Imagining Internationalism in American and British Labor, 1939-49

Imagining Internationalism in American and British Labor, 1939-49

Author: Victor Silverman

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 9780252068058

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"Vividly capturing a moment in history when American and British unions seemed about to join with their Soviet counterparts to create a world unified by its workers, this wide-ranging study uncovers the social, cultural, and ideological currents that generated worldwide support among workers for a union international as well as the pull of national interests that ultimately subverted it. In a striking departure from the conventional wisdom, Victor Silverman argues that the ideology of the cold war was essentially imposed from above and came into conflict with the attitudes workers developed about internationalism. This work, the first to look at internationalism from the point of view of the worker, confirms at the level of social and cultural history that the postwar tensions between the Anglo-Americans and the Soviets took several years to become a new orthodoxy. Silverman demonstrates that for millions of trade unionists in dozens of countries the Cold War began in late 1948, rather than between 1945 and 1946, as generally recorded by diplomatic historians. Tracing the faultlines between politics and ideals and between national and class allegiances, Silverman shows how the vision of an international working-class recovery was ultimately discredited and the cold war set inexorably in motion."


Imagining Internationalism in American and British Labor, 1939-49

Imagining Internationalism in American and British Labor, 1939-49

Author: Victor Silverman

Publisher:

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780252024900

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Vividly capturing a moment in history when American and British unions seemed about to join with their Soviet counterparts to create a world unified by its workers, this wide-ranging study uncovers the social, cultural, and ideological currents that generated worldwide support among workers for a union international as well as the pull of national interests that ultimately subverted it. In a striking departure from the conventional wisdom, Victor Silverman argues that the ideology of the cold war was essentially imposed from above and came into conflict with the attitudes workers developed about internationalism. This work, the first to look at internationalism from the point of view of the worker, confirms at the level of social and cultural history that the postwar tensions between the Anglo-Americans and the Soviets took several years to become a new orthodoxy. Silverman demonstrates that for millions of trade unionists in dozens of countries the Cold War began in late 1948, rather than between 1945 and 1946, as generally recorded by diplomatic historians. Tracing the faultlines between politics and ideals and between national and class allegiances, Silverman shows how the vision of an international working-class recovery was ultimately discredited and the cold war set inexorably in motion.


Red Chicago

Red Chicago

Author: Randi Storch

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 322

ISBN-13: 0252076389

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Realities of the street-level American Communist experience during the worst years of the Depression


Disaster Citizenship

Disaster Citizenship

Author: Jacob A.C. Remes

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2015-12-30

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 0252097947

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A century ago, governments buoyed by Progressive Era–beliefs began to assume greater responsibility for protecting and rescuing citizens. Yet the aftermath of two disasters in the United States–Canada borderlands--the Salem Fire of 1914 and the Halifax Explosion of 1917--saw working class survivors instead turn to friends, neighbors, coworkers, and family members for succor and aid. Both official and unofficial responses, meanwhile, showed how the United States and Canada were linked by experts, workers, and money. In Disaster Citizenship, Jacob A. C. Remes draws on histories of the Salem and Halifax events to explore the institutions--both formal and informal--that ordinary people relied upon in times of crisis. He explores patterns and traditions of self-help, informal order, and solidarity and details how people adapted these traditions when necessary. Yet, as he shows, these methods--though often quick and effective--remained illegible to reformers. Indeed, soldiers, social workers, and reformers wielding extraordinary emergency powers challenged these grassroots practices to impose progressive "solutions" on what they wrongly imagined to be a fractured social landscape.


