Download or read book Women and American Socialism 1870 1920 written by Mari Jo Buhle and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 1983-04-01 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Socialist women faced the often thorny dilemma of fitting their concern with women's rights into their commitment to socialism. Mari Jo Buhle examines women's efforts to agitate for suffrage, sexual and economic emancipation, and other issues and the political and intellectual conflicts that arose in response. In particular, she analyzes the clash between a nativist socialism influence by ideas of individual rights and the class-based socialism championed by German American immigrants. As she shows, the two sides diverged, often greatly, in their approaches and their definitions of women's emancipation. Their differing tactics and goals undermined unity and in time cost women their independence within the larger movement.

Download or read book Italian Immigrant Radical Culture written by Marcella Bencivenni and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Maligned by modern media and often stereotyped, Italian Americans possess a vibrant, if largely forgotten, radical past. In Italian Immigrant Radical Culture, Marcella Bencivenni delves into the history of the sovversivi, a transnational generation of social rebels, and offers a fascinating portrait of their political struggle as well as their milieu, beliefs, and artistic creativity in the United States. As early as 1882, the sovversivi founded a socialist club in Brooklyn. Radical organizations then multiplied and spread across the country, from large urban cities to smaller industrial mining areas. By 1900, thirty official Italian sections of the Socialist Party along the East Coast and countless independent anarchist and revolutionary circles sprang up throughout the nation. Forming their own alternative press, institutions, and working class organizations, these groups created a vigorous movement and counterculture that constituted a significant part of the American Left until World War II. Italian Immigrant Radical Culture compellingly documents the wide spectrum of this oppositional culture and examines the many cultural and artistic forms it took, from newspapers to literature and poetry to theater and visual art. As the first cultural history of Italian American activism, it provides a richer understanding of the Italian immigrant experience while also deepening historical perceptions of radical politics and culture.

Download or read book A Broad and Ennobling Spirit written by Ronald Mendel and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2003-10-30 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With the introduction of new production methods and technological innovation, tradesmen and workers encountered new challenges. This study examines the development of trade unions as a manifestation of working class experience in late Gilded Age America. It underscores both the distinctive and the common features of trade unionism across four occupations: building tradesmen, cigar makers, garment workers, and printers. While reactions differed, the unions representing these workers displayed a convergence in their strategic orientation, programmatic emphasis and organizational modus operandi. As such, they were not disparate organizations, concerned only with sectional interests, but participants in an organizational-network in which cooperation and solidarity became benchmarks for the labor movement. Printers coped with the mechanization of typesetting by promoting greater cooperation among the different craft unions within the industry, with the aim of establishing effective job control. Building tradesmen exerted a pragmatic militancy, which combined strikes with overtures to the employers' business sense, to uphold the standards of craft labor. Cigar makers, especially handicraftsmen who found their position threatened by machinery and the growth of factory production, debated the merits of a craft-based union against the possible advantages of an industrial-oriented organization. Garment workers, caught in the snare of a sweating system of labor in which wages and work loads were inversely related, organized unions to mount strikes during the busy season in the hope of securing higher wages, only to see them whither in the midst of slack periods.

Download or read book Rough Work written by Ruth Bleasdale and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2018-01-01 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cover -- Page i -- Title page -- Dedication -- Copyright page -- Contents -- List of Maps, Illustrations, and Tables -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- 1 Contracting on Public Works, 1841 to 1882 -- 2 The Labour Force -- 3 The Work -- 4 The Living -- 5 The Boundaries of Belonging: Navvy Communities of the 1840s and 1850s -- 6 Degrees of Separation: Redefining the Boundaries of Belonging through the 1870s -- 7 Defining a Community of Interests: The 1840s and 1850s -- 8 Labour Unity and Militance on Public Works through the 1870s -- Conclusion -- Appendix: Location of Contracts (Sections) on the Intercolonial Railway and Third Welland Canal -- Notes -- Select Bibliography -- Index -- Canadian Social History series

