Radical History Review presents innovative scholarship and commentary that looks critically at the past and its history from a non-sectarian left perspective. RHR scrutinises conventional history and seeks to broaden and advance the discussion of crucial issues such as the role of race, class and gender in history.
Is class outmoded as a basis for understanding labor history? This significant new collection emphatically says "No " Touching on such subjects as migrant labor, religion, ethnicity, agricultural history, and gender, these thirteen essays by former students of David Montgomery--a preeminent leader in labor circles as well as in academia--demonstrate the sheer diversity of the field today.
In this book, Bryant Simon brings to life the politics of white South Carolina millhands during the first half of the twentieth century. His revealing and moving account explores how this group of southern laborers thought about and participated in politics and public power. Taking a broad view of politics, Simon looks at laborers as they engaged in political activity in many venues--at the polling station, on front porches, and on the shop floor--and examines their political involvement at the local, state, and national levels. He describes the campaign styles and rhetoric of such politicians as Coleman Blease and Olin Johnston (himself a former millhand), who eagerly sought the workers' votes. He draws a detailed picture of mill workers casting ballots, carrying placards, marching on the state capital, writing to lawmakers, and picketing factories. These millhands' politics reflected their public and private thoughts about whiteness and blackness, war and the New Deal, democracy and justice, gender and sexuality, class relations and consumption. Ultimately, the people depicted here are neither romanticized nor dismissed as the stereotypically racist and uneducated "rednecks" found in many accounts of southern politics. Southern workers understood the political and social forces that shaped their lives, argues Simon, and they developed complex political strategies to deal with those forces.
"Since the colonial era, North America has been defined and continually redefined by the intersections of sex, violence, and love across racial boundaries. Motivated by conquest, economics, desire, and romance, such crossings have profoundly affected American society by disturbing dominant ideas about race and sexuality. Sex, Love, Race provides a historical foundation for contemporary discussions of sex across racial lines, which, despite the numbers of interracial marriages and multi-racial children, remains a controversial issue today. The first historical anthology to focus solely and widely on the subject, Sex, Love, Race gathers new essays by both younger and well-known scholars which probe why and how sex across racial boundaries has so threatened Americans of all colors and classes. Traversing the whole of American history, from liaisons among Indians, Europeans, and Africans to twentieth-century social scientists' fascination with sex between Asian Americans and whits, the essays cover a range of regions, and of racial, ethnic, and sexual identities, in North America"--Back cover
The Theater of Tony Kushner is a comprehensive portrait of the forty-year long career of dramatist Tony Kushner as playwright, screenwriter, essayist, and public intellectual and political activist. Following an introduction examining the influences of Kushner’s development as an artist, this updated second edition features individual chapters on his major plays, including A Bright Room Called Day, Hydriotaphia, or The Death of Dr. Browne, Angels in America, Slavs! Thinking About the Longstanding Problems of Virtue and Happiness, Homebody/Kabul, Caroline, or Change, and The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures, along with chapters on Kushner’s adaptations, one-act plays, and screenplays, including his two Academy Award-nominated screenplays, Munich and Lincoln. A book for anyone interested in theater, film, literature, and the ways in which the past informs the present, this second edition of The Theater of Tony Kushner explores how his writings reflect key elements of American society, from politics and economics to race, gender, and spirituality, all with the hope of inspiring America to live up to its ideals.
Radical History Review presents innovative scholarship and commentary that looks critically at the past and its history from a non-sectarian left perspective.
Feature articles in this issue include: "Women and Guilds in Bologna: The Ambiguities of 'Marginality'," by Dora Dumont; "Unpacking the First Person Singular: Negotiating Patriarchy in Nineteenth-Century Chile," by Andy Daitsman; "Culture Wars Won and Lost, Part II: Ethnic Museums on the Mall," by Fath Davis Ruffins (a continuation of an article published in RHR 68); and "'All the Intensity of My Nature': Ida B. Wells and African-American Women's Anger in History," by Patricia A. Schechter.
In Getting Medieval Carolyn Dinshaw examines communities—dissident and orthodox—in late-fourteenth and early-fifteenth-century England to create a new sense of queer history. Reaching beyond both medieval and queer studies, Dinshaw demonstrates in this challenging work how intellectual inquiry into pre-modern societies can contribute invaluably to current issues in cultural studies. In the process, she makes important connections between past and present cultures that until now have not been realized. In her pursuit of historical analyses that embrace the heterogeneity and indeterminacy of sex and sexuality, Dinshaw examines canonical Middle English texts such as the Canterbury Tales and The Book of Margery Kempe. She examines polemics around the religious dissidents known as the Lollards as well as accounts of prostitutes in London to address questions of how particular sexual practices and identifications were normalized while others were proscribed. By exploring contemporary (mis)appropriations of medieval tropes in texts ranging from Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction to recent Congressional debates on U.S. cultural production, Dinshaw demonstrates how such modern media can serve to reinforce constrictive heteronormative values and deny the multifarious nature of history. Finally, she works with and against the theories of Michel Foucault, Homi K. Bhabha, Roland Barthes, and John Boswell to show how deconstructionist impulses as well as historical perspectives can further an understanding of community in both pre- and postmodern societies. This long-anticipated volume will be indispensible to medieval and queer scholars and will be welcomed by a larger cultural studies audience.
From the depression of the 1890s through World War I, construction tradesman held an important place in San Francisco's economic, political, and social life. Michael Kazin's award-winning study delves into how the city’s Building Trades Council (BTC) created, accumulated, used, and lost their power. He traces the rise of the BTC into a force that helped govern San Francisco, controlled its potential progress, and articulated an ideology that made sense of the changes sweeping the West and the country. Believing themselves the equals of officeholders and corporate managers, these working and retired craftsmen pursued and protected their own power while challenging conservatives and urban elites for the right to govern. What emerges is a long-overdue look at building trades as a force in labor history within the dramatic story of how the city's 25,000 building workers exercised power on the job site and within the halls of government, until the forces of reaction all but destroyed the BTC.
In a few short decades before the First World War, Calgary was transformed from a frontier outpost into a complex industrial metropolis. With industrialization there emerged a diverse and equally complex working class. David Bright explores the various levels of class formation and class identity in the city to argue that Calgary's reputation as a prewar centre of labour conservatism is in need of revision.
