Download or read book Storming Caesars Palace written by Annelise Orleck and published by Beacon Press. This book was released on 2005-07-01 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The inspirational and little-known story of welfare mothers in Las Vegas, America's Sin City, who crafted an original response to poverty-from the ground up In Storming Caesars Palace, historian Annelise Orleck tells the compelling story of how a group of welfare mothers built one of this country's most successful antipoverty programs. Declaring "We can do it and do it better," these women proved that poor mothers are the real experts on poverty. In 1972 they founded Operation Life, which was responsible for many firsts for the poor in Las Vegas-the first library, medical center, daycare center, job training, and senior citizen housing. By the late 1970s, Operation Life was bringing millions of dollars into the community. These women became influential in Washington, DC-respected and listened to by political heavyweights such as Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Ted Kennedy, and Jimmy Carter. Though they lost their funding with the country's move toward conservatism in the 1980s, their struggles and phenomenal triumphs still stand as a critical lesson about what can be achieved when those on welfare chart their own course.
Download or read book Storming Caesars Palace REVISED UPDATED written by Annelise Orleck and published by Beacon Press. This book was released on 2023-04-25 with total page 394 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The inspiration for the PBS documentary premiering March 2023 The story of the revolutionary Black women welfare organizers of Las Vegas who spearheaded an evergreen, radical revisioning of American economic justice This timely reissue tells the little-known story of a pioneering group of Black mothers who built one of this country's most successful antipoverty programs. In Storming Caesars Palace, Annelise Orleck brings into focus the hidden figures of a trailblazing movement who proved that poor mothers are the real experts on poverty, providing job training, libraries, medical access, daycare centers and housing to the poor in Las Vegas throughout the 1970s. Orleck introduces Ruby Duncan, a sharecropper turned White House advisor who led the charge on the long war on poverty waged against the poor Black mothers of Las Vegas. According to Ruby, “Poor women must dream their highest dreams and never stop,” and she, with the help of Mary Wesley and Alversa Beals, did exactly that. A vivid retelling of an overlooked American history, Orleck follows the Black women who went on to lead a revolutionary movement against welfare injustice. These women eventually founded Operation Life, one of the first women-led community organizations in the nation and one of the country’s most successful antipoverty programs. They went on to gain national traction and garnered the respect of key political figures such as Ted Kennedy and Jimmy Carter. With a new prologue and epilogue that explore the race and labor movements paramount to the political climate of 2021, Orleck masterfully blends together history, social analysis, and personal storytelling in a story that is as enraging as it is empowering.
Download or read book We Are All Fast Food Workers Now written by Annelise Orleck and published by Beacon Press. This book was released on 2018-02-27 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of low-wage workers rising up around the world to demand respect and a living wage. Tracing a new labor movement sparked and sustained by low-wage workers from across the globe, “We Are All Fast-Food Workers Now” is an urgent, illuminating look at globalization as seen through the eyes of workers-activists: small farmers, fast-food servers, retail workers, hotel housekeepers, home-healthcare aides, airport workers, and adjunct professors who are fighting for respect, safety, and a living wage. With original photographs by Liz Cooke and drawing on interviews with activists in many US cities and countries around the world, including Bangladesh, Cambodia, Mexico, South Africa, and the Philippines, it features stories of resistance and rebellion, as well as reflections on hope and change as it rises from the bottom up.
Download or read book The War on Poverty written by Annelise Orleck and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2011-11-01 with total page 516 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty has long been portrayed as the most potent symbol of all that is wrong with big government. Conservatives deride the War on Poverty for corruption and the creation of "poverty pimps," and even liberals carefully distance themselves from it. Examining the long War on Poverty from the 1960s onward, this book makes a controversial argument that the programs were in many ways a success, reducing poverty rates and weaving a social safety net that has proven as enduring as programs that came out of the New Deal. The War on Poverty also transformed American politics from the grass roots up, mobilizing poor people across the nation. Blacks in crumbling cities, rural whites in Appalachia, Cherokees in Oklahoma, Puerto Ricans in the Bronx, migrant Mexican farmworkers, and Chinese immigrants from New York to California built social programs based on Johnson's vision of a greater, more just society. Contributors to this volume chronicle these vibrant and largely unknown histories while not shying away from the flaws and failings of the movement--including inadequate funding, co-optation by local political elites, and blindness to the reality that mothers and their children made up most of the poor. In the twenty-first century, when one in seven Americans receives food stamps and community health centers are the largest primary care system in the nation, the War on Poverty is as relevant as ever. This book helps us to understand the turbulent era out of which it emerged and why it remains so controversial to this day.