Download or read book City of Dust written by Gregg Andrews and published by University of Missouri Press. This book was released on 2002-09-20 with total page 387 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mark Twain's boyhood home of Hannibal, Missouri, often brings to mind romanticized images of Twain's fictional characters Huck Finn or Tom Sawyer exploring caves and fishing from the banks of the Mississippi River. In City of Dust, Gregg Andrews tells another story of the Hannibal area, the very real story of the exploitation and eventual destruction of Ilasco, Missouri, an industrial town created to serve the purposes of the Atlas Portland Cement Company. In this new edition, Andrews provides an introduction detailing the impact of this book since its initial publication in 1996. He writes of a new twist in the Ilasco saga, one that concerns the Continental Cement Company’s attempt, not unlike Atlas’s one hundred years earlier, to manipulate the sale of a piece of land near its plant in the town. He explores the uneasy relationship between preservationists and the plant’s CEO and officials in St. Louis; the growing movement to preserve Ilasco’s heritage, including the building of a monument to commemorate the early residents of the town; and the grassroots petition drive and letter-writing campaign that stopped the Continental Cement Company’s machinations.

Download or read book Italian Workers of the World written by Donna R. Gabaccia and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offering a kaleidoscopic perspective on the experiences of Italian workers on foreign soil, Italian Workers of the World explores the complex links between international class formation and nation building. Distinguished by an international panel of contributors, this wide-ranging volume examines how the reception of immigrants in their new countries shaped their sense of national identity and helped determine the nature of the multiethnic states in which they settled. In Argentina and Brazil, Italian migrants were welcomed as a civilizing influence and were instrumental in establishing and leading syndicalist and anarcho-syndicalist labor movements committed to labor internationalism. In the United States, by contrast, where Italian workers were greeted by the American Federation of Labor's hostility to socialism, internationalism, and unskilled laborers, they organized in ethnically mixed unions, including the radical Industrial Workers of the World. The xenophobia they encountered in the land of opportunity ultimately encouraged sympathy among Italian Americans for Mussolini's modernizing, imperialist ambitions for the Italian state.Covering the work of republican Garibaldi boundaries of historical nationalism.

Download or read book Gentile New York written by Gil Ribak and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2012-01-19 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The very question of “what do Jews think about the goyim” has fascinated Jews and Gentiles, anti-Semites and philo-Semites alike. Much has been written about immigrant Jews in nineteenth- and twentieth-century New York City, but Gil Ribak’s critical look at the origins of Jewish liberalism in America provides a more complicated and nuanced picture of the Americanization process. Gentile New York examines these newcomers’ evolving feelings toward non-Jews through four critical decades in the American Jewish experience. Ribak considers how they perceived Gentiles in general as well as such different groups as “Yankees” (a common term for WASPs in many Yiddish sources), Germans, Irish, Italians, Poles, and African Americans. As they discovered the complexity of America’s racial relations, the immigrants found themselves at odds with “white” American values or behavior and were drawn instead into cooperative relationships with other minorities. Sparked with many previously unknown anecdotes, quotations, and events, Ribak’s research relies on an impressive number of memoirs, autobiographies, novels, newspapers, and journals culled from both sides of the Atlantic.

