The Black Rock That Built America explains how, on the backs of thousands of European immigrants, America was transformed from a mostly rural nation into the world's greatest industrial power. As the nation expanded in the nineteenth century, anthracite coal fueled the making of steel, the building of railroads, the operation of factories, and the heating of homes. This book tells of the struggles these immigrant miners endured while performing the grueling and dangerous work of extracting anthracite coal from the earth in order to earn their place in America.
The original architects of rock 'n roll were black musicians, but by the 1980s, rock music produced by African Americans was no longer "authentically black." Mahon offers an in-depth account of how, since 1985, members of the Black Rock Coalition have broadened understandings of black identity and culture through rock music.
The economy has been brutal to American workers for several decades. The chance to give one's children a better life than one's own -- the promise at the heart of the American Dream -- is withering away. While onlookers assume those suffering in marginalized working-class communities will instinctively rise up, the 2016 election threw into sharp relief how little we know about how the working-class translate their grievances into politics. In We're Still Here, Jennifer M. Silva tells a deep, multi-generational story of pain, place, and politics that will endure long after the Trump administration. Drawing on over 100 interviews with black, white, and Latino working-class residents of a declining coal town in Pennsylvania, Silva reveals how the decline of the American Dream is lived and felt. The routines and rhythms of traditional working-class life such as manual labor, unions, marriage, church, and social clubs have diminished. In their place, she argues, individualized strategies for coping with pain, and finding personal redemption, have themselves become sources of political stimulus and reaction among the working class. Understanding how generations of Democratic voters come to reject the social safety net and often politics altogether requires moving beyond simple partisanship into a maze of addiction, joblessness, family disruption, violence, and trauma. Instead, Silva argues that we need to uncover the relationships, loyalties, longings, and moral visions that underlie and generate the civic and political disengagement of working-class people. We're Still Here provides powerful, on the ground evidence of the remaking of working-class identity and politics that will spark new tensions but also open up the possibility for shifting alliances and new possibilities.
How Blacks Built America examines the many positive and dramatic contributions made by African Americans to this country over its long history. Almost all public and scholarly discussion of African Americans accenting their distinctive societal position, especially discussion outside black communities, has emphasized either stereotypically negative features or the negative socioeconomic conditions that they have long faced because of systemic racism. In contrast, Feagin reveals that African Americans have long been an extraordinarily important asset for this country. Without their essential contributions, indeed, there probably would not have been a United States. This is an ideal addition to courses race and ethnicity courses.
To visiting geologists, Black Rock, New Mexico, is a basaltic escarpment and an ideal natural laboratory. To hospital workers, Black Rock is a picturesque place to earn a living. To the Zuni, the mesas, arroyos, and the rock itself are a stage on which the passion of their elders is relived. William A. Dodge explores how a shared sense of place evolves over time and through multiple cultures that claim the landscape. Through stories told over many generations, this landscape has given the Zuni an understanding of how they came to be in this world. More recently, paleogeographers have studied the rocks and landforms to better understand the world as it once was. Archaeologists have conducted research on ancestral Zuni sites in the vicinity of Black Rock to explore the cultural history of the region. In addition, the Anglo-American employees of the Bureau of Indian Affairs came to Black Rock to advance the federal Indian policy of assimilation and brought with them their own sense of place. Black Rock has been an educational complex, an agency town, and an Anglo community. Today it is a health care center, commercial zone, and multiethnic subdivision. By describing the dramatic changes that took place at Black Rock during the twentieth century, Dodge deftly weaves a story of how the cultural landscape of this community reflected changes in government policy and how the Zunis themselves, through the policy of Indian self-determination, eventually gave new meanings to this ancient landscape.
You may know all about the Easter Rising and the Good Friday Agreement, but did you know that the hypodermic needle was invented in Tallaght? Or that Dublin was the first city in the world to have a woman stockbroker, decades before London or New York? Or that the formula used to create the video game Tomb Raider was sketched on a bridge in Cabra in the nineteenth century? With one entry for every day of the year, this book marks the anniversaries of momentous events in Irish history: in politics, medicine, music, sport and innovation. In this accessible, comprehensive and authoritative book, discover the moments that have helped to shape the national identity of Ireland.
Vols. 29-30 contain papers of the International Engineering Congress, Chicago, 1893; v. 54, pts. A-F, papers of the International Engineering Congress, St. Louis, 1904.
The first English translation of the most comprehensive and detailed work on the development, construction, finance, and operation of early American railroads and canals.