On the Ground

On the Ground

Author: Liesl Miller Orenic

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 306

ISBN-13: 0252076273

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The challenges and successes of unionization at four U.S. airlines, with a focus on baggage handlers


Victor Arnautoff and the Politics of Art

Victor Arnautoff and the Politics of Art

Author: Robert W. Cherny

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2017-03-07

Total Pages: 356

ISBN-13: 0252099249

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Victor Arnautoff reigned as San Francisco's leading mural painter during the New Deal era. Yet that was only part of an astonishing life journey from Tsarist officer to leftist painter. Robert W. Cherny's masterful biography of Arnautoff braids the artist's work with his increasingly leftist politics and the tenor of his times. Delving into sources on Russian émigrés and San Francisco's arts communities, Cherny traces Arnautoff's life from refugee art student and assistant to Diego Rivera to prominence in the New Deal's art projects and a faculty position at Stanford University. As Arnautoff's politics moved left, he often incorporated working people and people of color into his treatment of the American past and present. In the 1950s, however, his participation in leftist organizations and a highly critical cartoon of Richard Nixon landed him before the House Un-American Activities Committee and led to calls for his dismissal from Stanford. Arnautoff eventually departed America, a refugee of another kind, now fleeing personal loss and the disintegration of the left-labor culture that had nurtured him, before resuming his artistic career in the Soviet Union that he had fought in his youth to destroy.


Making Capitalism Safe

Making Capitalism Safe

Author: Donald Wayne Rogers

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 298

ISBN-13: 0252034821

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Workplaces in the United States are safer today than they were a hundred and twenty years ago. In this book, Donald W. Rogers attributes this improvement partly to the development in the Progressive Era of surprisingly strong state-level work safety and health regulatory agencies, a patchwork of commissions and labor departments that advanced safety law from common-law negligence to the modern system of administrative regulation. Rogers examines the Wisconsin Industrial Commission and compares it to arrangements in Ohio, California, New York, Illinois, and Alabama. Connecting this history to the creation of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration in 1970, Making Capitalism Safe will revise historical understandings of state regulation, compensation insurance, and labor law politics--issues that remain pressing in our time.


The Great Strikes of 1877

The Great Strikes of 1877

Author: David O. Stowell

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2024-02-12

Total Pages: 218

ISBN-13: 0252056353

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A spectacular example of collective protest, the Great Strike of 1877--actually a sequence of related actions--was America's first national strike and the first major strike against the railroad industry. In some places, non-railroad workers also abandoned city businesses, creating one of the nation's first general strikes. Mobilizing hundreds of thousands of workers, the Great Strikes of 1877 transformed the nation's political landscape, shifting the primary political focus from Reconstruction to labor, capital, and the changing role of the state. Probing essays by distinguished historians explore the social, political, regional, and ethnic landscape of the Great Strikes of 1877: long-term effects on state militias and national guard units; ethnic and class characterization of strikers; pictorial representations of poor laborers in the press; organizational strategies employed by railroad workers; participation by blacks; violence against Chinese immigrants; and the developing tension between capitalism and racial equality in the United States. Contributors: Joshua Brown, Steven J. Hoffman, Michael Kazin, David Miller, Richard Schneirov, David O. Stowell, and Shelton Stromquist.


Death and Dying in the Working Class, 1865-1920

Death and Dying in the Working Class, 1865-1920

Author: Michael K. Rosenow

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2015-04-15

Total Pages: 249

ISBN-13: 0252097114

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Michael K. Rosenow investigates working people's beliefs, rituals of dying, and the politics of death by honing in on three overarching questions: How did workers, their families, and their communities experience death? Did various identities of class, race, gender, and religion coalesce to form distinct cultures of death for working people? And how did people's attitudes toward death reflect notions of who mattered in U.S. society? Drawing from an eclectic array of sources ranging from Andrew Carnegie to grave markers in Chicago's potter's field, Rosenow portrays the complex political, social, and cultural relationships that fueled the United States' industrial ascent. The result is an undertaking that adds emotional depth to existing history while challenging our understanding of modes of cultural transmission.


Banded Together

Banded Together

Author: Jeremy Brecher

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2011-05

Total Pages: 282

ISBN-13: 0252036123

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Chiefly concerned with 1980s and 1990s.