Download or read book The Progressive Era in the USA 1890 1921 written by Kristofer Allerfeldt and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-05-15 with total page 785 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Few periods in American history have been explored as much as the Progressive Era. It is seen as the birth-place of modern American liberalism, as well as the time in which America emerged as an imperial power. Historians and other scholars have struggled to explain the contradictions of this period and this volume explores some of the major controversies this exciting period has inspired. Investigating subjects as diverse as conservation, socialism, or the importance of women in the reform movements, this volume looks at the lasting impact of this productive, yet ultimately frustrated, generation's legacy on American and world history.

Download or read book Old Labor and New Immigrants in American Political Development written by Gwendolyn Mink and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2019-06-30 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why have American politics developed differently from politics in Europe? Generations of scholars and commentators have wondered why organized labor in the United States did not acquire a broad-based constituency or form an autonomous labor party. In this innovative and insightful book, Gwendolyn Mink finds new answers by approaching this question from a different angle: she asks what determined union labor's political interests and how those interests influenced the political role forged by the American Federation of Labor. At bottom, Mink argues, the demographic dynamics of industrialization produced a profound racial response to economic change among organized labor. This response shaped the AFL's political strategy and political choices. In her account of the unique role played by labor in politics prior to the New Deal, Mink focuses on the ways in which the organizational and political interests of the AFL were mediated by the national issue of immigration and links the AFL's response to immigration to its conservative stance in and toward politics. She investigates the political impact of a labor market split between union and nonunion, old and new immigrant workers; of dramatic demographic change; and of nativism and racism. Mink then elucidates the development of trade-union political interests, ideology, and strategy; the movement of the AFL into established state and party structures; and the consequent separation of the AFL from labor's social base.

Download or read book Capital Labor and State written by David Brian Robertson and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2000 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Capital, Labor, and State is a systematic and thorough examination of American labor policy from the Civil War to the New Deal. David Brian Robertson skillfully demonstrates that although most industrializing nations began to limit employer freedom and regulate labor conditions in the 1900s, the United States continued to allow total employer discretion in decisions concerning hiring, firing, and workplace conditions. Robertson argues that the American constitution made it much more difficult for the American Federation of Labor, government, and business to cooperate for mutual gain as extensively as their counterparts abroad, so that even at the height of New Deal, American labor market policy remained a patchwork of limited protections, uneven laws, and poor enforcement, lacking basic national standards even for child labor.

Download or read book Labor Histories written by Eric Arnesen and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2022-10-17 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is class outmoded as a basis for understanding labor history? This collection emphatically answers, "No!" These thirteen essays delve into subjects like migrant labor, religion, ethnicity, agricultural history, and gender. Written by former students of preeminent labor figure and historian David Montgomery, the works advance the argument that class remains indispensable to the study of working Americans and their place in the broad drama of our shared national history.

Download or read book A Government by the People written by Thomas Goebel and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2003-04-03 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between 1898 and 1918, many American states introduced the initiative, referendum, and recall--known collectively as direct democracy. Most interpreters have seen the motives for these reform measures as purely political, but Thomas Goebel demonstrates that the call for direct democracy was deeply rooted in antimonopoly sentiment. Frustrated with the governmental corruption and favoritism that facilitated the rise of monopolies, advocates of direct democracy aimed to check the influence of legislative bodies and directly empower the people to pass laws and abolish trusts. But direct democracy failed to achieve its promises: corporations and trusts continued to flourish, voter turnout rates did not increase, and interest groups grew stronger. By the 1930s, it was clear that direct democracy favored large organizations with the financial and organizational resources to fund increasingly expensive campaigns. Recent years have witnessed a resurgence of direct democracy, particularly in California, where ballot questions and propositions have addressed such volatile issues as gay rights and affirmative action. In this context, Goebel's analysis of direct democracy's history, evolution, and ultimate unsuitability as a grassroots tool is particularly timely.

