Download or read book The Civil Wars in U S Labor written by Steve Early and published by Haymarket Books. This book was released on 2011 with total page 442 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Trade union leader and journalist Steve Early discusses how to reverse American labour's current decline.

Download or read book Free Labor written by Mark A. Lause and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2015-06-30 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Monumental and revelatory, Free Labor explores labor activism throughout the country during a period of incredible diversity and fluidity: the American Civil War. Mark A. Lause describes how the working class radicalized during the war as a response to economic crisis, the political opportunity created by the election of Abraham Lincoln, and the ideology of free labor and abolition. His account moves from battlefield and picket line to the negotiating table, as he discusses how leaders and the rank-and-file alike adapted tactics and modes of operation to specific circumstances. His close attention to women and African Americans, meanwhile, dismantles notions of the working class as synonymous with whiteness and maleness. In addition, Lause offers a nuanced consideration of race's role in the politics of national labor organizations, in segregated industries in the border North and South, and in black resistance in the secessionist South, creatively reading self-emancipation as the largest general strike in U.S. history.

Download or read book Making the Empire Work written by Daniel E. Bender and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2015-07-17 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Millions of laborers, from the Philippines to the Caribbean, performed the work of the United States empire. Forging a global economy connecting the tropics to the industrial center, workers harvested sugar, cleaned hotel rooms, provided sexual favors, and filled military ranks. Placing working men and women at the center of the long history of the U.S. empire, these essays offer new stories of empire that intersect with the “grand narratives” of diplomatic affairs at the national and international levels. Missile defense, Cold War showdowns, development politics, military combat, tourism, and banana economics share something in common—they all have labor histories. This collection challenges historians to consider the labor that formed, worked, confronted, and rendered the U.S. empire visible. The U.S. empire is a project of global labor mobilization, coercive management, military presence, and forced cultural encounter. Together, the essays in this volume recognize the United States as a global imperial player whose systems of labor mobilization and migration stretched from Central America to West Africa to the United States itself. Workers are also the key actors in this volume. Their stories are multi-vocal, as workers sometimes defied the U.S. empire’s rhetoric of civilization, peace, and stability and at other times navigated its networks or benefited from its profits. Their experiences reveal the gulf between the American ‘denial of empire’ and the lived practice of management, resource exploitation, and military exigency. When historians place labor and working people at the center, empire appears as a central dynamic of U.S. history.

Download or read book Save Our Unions written by Steve Early and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2013-11 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Save Our Unions: Dispatches From A Movement in Distress brings together recent essays and reporting by labor journalist Steve Early. The author illuminates the challenges facing U.S. workers, whether they’re trying to democratize their union, win a strike, defend past contract gains, or bargain with management for the first time. Drawing on forty years of personal experience, Early writes about cross-border union campaigning, labor strategies for organizing and health care reform, and political initiatives that might lessen worker dependence on the Democratic Party. Save Our Unions contains vivid portraits of rank-and-file heroes and heroines, both well-known and unsung. It takes readers to union conventions and funerals, strikes and picket-lines, celebrations of labor’s past and struggles to insure that unions still have a future in the 21st century. The book’s insight, analysis and advocacy make this an important contribution to the project of labor revitalization and reform.

Download or read book Another Civil War written by Grace Palladino and published by North's Civil War. This book was released on 2006 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Avery Craven Prize, this classic account of the social and economic impact of the Civil War explores the complicated intersections of class, region, ethnicity, and labor militancy during a tumultuous era of social change. It is a model case study of the social and cultural context of the Civil War.“Demonstrates convincingly that, in the midst of a national civil war, coal miners and operators fought another civil war . . . a first-rate piece of scholarship.”—The Journal of American History