Download or read book A Movement Without Marches written by Lisa Levenstein and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this bold interpretation of U.S. history, Lisa Levenstein reframes highly charged debates over the origins of chronic African American poverty and the social policies and political struggles that led to the postwar urban crisis. A Movement Withou
Download or read book Feminism s Forgotten Fight written by Kirsten Swinth and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2018-11-05 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A spirited defense of feminism, arguing that the lack of support for working mothers is less a failure of second-wave feminism than a rejection by reactionaries of the sweeping changes they campaigned for. When people discuss feminism, they often lament its failure to deliver on the promise that women can “have it all.” But as Kirsten Swinth argues in this provocative book, it is not feminism that has betrayed women, but a society that balked at making the far-reaching changes for which activists fought. Feminism’s Forgotten Fight resurrects the comprehensive vision of feminism’s second wave at a time when its principles are under renewed attack. Through compelling stories of local and national activism and crucial legislative and judicial battles, Swinth’s history spotlights concerns not commonly associated with the movement of the 1960s and 1970s. We see liberals and radicals, white women and women of color, rethinking gender roles and redistributing housework. They brought men into the fold, and together demanded bold policy changes to ensure job protection for pregnant women and federal support for child care. Many of the creative proposals they devised to reshape the workplace and rework government policy—such as guaranteed incomes for mothers and flex time—now seem prescient. Swinth definitively dispels the notion that second-wave feminists pushed women into the workplace without offering solutions to issues they faced at home. Feminism’s Forgotten Fight examines activists’ campaigns for work and family in depth, and helps us see how feminism’s opponents—not feminists themselves—blocked the movement’s aspirations. Her insights offer key lessons for women’s ongoing struggle to achieve equality at home and work.
Download or read book Free Joan Little written by Christina Greene and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2022-10-05 with total page 363 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Early on a summer morning in 1974, local officials found the jailer Clarence Alligood stabbed to death in a cell in the women's section of a rural North Carolina jail. Fleeing the scene was Joan Little, twenty years old, poor, Black, and in trouble. After turning herself in, Little faced a possible death sentence in the state's gas chamber. At her trial, which was followed around the world, Little claimed that she had killed Alligood in self-defense against sexual assault. Local and national figures took up Little's cause, protesting her innocence. After a five-week trial, Little was acquitted. But the case stirred debate about a woman's right to use deadly force to resist sexual violence. Through the prism of Little's rape-murder trial and the Free Joan Little campaign, Christina Greene explores the intersecting histories of African American women, mass incarceration, sexual violence, and social movements of the 1970s and 1980s. Greene argues that Little's circumstances prior to her arrest, assault, and trial were shaped by unprecedented increases in federal financing of local law enforcement and a decades-long criminalization of Blackness. She also reveals tensions among Little's defenders and recovers Black women's intersectional politics of the period, which linked women's prison protest and antirape activism with broader struggles for economic and political justice.
Download or read book The Routledge History of Twentieth Century United States written by Jerald Podair and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-05-02 with total page 624 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge History of the Twentieth-Century United States is a comprehensive introduction to the most important trends and developments in the study of modern United States history. Driven by interdisciplinary scholarship, the thirty-four original chapters underscore the vast range of identities, perspectives and tensions that contributed to the growth and contested meanings of the United States in the twentieth century. The chronological and topical breadth of the collection highlights critical political and economic developments of the century while also drawing attention to relatively recent areas of research, including borderlands, technology and disability studies. Dynamic and flexible in its possible applications, The Routledge History of the Twentieth-Century United States offers an exciting new resource for the study of modern American history.
