Reconstructs the history of scientific thought by American socialists, showing how ideas about evolution shaped the national movement and its place in the international movement. Documents the enthusiasm that lured both Marxists and non-Marxists far beyond Darwin and Spencer to a vision of inevitable progress toward socialism. Paper edition (unseen), $24.95. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
At the beginning of the twentieth century, industrialization both dramatically altered everyday experiences and shaped debates about the effects of immigration, empire, and urbanization. In American Abyss, Daniel E. Bender examines an array of sources—eugenics theories, scientific studies of climate, socialist theory, and even popular novels about cavemen—to show how intellectuals and activists came to understand industrialization in racial and gendered terms as the product of evolution and as the highest expression of civilization.Their discussions, he notes, are echoed today by the use of such terms as the "developed" and "developing" worlds. American industry was contrasted with the supposed savagery and primitivism discovered in tropical colonies, but observers who made those claims worried that industrialization, by encouraging immigration, child and women's labor, and large families, was reversing natural selection. Factories appeared to favor the most unfit. There was a disturbing tendency for such expressions of fear to favor eugenicist "remedies."Bender delves deeply into the culture and politics of the age of industry. Linking urban slum tourism and imperial science with immigrant better-baby contests and hoboes, American Abyss uncovers the complex interactions of turn-of-the-century ideas about race, class, gender, and ethnicity. Moreover, at a time when immigration again lies at the center of American economy and society, this book offers an alarming and pointed historical perspective on contemporary fears of immigrant laborers.
This finely detailed narrative is the definitive account of the rise to power of the Chicago labor movement amidst the 1877 railroad strike, the 1886 struggle over the eight-hour workday, and the 1894 Pullman strike. Hinging on a major reinterpretation of the Haymarket era, Labor and Urban Politics argues for labor's profound influence on the shaping of urban politics and the transformation of liberalism in late nineteenth-century America.''After this book, no one will have any excuse to write about late nineteenth-century politics in Chicago, or any other city, solely on the basis of the actions and interests of elites. Schneirov argues for the importance of the working class in municipal politics on a level that surpasses anything else in the literature.'' -- David Montgomery''The most thorough, deepest re-reading of Gilded Age reality that has yet emerged from labor historians. . . . Gives an unparalleled understanding of the world of contemporary labor.'' -- Leon Fink, author of In Search of the Working Class: Essays in American Labor History and Political Culture A volume in the series The Working Class in American History, edited by David Brody, Alice Kessler-Harris, David Montgomery, and Sean Wilentz
from radicals' failure at this critical juncture to defend and develop the theoretical commitments that define Marxism as a distinctive variety of anticapitalism.