Download or read book From the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend written by Priscilla Murolo and published by The New Press. This book was released on 2018-08-28 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Newly updated: “An enjoyable introduction to American working-class history.” —The American Prospect Praised for its “impressive even-handedness”, From the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend has set the standard for viewing American history through the prism of working people (Publishers Weekly, starred review). From indentured servants and slaves in seventeenth-century Chesapeake to high-tech workers in contemporary Silicon Valley, the book “[puts] a human face on the people, places, events, and social conditions that have shaped the evolution of organized labor”, enlivened by illustrations from the celebrated comics journalist Joe Sacco (Library Journal). Now, the authors have added a wealth of fresh analysis of labor’s role in American life, with new material on sex workers, disability issues, labor’s relation to the global justice movement and the immigrants’ rights movement, the 2005 split in the AFL-CIO and the movement civil wars that followed, and the crucial emergence of worker centers and their relationships to unions. With two entirely new chapters—one on global developments such as offshoring and a second on the 2016 election and unions’ relationships to Trump—this is an “extraordinarily fine addition to U.S. history [that] could become an evergreen . . . comparable to Howard Zinn’s award-winning A People’s History of the United States” (Publishers Weekly). “A marvelously informed, carefully crafted, far-ranging history of working people.” —Noam Chomsky

Download or read book American Civil Wars written by Don H. Doyle and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2017-02-02 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: American Civil Wars takes readers beyond the battlefields and sectional divides of the U.S. Civil War to view the conflict from outside the national arena of the United States. Contributors position the American conflict squarely in the context of a wider transnational crisis across the Atlantic world, marked by a multitude of civil wars, European invasions and occupations, revolutionary independence movements, and slave uprisings—all taking place in the tumultuous decade of the 1860s. The multiple conflicts described in these essays illustrate how the United States' sectional strife was caught up in a larger, complex struggle in which nations and empires on both sides of the Atlantic vied for the control of the future. These struggles were all part of a vast web, connecting not just Washington and Richmond but also Mexico City, Havana, Santo Domingo, and Rio de Janeiro and--on the other side of the Atlantic--London, Paris, Madrid, and Rome. This volume breaks new ground by charting a hemispheric upheaval and expanding Civil War scholarship into the realms of transnational and imperial history. American Civil Wars creates new connections between the uprisings and civil wars in and outside of American borders and places the United States within a global context of other nations. Contributors: Matt D. Childs, University of South Carolina Anne Eller, Yale University Richard Huzzey, University of Liverpool Howard Jones, University of Alabama Patrick J. Kelly, University of Texas at San Antonio Rafael de Bivar Marquese, University of Sao Paulo Erika Pani, College of Mexico Hilda Sabato, University of Buenos Aires Steve Sainlaude, University of Paris IV Sorbonne Christopher Schmidt-Nowara, Tufts University Jay Sexton, University of Oxford

Download or read book Who Rules America Now written by G. William Domhoff and published by Touchstone. This book was released on 1986 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author is convinced that there is a ruling class in America today. He examines the American power structure as it has developed in the 1980s. He presents systematic, empirical evidence that a fixed group of privileged people dominates the American economy and government. The book demonstrates that an upper class comprising only one-half of one percent of the population occupies key positions within the corporate community. It shows how leaders within this "power elite" reach government and dominate it through processes of special-interest lobbying, policy planning and candidate selection. It is written not to promote any political ideology, but to analyze our society with accuracy.

Download or read book Class Struggle Unionism written by Joe Burns and published by Haymarket Books. This book was released on 2022-03-01 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For those who want to build a fighting labor movement, there are many questions to answer. How to relate to the union establishment which often does not want to fight? Whether to work in the rank and file of unions or staff jobs? How much to prioritize broader class demands versus shop floor struggle? How to relate to foundation-funded worker centers and alternative union efforts? And most critically, how can we revive militancy and union power in the face of corporate power and a legal system set up against us? Class struggle unionism is the belief that our union struggle exists within a larger struggle between an exploiting billionaire class and the working class which actually produces the goods and services in society. Class struggle unionism looks at the employment transaction as inherently exploitative. While workers create all wealth in society, the outcome of the wage employment transaction is to separate workers from that wealth and create the billionaire class. From that simple proposition flows a powerful and radical form of unionism. Historically, class struggle unionists placed their workplace fights squarely within this larger fight between workers and the owning class. Viewing unionism in this way produces a particular type of unionism which both fights for broader class issues but is also rooted in workplace-based militancy. Drawing on years of labor activism and study of labor tradition Joe Burns outlines the key set of ideas common to class struggle unionism and shows how these ideas can create a more militant, democtractic and fighting labor movement.