Download or read book Facing toward the Dawn written by Richard Lenzi and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2019-01-01 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the history of the Italian anarchist movement in New London, Connecticut. In the early twentieth century, the Italian American radical movement thrived in industrial cities throughout the United States, including New London, Connecticut. Facing toward the Dawn tells the history of the vibrant anarchist movement that existed in New London’s Fort Trumbull neighborhood for seventy years. Comprised of immigrants from the Marche region of Italy, especially the city of Fano, the Fort Trumbull anarchists fostered a solidarity subculture based on mutual aid and challenged the reigning forces of capitalism, the state, and organized religion. They began as a circle within the ideological camp of Errico Malatesta and evolved into one of the core groupings within the wing of the movement supporting Luigi Galleani. Their manifold activities ranged from disseminating propaganda to participating in the labor movement; they fought fascists in the streets, held countless social events such as festas, theatrical performances, picnics and dances, and hosted militant speakers, including Emma Goldman. Focusing on rank-and-file militants—carpenters, stonemasons, fishermen, housewives—rather than well-known figures, Richard Lenzi offers a microhistory of an ethnic radical group during the heyday of labor radicalism in the United States. He also places that history in the context of the larger radical movement, the Italian American community, and greater American society, as it moved from the Gilded Age to the New Deal and beyond. “This book is the product of some wonderful and groundbreaking historical detective work, and it succeeds in combining two seemingly incongruent genres of history: the local/neighborhood study and the history of transnational migration and radicalism. The result is one of the best and most detailed histories of a single anarchist community written to date. In addition, it makes new and important contributions to the history and background of the Sacco-Vanzetti case, Prohibition, and the history of fascism and anti-fascism in the United States. Scholars and lay readers interested in any of these areas will find this work indispensable.” — Kenyon Zimmer, author of Immigrants against the State: Yiddish and Italian Anarchism in America

Download or read book Reinventing Free Labor written by Gunther Peck and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2000-05-22 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the most infamous villains in North America during the Progressive Era was the padrone, a mafia-like immigrant boss who allegedly enslaved his compatriots and kept them uncivilized, unmanly, and unfree. In this history of the padrone, first published in 2000, Gunther Peck analyzes the figure's deep cultural resonance by examining the lives of three padrones and the workers they imported to North America. He argues that the padrones were not primitive men but rather thoroughly modern entrepreneurs who used corporations, the labour contract, and the right to quit to create far-flung coercive networks. Drawing on Greek, Spanish, and Italian language sources, Peck analyzes how immigrant workers emancipated themselves using the tools of padrone power to their own advantage.

Download or read book Signs of Change written by Ron Robin and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-01-12 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published in 1990, Signs of Change assess the people of San Francisco according to their own demonstrative standards through the visual symbols. Special attention is devoted to the visual perceptions of immigrants, those whose senses were not smothered by over-familiarity or protracted compliance with American mores. Immigration history is often studied in the concentrate exclusively on narrow connections between newcomers and their urban surroundings. The city has served as a data-base for the study of specific immigrant communities; frequently it has provided mere background for cloistered studies of immigrant life.

Download or read book Eugene V Debs written by Nick Salvatore and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 1982 with total page 468 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traces the life of the controversial American socialist and social reformer and assesses his role in American history.

Download or read book Sweatshop USA written by Daniel E. Bender and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-10-28 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For over a century, the sweatshop has evoked outrage and moral repugnance. Once cast as a type of dangerous and immoral garment factory brought to American shores by European immigrants, today the sweatshop is reviled as emblematic of the abuses of an unregulated global economy. This collection unites some of the best recent work in the interdisciplinary field of sweatshop studies. It examines changing understandings of the roots and problems of the sweatshop, and explores how the history of the American sweatshop is inexorably intertwined with global migration of capital, labor, ideas and goods. The American sweatshop may be located abroad but remains bound to the United States through ties of fashion, politics, labor and economics. The global character of the American sweatshop has presented a barrier to unionization and regulation. Anti-sweatshop campaigns have often focused on local organizing and national regulation while the sweatshop remains global. Thus, the epitaph for the sweatshop has frequently been written and re-written by unionists, reformers, activists and politicians. So, too, have they mourned its return.