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 America in the Age of the Titans written by Sean Dennis Cashman and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 1988-08-01 with total page 624 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Detailing the events of the Progressive Era and World War I (1901-20), America in the Age of the Titans is the only interdisciplinary history covering this period currently available. The book contains the results of research into primary sources an drecent scholarship with an emphases on leading personalities and anecdotes about them. Sean Dennis Cashman's sequesl to America in the Gilded Age gives special attention to industry and inventions, and social and cultural history. He covers developments in science, technology, and industry; the Progressive movement and the presidencies of Theodore Roosevelt, immigration, the new woman, and labor, including the Industrial Workers of the World and the Great Red Scare; the transportation and communications revolution in radio and motion pictures; the cultural contribuation of artists, architects, and creatice writers; and America's foreign policies across the world. Written in a lively, accessible style with over sixty illustrations, this book is an excellent introduction to these momentous years. It provides an assessment of the contributions of the titans - political, scientific, and industrial.

Download or read book American Progressives and German Social Reform 1875 1920 written by Axel R. Schäfer and published by Franz Steiner Verlag. This book was released on 2000 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study recreates the intellectual climate and transatlantic setting of turn-of-the-century American reform. It examines the influence and meaning of German social thought and reform in the American Reform Movement prior to World War I. The American Progressives used the German theories in order to develop and establish new concepts of reform and to base democracy on principles other than possessive individualism, utilitarian ethics, and market ideology that liberalism held in stock. However, due to the war these reforms lost their radical character. In the end, the progressive quest for a broader sphere of public control, participatory models of reform, and social ethics yielded to the liberal model of regulation, business co-operation, and administrative efficiency, and to the moralistic agenda of prohibition and immigration control. "Axel R. Sch�fer's fine study of what American progressives learned from their German counterparts adds to the growing literature illuminating the cosmopolitan breadth and ideological daring of turn-of-the-century reform. [�] It is a testament to the argumentative force of this insightful work that it so clarifies and deepens the vital debate over the progressive legacy in our new Gilded Age." The Journal of American History "Sch�fer did not intend to offer an exhaustive treatment; instead, he wished to show that part of progressive thought was not merely home grown, ,a relection of narrow, moralistic Protestantism� (220), but had some German roots, too. This he did well, and readers may mine his chapters for other insights�" German Studies Review "Axel R. Sch�fers kenntnisreiche, methodisch reflektierte und quellenges�ttigte Untersuchung legt die bis vor kurzem nur wenig beachteten transatlantischen Bezuege der ,progressiven Bewegung� an der Wende vom 19. zum 20. Jahrhundert frei und bettet dieses, als ,sehr amerikanisch� geltende Reformph�nomen st�rker in seinen weltlichen Gesamtzusammenhang ein. Sch�fer wird daher nicht nur von Amerikaspezialisten mit Gewinn gelesen werden, sondern auch von Historikern, die sich mit interkulturellen Austauschprozessen besch�ftigen." Das Historisch-Politische Buch "Selten jedenfalls ist die Krise des Progressivism im Ersten Weltkrieg so klar analysiert worden wie hier�" Historische Zeitschrift "Anachronismen vermeidend und mit gro�er F�higkeit zur Empathie zeichnet Sch�fer die Motive und Vorstellungswelten der Akteure nach, ohne sie von vornherein zu verurteilen. Auf diese Weise gelingt ihm eine sehr differenzierte Darstellung�" Neue Politische Literatur.