Download or read book Workers at War written by Joshua H. Howard and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 492 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book focuses on the lives, struggles, and contrasting perspectives of the 60,000 workers, military administrators, and technical staff employed in the largest, most strategic industry of the Nationalist government, the armaments industry based in the wartime capital, Chongqing. The author argues that China's arsenal workers participated in three interlocked conflicts between 1937 and 1953: a war of national liberation, a civil war, and a class war. The work adds to the scholarship on the Chinese revolution, which has previously focused primarily on rural China, showing how workers’ alienation from the military officers directing the arsenals eroded the legitimacy of the Nationalist regime and how the Communists mobilized working-class support in Chongqing. Moreover, in emphasizing the urban, working-class, and nationalist components of the 1949 revolution, the author demonstrates the multiple sources of workers’ identities and thus challenges previous studies that have exclusively stressed workers’ particularistic or regional identities.

Download or read book Commonsense Anticommunism written by Jennifer Luff and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2012-05-21 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between the Great War and Pearl Harbor, conservative labor leaders declared themselves America's "first line of defense" against Communism. In this surprising account, Jennifer Luff shows how the American Federation of Labor fanned popular anticommunism but defended Communists' civil liberties in the aftermath of the 1919 Red Scare. The AFL's "commonsense anticommunism," she argues, steered a middle course between the American Legion and the ACLU, helping to check campaigns for federal sedition laws. But in the 1930s, frustration with the New Deal order led labor conservatives to redbait the Roosevelt administration and liberal unionists and abandon their reluctant civil libertarianism for red scare politics. That frustration contributed to the legal architecture of federal anticommunism that culminated with the McCarthyist fervor of the 1950s. Relying on untapped archival sources, Luff reveals how labor conservatives and the emerging civil liberties movement debated the proper role of the state in policing radicals and grappled with the challenges to the existing political order posed by Communist organizers. Surprising conclusions about familiar figures, like J. Edgar Hoover, and unfamiliar episodes, like a German plot to disrupt American munitions manufacture, make Luff's story a fresh retelling of the interwar years.

Download or read book The Devil Is Here in These Hills written by James Green and published by Open Road + Grove/Atlantic. This book was released on 2015-02-03 with total page 447 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “The most comprehensive and comprehendible history of the West Virginia Coal War I’ve ever read.” —John Sayles, writer and director of Matewan On September 1, 1912, the largest, most protracted, and deadliest working-class uprising in American history was waged in West Virginia. On one side were powerful corporations whose millions bought armed guards and political influence. On the other side were fifty thousand mine workers, the nation’s largest labor union, and the legendary “miners’ angel,” Mother Jones. The fight for unionization and civil rights sparked a political crisis that verged on civil war, stretching from the creeks and hollows of the Appalachians to the US Senate. Attempts to unionize were met with stiff resistance. Fundamental rights were bent—then broken. The violence evolved from bloody skirmishes to open armed conflict, as an army of more than fifty thousand miners finally marched to an explosive showdown. Extensively researched and vividly told, this definitive book about an often-overlooked chapter of American history, “gives this backwoods struggle between capital and labor the due it deserves. [Green] tells a dark, often despairing story from a century ago that rings true today” (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette).