Download or read book Intimate Labors written by Eileen Boris and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2010-06-22 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book advances debates over the relationship between care and economy through the concept of intimate labor—care, domestic, and sex work—and thus charts relations of race, class, gender, sexuality, and citizenship in the context of global economic transformations.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of the Social Science of Poverty written by David Brady and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 937 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Handbook of the Social Science of Poverty builds a common scholarly ground in the study of poverty by bringing together an international, inter-disciplinary group of scholars to provide their perspectives on the issue. Contributors engage in discussions about the leading theories and conceptual debates regarding poverty, the most salient topics in poverty research, and the far-reaching consequences of poverty on the individual and societal level.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of American Women s and Gender History written by Ellen Hartigan-O'Connor and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-04 with total page 640 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the first European encounters with Native American women to today's crisis of sexual assault, The Oxford Handbook of American Women's and Gender History boldly interprets the diverse history of women and how ideas about gender shaped their access to political and cultural power in North America. Over twenty-nine chapters, this handbook illustrates how women's and gender history can shape how we view the past, looking at how gender influenced people's lives as they participated in migration, colonialism, trade, warfare, artistic production, and community building. Theoretically cutting edge, each chapter is alive with colorful historical characters, from young Chicanas transforming urban culture, to free women of color forging abolitionist doctrines, Asian migrant women defending the legitimacy of their marriages, and transwomen fleeing incarceration. Together, their lives constitute the history of a continent. Leading scholars across multiple generations demonstrate the power of innovative research to excavate a history hidden in plain sight. Scrutinizing silences in the historical record, from the inattention to enslaved women's opinions to the suppression of Indian women's involvement in border diplomacy, the authors challenge the nature of historical evidence and remap what counts in our interpretation of the past. Together and separately, these essays offer readers a deep understanding of the variety and centrality of women's lives to all dimensions of the American past, even as they show that the boundaries of "women," "American," and "history" have shifted across the centuries.
Download or read book A Chance for Change written by Crystal R. Sanders and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2016-02-10 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this innovative study, Crystal Sanders explores how working-class black women, in collaboration with the federal government, created the Child Development Group of Mississippi (CDGM) in 1965, a Head Start program that not only gave poor black children access to early childhood education but also provided black women with greater opportunities for political activism during a crucial time in the unfolding of the civil rights movement. Women who had previously worked as domestics and sharecroppers secured jobs through CDGM as teachers and support staff and earned higher wages. The availability of jobs independent of the local white power structure afforded these women the freedom to vote in elections and petition officials without fear of reprisal. But CDGM's success antagonized segregationists at both the local and state levels who eventually defunded it. Tracing the stories of the more than 2,500 women who staffed Mississippi's CDGM preschool centers, Sanders's book remembers women who went beyond teaching children their shapes and colors to challenge the state's closed political system and white supremacist ideology and offers a profound example for future community organizing in the South.
Download or read book Fighting Jim Crow in the County of Kings written by Brian Purnell and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2013-05 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) established a reputation as one of the most important civil rights organizations of the early 1960s. In the wake of the southern student sit-ins, CORE created new chapters all over the country, including one in Brooklyn, New York, which quickly established itself as one of the most audacious and dynamic chapters in the nation. In Fighting Jim Crow in the County of Kings, historian Brian Purnell explores the chapter's numerous direct-action protest campaigns for economic justice and social equality. The group's tactics evolved from pickets and sit-ins for jobs and housing to more dramatic action, such as dumping trash on the steps of Borough Hall to protest inadequate garbage collection. The Brooklyn chapter's lengthy record of activism, however, yielded only modest progress. Its members eventually resorted to desperate measures, such as targeting the opening day of the 1964 World's Fair with a traffic-snarling "stall-in." After that moment, its interracial, nonviolent phase was effectively over. By 1966, the group was more aligned with the black power movement, and a new Brooklyn CORE emerged. Drawing from archival sources and interviews with individuals directly involved in the chapter, Purnell explores how people from diverse backgrounds joined together, solved internal problems, and earned one another's trust before eventually becoming disillusioned and frustrated. Fighting Jim Crow in the County of Kings adds to our understanding of the broader civil rights movement by examining how it was implemented in an iconic northern city, where interracial activists mounted a heroic struggle against powerful local forms of racism.