Download or read book The Ideology of the Socialist Party of America 1901T1917 written by Anthony V. Esposito and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-09-29 with total page 203 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examining the propaganda literature issued by the Socialist Party before World War I, this study investigates how the party shaped its appeal to an American audience. With the rise of an anti-monopoly reform movement after 1908 that rejected all notions of class, and socialist success in some city elections after 1910, the party confronted growing liberal strength. By 1912-13 this confrontation affected the ideological appeal and unity of the party by pitting the loyalties of class and citizenship against each other. By the time the U.S. entered WWI, the idea of class had become taboo in American politics, driving a wedge between radicals and reformers that persists until today. (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Connecticut, 1992; revised with new preface and index)

Download or read book The New York Irish written by Ronald H. Bayor and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 1997-09-30 with total page 772 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As one of the country's oldest ethnic groups, the Irish have played a vital part in its history. New York has been both port of entry and home to the Irish for three centuries. This joint project of the Irish Institute and the New York Irish History Roundtable offers a fresh perspective on an immigrant people's encounter with the famed metropolis. 37 illustrations.

Download or read book Louis Miller and Di Warheit The Truth written by Ehud Manor and published by Apollo Books. This book was released on 2012 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book tells the story of Di Warheit ("The Truth"), a Yiddish daily established in New York in late 1905. Its founder, Louis Miller (1866-1927), emigrated from Russia to the US in 1884, and by 1897 he was the leader of a group that established the Forverts, later to be the most successful Yiddish newspaper in the US. Common wisdom depicts Miller's social leaning as stemming from ego and opportunism, but this book suggests that Miller's publishing philosophy was based primarily on ideological and political grounds. Why begin Miller's story in 1905? Because in that year, 'The Jewish Question' - especially in Russia with its pogroms - turned dramatic. Miller understood that the time had come for a paradigm shift. The result was labeled Klal-Yisruel Politics, a combined nationalist all-Jewish effort to ameliorate 'the Jewish condition' wherever Jews suffered or were oppressed. The drive behind Miller's decision to run Di Warheit was his eagerness to promote a progressive, non-radical, and pragmatic political mind set among his immigrant brethren. This somewhat forgotten chapter in American Jewish history is told here in chronological order, mainly through the texts of Miller's newspaper. Each chapter is dedicated to the main issue that drove Miller's publishing effort at a specific time period and in response to external events impacting Jewry, until the management forced him out of Di Warheit due to his non-conventional interpretation of the war that broke out in Europe in 1914. This long-awaited book tells the story of a Yiddish-speaking socialist, who, after denying the very existence of a specific Jewish people, was open-minded enough to re-examine his beliefs and was courageous enough to publicly change his mind. But, he paid the price for telling, or at least trying to tell, that truth.

Download or read book The State and Freedom of Contract written by and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 1998-09 with total page 394 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The relationship of law to economic freedom has been a vital element in the history of all modern democratic societies. "Freedom of contract" is both a technical term in law, referring to private agreements and promises, and a metaphor often deployed to describe economic liberty. This volume of new essays by eminent legal historians offers fresh perspectives on freedom of contract in both senses of the term, and considers how economic freedom relates to such classic political freedoms as free speech and other Anglo-American constitutional norms. The principal focus of the essays is on broad issues of policy and law, rather than on narrow considerations of legal doctrine. All the contributors reject stereotypes that pervade the existing literature about the allegedly unalloyed individualism of the common law, and show how active state interventions of various kinds have shaped contract law in relation to social change throughout our legal history. Equally, however, they reject shibboleths regarding "bringing the state back in," and take a hard look at the claims of statist ideology regarding the norms and rules that have established the legal boundaries of liberty in the modern industrial and post-industrial eras. The topics covered are Blackstone's claim that property was the "despotic dominion of the private owner" (A. W. B. Simpson), labor and contract (John V. Orth), the influence of philosophical trends on legal innovations (James Gordley), contract and individualism (David Lieberman), the tradition of public rights (Harry N. Scheiber), the formal concept of "liberty of contract" in American law (Charles McCurdy), the interwoven history of labor law and contract law (Arthur McEvoy), public policy in relation to natural resources (Donald Pisani), and globalization of freedom of contract (Martin Shapiro).