Download or read book The Miners of Windber written by Mildred Allen Beik and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 1996-09-15 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1897 the Berwind-White Coal Mining Company founded Windber as a company town for its miners in the bituminous coal country of Pennsylvania. The Miners of Windber chronicles the coming of unionization to Windber, from the 1890s, when thousands of new immigrants flooded Pennsylvania in search of work, through the New Deal era of the 1930s, when the miners' rights to organize, join the United Mine Workers of America, and bargain collectively were recognized after years of bitter struggle. Mildred Allen Beik, a Windber native whose father entered the coal mines at age eleven in 1914, explores the struggle of miners and their families against the company, whose repressive policies encroached on every part of their lives. That Windber's population represented twenty-five different nationalities, including Slovaks, Hungarians, Poles, Italians, and Carpatho-Russians, was a potential obstacle to the solidarity of miners. Beik, however, shows how the immigrants overcame ethnic fragmentation by banding together as a class to unionize the mines. Work, family, church, fraternal societies, and civic institutions all proved critical as men and women alike adapted to new working conditions and to a new culture. Circumstance, if not principle, forced miners to embrace cultural pluralism in their fight for greater democracy, reforms of capitalism, and an inclusive, working-class, definition of what it meant to be an American. Beik draws on a wide variety of sources, including oral histories gathered from thirty-five of the oldest living immigrants in Windber, foreign-language newspapers, fraternal society collections, church manuscripts, public documents, union records, and census materials. The struggles of Windber's diverse working class undeniably mirror the efforts of working people everywhere to democratize the undemocratic America they knew. Their history suggests some of the possibilities and limitations, strengths and weaknesses, of worker protest in the early twentieth century.

Download or read book The Miners of Windber written by Mildred A. Beik and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 482 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Mildred Allen Beik, a Windber native whose father entered the coal mines at age eleven in 1914, explores the struggle of miners and their families against the company, whose repressive policies encroached on every part of their lives. That Windber's population represented twenty-five different nationalities, including Slovaks, Hungarians, Poles, Italians, and Carpatho-Russians, was a potential obstacle to the solidarity of miners. Beik, however, shows how the immigrants overcame ethnic fragmentation by banding together as a class to unionize the mines. Work, family, church, fraternal societies, and civic institutions all proved critical as men and women alike adapted to new working conditions and to a new culture."--BOOK JACKET.

Download or read book The Immigrant Left in the United States written by Director of the Oral History of the American Left at Taminent Library Paul Buhle and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 1996-01-01 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A transnational social history of immigrant-group involvement in radical activities in nineteenth- and twentieth-century America that provides missing links between the immigration experience, the neighborhood, the workplace, politics, and culture.

Download or read book Family and Community written by Virginia Yans-McLaughlin and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 1977 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A vividly human presentation of the Italian migration to America. Real people appear here, with ordeals and hopes, successes and failures, in all of the circumstances envisioned by the marriage vows. Unions, churches, the rackets, the press, even ideals and ideologies come into focus on this meticulously comprehensive canvas.''--The New Republic ''Yans-McLaughlin has demonstrated effectively that Buffalo's Italian families did not disintegrate or experience major transforamatios under the pressure of immigration and life in a radically different environment. . . . points the way for further significant study of immigrant families.''-John Briggs, International Migration Review ''Methodologically speaking, Yans-McLaughlin's most important conclusion is that quantification is not enough. Statistics, she insists, can give us only the form of group structures; they do not assist the historian in penetrating to the cultural content of those structures. . . . Her book's great strength is its intelligent and painstaking analysis of the key institution of the family among Italian immigrants.''--New York Historical Society Quarterly.

Download or read book Italy s Many Diasporas written by Donna R. Gabaccia and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-10-18 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Italy's residents are a migratory people. Since 1800 well over 27 million left home, but over half also returned home again. As cosmopolitans, exiles, and 'workers of the world' they transformed their homeland and many of the countries where they worked or settled abroad. But did they form a diaspora? Migrants maintained firm ties to native villages, cities and families. Few felt much loyalty to a larger nation of Italians. Rather than form a 'nation unbound,' the transnational lives of Italy's migrants kept alive international regional cultures that challenged the hegemony of national states around the world. This ambitious and theoretically innovative overview examines the social, cultural and economic integration of Italian migrants. It explores their complex yet distinctive identity and their relationship with their homeland taking a comprehensive approach.