Download or read book How Welfare Worked in the Early United States written by Gabriel J. Loiacono and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Two Centuries Ago, Americans paid for-and relied on-an astonishing government system that provided food, housing, and medical care to those in need. How Welfare Worked in the Early United States: Five Microhistories tells stories of "poor relief" through the lives of five people: a long-serving overseer of the poor, a Continental Army veteran who was banished from town, a nurse who was paid by the government to care for the poor an unwed mother who cared for the elderly and struggled to remain with her daughter, and a young paralyzed man who worked as a Christian missionary inside a poorhouse. Of Native, African, and English descent, these five Rhode Islanders' life stories show how poor relief actually worked. Students of history and of today's social provision have much to learn about how welfare worked in the early United States. Book jacket.
Download or read book City of Dispossessions written by Kyle T. Mays and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2022-05-24 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In July 2013, Detroit became the largest city in U.S. history to declare bankruptcy. The underlying causes were decades of deindustrialization, white flight, and financial mismanagement. More recently it has been heralded a comeback city as wealthy white residents resettle there. Yet, as Kyle T. Mays argues, we cannot understand the current state of Detroit without also understanding the longer history of Native American and African American dispossession that has defined the city since its founding. How has dispossession impacted the development of modern U.S. cities? And how does comparing the historical experiences of Native Americans and African Americans in an urban context help us comprehend histories of race, sovereignty, and colonialism? Using archives, oral and family histories, and community documents, City of Dispossessions is a cultural, intellectual, and social history that argues that physical and symbolic forms of dispossession of Native Americans and African Americans, and their reactions to dispossession, have been central to Detroit's modern development. The book begins with the first settlement by the Frenchman Cadillac in 1701 and chronicles how the logic of dispossession has continued into the present, through a wide range of forms that include memorialization of the "disappearing Indian," the physical dispossession of African Americans through urban renewal, and gentrification. Mays also chronicles the wide-ranging forms of expression through which Black and Indigenous Detroiters have contested dispossession, such as the Red and Black Power movements and culturally relevant education. Through lively, accessible prose as well as historical and contemporary examples, City of Dispossessions will be of interest to readers of urban studies, Indigenous Studies, and critical ethnic studies.
Download or read book Fannie Lou Hamer written by Earnest N. Bracey and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2014-01-10 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the life of one of Mississippi's greatest civil rights activists, Fannie Lou Hamer. Known for her daring, her brinkmanship and her impassioned speech-making, Hamer rose to prominence in the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, an intrepid group which tried to unseat the predominantly white Democrats of Mississippi during the 1964 Democratic National Convention. She is particularly remembered for her speech before the Credentials Committee, seeking to end all-white representation of her home state. Hamer fought her entire life to expand freedom and basic rights to African Americans in the United States.
Download or read book Strike the Hammer written by Laura Warren Hill and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2021-04-15 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On July 24, 1964, chaos erupted in Rochester, New York. Strike the Hammer examines the unrest—rebellion by the city's Black community, rampant police brutality—that would radically change the trajectory of the Civil Rights movement. After overcoming a violent response by State Police, the fight for justice, in an upstate town rooted in black power movements, was reborn. That resurgence owed much to years of organizing and resistance in the community. Laura Warren Hill examines Rochester's long Civil Rights history and, drawing extensively on oral accounts of the northern, urban community, offers rich and detailed stories of the area's protest tradition. Augmenting oral testimonies with records from the NAACP, SCLC, and the local FIGHT, Strike the Hammer paints a compelling picture of the foundations for the movement. Now, especially, this story of struggle for justice and resistance to inequality resonates. Hill leads us to consider the social, political, and economic environment more than fifty years ago and how that founding generation of activists left its mark on present-day Rochester.
