Steelworker Alley
Steelworker Alley

Author: Robert Bruno

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 238

ISBN-13: 9780801486005

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For retired steelworkers in Youngstown, Ohio, the label "working class" fits comfortably. Questioning the widely held view that laborers in postwar America have adopted middle-class values, Robert Bruno shows that in this community a blue-collar identity has provided a positive focus for many residents.The son of a Youngstown steelworker, Bruno returned to his hometown seeking to understand the formation of his own working-class consciousness and the place of labor in the larger capitalist society. Drawing on interviews with dozens of former steelworkers and on research in local archives, Bruno explores the culture of the community, including such subjects as relations among co-workers, class antagonism, and attitudes toward authority. He describes how, because workers are often neighbors, the workplace takes on a feeling of neighborhood. He also demonstrates that to understand class consciousness one must look beyond the workplace, in this instance from Youngstown's front porches to its bowling alleys and voting booths. Written with a deeply personal approach, Steelworker Alley is a richly detailed look at workers which reveals the continuing strength of class relationships in America.

Steelworkers in America
Steelworkers in America

Author: David Brody

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 1960

Total Pages: 382

ISBN-13: 9780252067136

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This edition of one of the seminal books in labor includes a new preface as well as a symposium on the book in which seven prominent historians discuss its significance and its place in the historiography of labor. "Steelworkers in America has emerged and remained one of the few genuinely classic works of U.S. labor history--one of the axiomatic starting points for any understanding of the new labor history." -- Roy Rosenzweig "The vision of Steelworkers has survived these thirty years and continues to inspire new work in labor history." -- Lizabeth Cohen

Steel Closets
Steel Closets

Author: Anne Balay

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2014-04-07

Total Pages: 187

ISBN-13: 1469614014

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Even as substantial legal and social victories are being celebrated within the gay rights movement, much of working-class America still exists outside the current narratives of gay liberation. In Steel Closets, Anne Balay draws on oral history interviews with forty gay, lesbian, and transgender steelworkers, mostly living in northwestern Indiana, to give voice to this previously silent and invisible population. She presents powerful stories of the intersections of work, class, gender, and sexual identity in the dangerous industrial setting of the steel mill. The voices and stories captured by Balay--by turns alarming, heroic, funny, and devastating--challenge contemporary understandings of what it means to be queer and shed light on the incredible homophobia and violence faced by many: nearly all of Balay's narrators remain closeted at work, and many have experienced harassment, violence, or rape. Through the powerful voices of queer steelworkers themselves, Steel Closets provides rich insight into an understudied part of the LGBT population, contributing to a growing body of scholarship that aims to reveal and analyze a broader range of gay life in America.

Steel Barrio
Steel Barrio

Author: Michael Innis-Jiménez

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2013-06-17

Total Pages: 250

ISBN-13: 0814760155

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Since the early twentieth century, thousands of Mexican Americans have lived, worked, and formed communities in Chicago’s steel mill neighborhoods. Drawing on individual stories and oral histories, Michael Innis-Jiménez tells the story of a vibrant, active community that continues to play a central role in American politics and society. Examining how the fortunes of Mexicans in South Chicago were linked to the environment they helped to build, Steel Barrio offers new insights into how and why Mexican Americans created community. This book investigates the years between the World Wars, the period that witnessed the first, massive influx of Mexicans into Chicago. South Chicago Mexicans lived in a neighborhood whose literal and figurative boundaries were defined by steel mills, which dominated economic life for Mexican immigrants. Yet while the mills provided jobs for Mexican men, they were neither the center of community life nor the source of collective identity. Steel Barrio argues that the Mexican immigrant and Mexican American men and women who came to South Chicago created physical and imagined community not only to defend against the ever-present social, political, and economic harassment and discrimination, but to grow in a foreign, polluted environment. Steel Barrio reconstructs the everyday strategies the working-class Mexican American community adopted to survive in areas from labor to sports to activism. This book links a particular community in South Chicago to broader issues in twentieth-century U.S. history, including race and labor, urban immigration, and the segregation of cities.