between immigration and employment trends beginning in the 1780s. Combining the history of labor and of immigration in a new and innovative way, he establishes that over time unionism has thrived when the numbers of newcomers have decreased, and faltered when those figures have risen.Briggs argues convincingly that the labor movement cannot be revived unless the following steps are taken: immigration levels are reduced, admission categories changed, labor law reformed, and the enforcement of labor protection standards at the worksite enhanced. The survival of American unionism, he asserts, does not rest with the movement's becoming a partner of the pro-immigration lobby. For to do so, organized labor would have to abandon its legacy as the champion of the American worker.