Download or read book Socialist Cities written by Richard W. Judd and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 1989-07-28 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Socialist Cities is a comparative treatment of grass-roots Socialist successes. It marks the first comprehensive look at the urban working-class base of the American Socialist movement in the early part of the century, and reveals the importance of municipal politics as an organizing strategy. The author assesses the reactions of both workers and non-workers to the party, and provides a fresh perspective on the perennial question of why socialism 'failed' in America. He demonstrates that the subtle and ongoing dialogue between the party's own internal theoretical and tactical weaknesses and the broader class and structural obstacles against which it struggled, contributed to its failure.

Download or read book The History of Wisconsin Volume IV written by John D. Buenker and published by Wisconsin Historical Society. This book was released on 2013-03-05 with total page 781 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Published in Wisconsin's Sesquicentennial year, this fourth volume in The History of Wisconsin series covers the twenty tumultuous years between the World's Columbian Exposition and the First World War when Wisconsin essentially reinvented itself, becoming the nation's "laboratory of democracy." The period known as the Progressive Era began to emerge in the mid-1890s. A sense of crisis and a widespread clamor for reform arose in reaction to rapid changes in population, technology, work, and society. Wisconsinites responded with action: their advocacy of women's suffrage, labor rights and protections, educational reform, increased social services, and more responsive government led to a veritable flood of reform legislation that established Wisconsin as the most progressive state in the union. As governor and U.S. Senator from Wisconsin, Robert M. La Follette, Sr., was the most celebrated of the Progressives, but he was surrounded by a host of pragmatic idealists from politics, government, and the state university. Although the Progressives frequently disagreed over priorities and tactics, their values and core beliefs coalesced around broad-based participatory democracy, the application of scientific expertise to governance, and an active concern for the welfare of all members of society-what came to be known as "the Wisconsin Idea."

Download or read book A Democracy That Works written by Stephen Amberg and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-11-25 with total page 371 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Democracy That Works argues that rather than corporate donations, Republican gerrymandering and media manipulation, the conservative ascendancy reflects the reconstruction of the rules that govern work that has disempowered workers. Using six historical case studies from the emergence of the New Deal, and its later overtaking by the conservative neoliberal agenda, to today's intersectional social justice movements, Stephen Amberg deploys situated institutional analysis to show how real actors created the rules that empowered liberal democracy for 50 years and then how Democrats and Republicans undermined democracy by changing those rules, thereby organizing working-class people out of American politics. He draws on multidisciplinary studies to argue that when employees are organized to participate at work, they are also organized to participate in politics to press for accountable government. In doing so, the book opens up analytical space to understand the unprecedented threat to liberal democracy in the U.S. A Democracy That Works is a fresh account of the crisis of democracy that illuminates how historical choices about the role of workers in the polity shaped America's liberal democracy during the 20th century. It will appeal to scholars of American politics and American political development, labor and social movements, democracy and comparative politics.

Download or read book Reader s Guide to American History written by Peter J. Parish and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-06-17 with total page 917 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There are so many books on so many aspects of the history of the United States, offering such a wide variety of interpretations, that students, teachers, scholars, and librarians often need help and advice on how to find what they want. The Reader's Guide to American History is designed to meet that need by adopting a new and constructive approach to the appreciation of this rich historiography. Each of the 600 entries on topics in political, social and economic history describes and evaluates some 6 to 12 books on the topic, providing guidance to the reader on everything from broad surveys and interpretive works to specialized monographs. The entries are devoted to events and individuals, as well as broader themes, and are written by a team of well over 200 contributors, all scholars of American history.

Download or read book Routledge Revivals Reform in New York City 1991 written by Augustus Cerillo and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-02-01 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published in 1991, Reform in New York City provides an interpretive synthesis of urban progressivism and provides a comprehensive historical look at progressivism in New York City. The book argues that urban reform still poses a major historiographical challenge to historians working today and that there is limited analysis of the social and political action that characterised turn of the century New York. The book addresses the conceptual approaches, interpretive differences, and thematic emphasis of the urban reform agenda.