From the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend
From the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend

Author: Priscilla Murolo

Publisher: The New Press

Published: 2018-08-28

Total Pages: 370

ISBN-13: 1620974495

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Newly updated: “An enjoyable introduction to American working-class history.” —The American Prospect Praised for its “impressive even-handedness”, From the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend has set the standard for viewing American history through the prism of working people (Publishers Weekly, starred review). From indentured servants and slaves in seventeenth-century Chesapeake to high-tech workers in contemporary Silicon Valley, the book “[puts] a human face on the people, places, events, and social conditions that have shaped the evolution of organized labor”, enlivened by illustrations from the celebrated comics journalist Joe Sacco (Library Journal). Now, the authors have added a wealth of fresh analysis of labor’s role in American life, with new material on sex workers, disability issues, labor’s relation to the global justice movement and the immigrants’ rights movement, the 2005 split in the AFL-CIO and the movement civil wars that followed, and the crucial emergence of worker centers and their relationships to unions. With two entirely new chapters—one on global developments such as offshoring and a second on the 2016 election and unions’ relationships to Trump—this is an “extraordinarily fine addition to U.S. history [that] could become an evergreen . . . comparable to Howard Zinn’s award-winning A People’s History of the United States” (Publishers Weekly). “A marvelously informed, carefully crafted, far-ranging history of working people.” —Noam Chomsky

Law and the Shaping of the American Labor Movement
Law and the Shaping of the American Labor Movement

Author: William E. Forbath

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2009-07-01

Total Pages: 231

ISBN-13: 0674037081

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Why did American workers, unlike their European counterparts, fail to forge a class-based movement to pursue broad social reform? Was it simply that they lacked class consciousness and were more interested in personal mobility? In a richly detailed survey of labor law and labor history, William Forbath challenges this notion of American “individualism.” In fact, he argues, the nineteenth-century American labor movement was much like Europe’s labor movements in its social and political outlook, but in the decades around the turn of the century, the prevailing attitude of American trade unionists changed. Forbath shows that, over time, struggles with the courts and the legal order were crucial to reshaping labor’s outlook, driving the labor movement to temper its radical goals.

A History of America in Ten Strikes
A History of America in Ten Strikes

Author: Erik Loomis

Publisher: The New Press

Published: 2018-10-02

Total Pages: 250

ISBN-13: 1620971623

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Recommended by The Nation, the New Republic, Current Affairs, Bustle, In These Times An “entertaining, tough-minded, and strenuously argued” (The Nation) account of ten moments when workers fought to change the balance of power in America “A brilliantly recounted American history through the prism of major labor struggles, with critically important lessons for those who seek a better future for working people and the world.” —Noam Chomsky Powerful and accessible, A History of America in Ten Strikes challenges all of our contemporary assumptions around labor, unions, and American workers. In this brilliant book, labor historian Erik Loomis recounts ten critical workers' strikes in American labor history that everyone needs to know about (and then provides an annotated list of the 150 most important moments in American labor history in the appendix). From the Lowell Mill Girls strike in the 1830s to Justice for Janitors in 1990, these labor uprisings do not just reflect the times in which they occurred, but speak directly to the present moment. For example, we often think that Lincoln ended slavery by proclaiming the slaves emancipated, but Loomis shows that they freed themselves during the Civil War by simply withdrawing their labor. He shows how the hopes and aspirations of a generation were made into demands at a GM plant in Lordstown in 1972. And he takes us to the forests of the Pacific Northwest in the early nineteenth century where the radical organizers known as the Wobblies made their biggest inroads against the power of bosses. But there were also moments when the movement was crushed by corporations and the government; Loomis helps us understand the present perilous condition of American workers and draws lessons from both the victories and defeats of the past. In crystalline narratives, labor historian Erik Loomis lifts the curtain on workers' struggles, giving us a fresh perspective on American history from the boots up. Strikes include: Lowell Mill Girls Strike (Massachusetts, 1830–40) Slaves on Strike (The Confederacy, 1861–65) The Eight-Hour Day Strikes (Chicago, 1886) The Anthracite Strike (Pennsylvania, 1902) The Bread and Roses Strike (Massachusetts, 1912) The Flint Sit-Down Strike (Michigan, 1937) The Oakland General Strike (California, 1946) Lordstown (Ohio, 1972) Air Traffic Controllers (1981) Justice for Janitors (Los Angeles, 1990)

The Long Deep Grudge
The Long Deep Grudge

Author: Toni Gilpin

Publisher: Haymarket Books

Published: 2020-02-25

Total Pages: 458

ISBN-13: 1642590894

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“The definitive history of an important but largely forgotten labor organization and its heroic struggles with an icon of industrial capitalism.” —Ahmed A. White, author of The Last Great Strike This rich history details the bitter, deep-rooted conflict between industrial behemoth International Harvester and the uniquely radical Farm Equipment Workers union. The Long Deep Grudge makes clear that class warfare has been, and remains, integral to the American experience, providing up-close-and-personal and long-view perspectives from both sides of the battle lines. International Harvester—and the McCormick family that largely controlled it—garnered a reputation for bare-knuckled union-busting in the 1880s, but in the twentieth century also pioneered sophisticated union-avoidance techniques that have since become standard corporate practice. On the other side the militant Farm Equipment Workers union, connected to the Communist Party, mounted a vociferous challenge to the cooperative ethos that came to define the American labor movement after World War II. This evocative account, stretching back to the nineteenth century and carried through to the present, reads like a novel. Biographical sketches of McCormick family members, union officials and rank-and-file workers are woven into the narrative, along with anarchists, jazz musicians, Wall Street financiers, civil rights crusaders, and mob lawyers. It touches on pivotal moments and movements as wide-ranging as the Haymarket “riot,” the Flint sit-down strikes, the Memorial Day Massacre, the McCarthy-era anti-communist purges, and America’s late twentieth-century industrial decline. “A capitalist family dynasty, a radical union, and a revolution in how and where work gets done—Toni Gilpin’s The Long Deep Grudge is a detailed chronicle of one of the most active battlefronts in our ever-evolving class war.” —John Sayles

Lived Experience
Lived Experience

Author: Delphine Diallo

Publisher: The New Press

Published: 2020-10-13

Total Pages: 91

ISBN-13: 1620975815

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A beautiful series of full-color portraits of LGBTQ people over the age of fifty Even with the extraordinary strides the LGBTQ movement has made in civil rights, acceptance, and visibility over the past half century, a growing portion of the community remains largely invisible, its concerns relegated to the margins. In the latest in a groundbreaking series of beautiful photobooks on LGBTQ communities around the world—from Russia to Mexico to Japan—French-Senegalese photographer Delphine Diallo centers on the voices and lives of older LGBTQ people in the United States, a generation that has been ravaged by the AIDS epidemic but has also been instrumental in extraordinary progress in LGBTQ rights and visibility in this country. The series of fifty full-color portraits of LGBTQ people from across the nation—interviewed on the fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall riots that led to modern LGBTQ rights movement—offers this wise and resilient cohort a chance to share their stories and to reflect. With a special focus on people of color, Lived Experience is a celebration of an underserved, neglected part of the LGBTQ world in America and an inspiration to future generations. Lived Experience was designed by Emerson, Wajdowicz Studios (EWS).

The Citizen Machine
The Citizen Machine

Author: Anna McCarthy

Publisher: The New Press

Published: 2010-07-13

Total Pages: 354

ISBN-13: 1595585966

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The Citizen Machine is the untold political history of television's formative era. Historian Anna McCarthy goes behind the scenes of early television programming, revealing that long before the age of PBS, leaders from business, philanthropy, and social reform movements as well as public intellectuals were all obsessively concerned with TV's potential to mold the right kind of citizen. Based on years of path-breaking archival work, The Citizen Machine sheds new light on the place of television in the postwar American political landscape.

Two Nations, Indivisible
Two Nations, Indivisible

Author: Jamie L. Bronstein

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2016-10-17

Total Pages: 237

ISBN-13: 1440838291

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While examining the arguments made in favor of egalitarianism, this book debunks the notion that the United States is now or has ever been a nation offering equal opportunity to all. In the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson famously asserted that "all men are created equal." Likewise, social mobility—the idea that any child can grow up to be president—has been key to the myth of what makes America great. Yet the hard truth is that inequality of both opportunity and resulting condition has been a defining feature of America's story. Written by a comparative labor historian, this book combines economic and social history with intellectual history to reveal the major trends of inequality that have been evident in America from Revolutionary times through the present. The book opens with an introduction to the burgeoning issue of inequality in America. The following chronological chapters describe how inequality was manifest in various periods. Each chapter not only provides a full survey of the secondary literature related to the topic of inequality in the particular time period but also examines prescriptions from thinkers who espoused equality, including Thomas Paine, Thomas Skidmore, Henry George, Jane Addams, Upton Sinclair, and Harry Caudill. By assessing these and other arguments relevant to social change, the work helps readers understand the cases made for and against equality of opportunity and condition throughout U.S. history.

The Great Turning
The Great Turning

Author: David C. Korten

Publisher: ReadHowYouWant.com

Published: 2009-02-20

Total Pages: 394

ISBN-13: 1442964480

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Although the issues addressed in The Great Turning are global and universal, I have chosen to focus my analysis on the United States. It is the nation among all others that is most challenged by the imperatives of the Great Turning. Few other nations are so accustomed to living beyond their own means, so imbued with a sense of special virtue and entitlement, or so burdened by a political leadership as out of touch with global reality and as incapable of accepting responsibility for the consequences of its actions. Because of its global presence, whether the United States responds to the imperatives with the logic of Empire or the logic of Earth Community is likely to have far-reaching consequences for all nations. Furthermore, the United States is the nation of my birth, the nation I know best and love most, and the nation for whose role in the world I feel most responsible.