Download or read book The Long Deep Grudge written by Toni Gilpin and published by Haymarket Books. This book was released on 2020-02-25 with total page 458 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “The definitive history of an important but largely forgotten labor organization and its heroic struggles with an icon of industrial capitalism.” —Ahmed A. White, author of The Last Great Strike This rich history details the bitter, deep-rooted conflict between industrial behemoth International Harvester and the uniquely radical Farm Equipment Workers union. The Long Deep Grudge makes clear that class warfare has been, and remains, integral to the American experience, providing up-close-and-personal and long-view perspectives from both sides of the battle lines. International Harvester—and the McCormick family that largely controlled it—garnered a reputation for bare-knuckled union-busting in the 1880s, but in the twentieth century also pioneered sophisticated union-avoidance techniques that have since become standard corporate practice. On the other side the militant Farm Equipment Workers union, connected to the Communist Party, mounted a vociferous challenge to the cooperative ethos that came to define the American labor movement after World War II. This evocative account, stretching back to the nineteenth century and carried through to the present, reads like a novel. Biographical sketches of McCormick family members, union officials and rank-and-file workers are woven into the narrative, along with anarchists, jazz musicians, Wall Street financiers, civil rights crusaders, and mob lawyers. It touches on pivotal moments and movements as wide-ranging as the Haymarket “riot,” the Flint sit-down strikes, the Memorial Day Massacre, the McCarthy-era anti-communist purges, and America’s late twentieth-century industrial decline. “A capitalist family dynasty, a radical union, and a revolution in how and where work gets done—Toni Gilpin’s The Long Deep Grudge is a detailed chronicle of one of the most active battlefronts in our ever-evolving class war.” —John Sayles

Download or read book Striking Steel written by Jack Metzgar and published by Temple University Press. This book was released on 2000-02-02 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Having come of age during a period of vibrant union-centered activism, Jack Metzgar begins this book wondering how his father, a U.S> Steel shop steward in the 1950s and '60s, and so many contemporary historians could forget what this country owes to the union movement. Combining personal memoir and historical narrative, Striking Steel argues for reassessment of unionism in American life during the second half of the twentieth century and a recasting of "official memory." As he traces the history of union steelworkers after World War II, Metzgar draws on his father's powerful stories about the publishing work in the mills, stories in which time is divided between "before the union" and since. His father, Johnny Metzgar, fought ardently for workplace rules as a means of giving "the men" some control over their working conditions and protection from venal foremen. He pursued grievances until he eroded management's authority, and he badgered foremen until he established shop-floor practices that would become part of the next negotiated contract. As a passionate advocate of solidarity, he urged coworkers to stick together so that the rules were upheld and everyone could earn a decent wage. Striking Steel's pivotal event is the four-month nationwide steel strike of 1959, a landmark union victory that has been all but erased from public memory. With remarkable tenacity, union members held out for the shop-floor rules that gave them dignity in the workplace and raised their standard of living. Their victory underscored the value of sticking together and reinforced their sense that they were contributing to a general improvement in American working and living conditions. The Metzgar family's story vividly illustrates the larger narrative of how unionism lifted the fortunes and prospects of working-class families. It also offers an account of how the broad social changes of the period helped to shift the balance of power in a conflict-ridden, patriarchal household. Even if the optimism of his generation faded in the upheavals of the 1960s, Johnny Metzgar's commitment to his union and the strike itself stands as an honorable example of what a collective action can and did achieve. Jack Metzgar's Striking Steel is a stirring call to remember and renew the struggle.

Download or read book The War That Forged a Nation written by James M. McPherson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2015-02-12 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: More than 140 years ago, Mark Twain observed that the Civil War had "uprooted institutions that were centuries old, changed the politics of a people, transformed the social life of half the country, and wrought so profoundly upon the entire national character that the influence cannot be measured short of two or three generations." In fact, five generations have passed, and Americans are still trying to measure the influence of the immense fratricidal conflict that nearly tore the nation apart. In The War that Forged a Nation, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian James M. McPherson considers why the Civil War remains so deeply embedded in our national psyche and identity. The drama and tragedy of the war, from its scope and size--an estimated death toll of 750,000, far more than the rest of the country's wars combined--to the nearly mythical individuals involved--Abraham Lincoln, Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson--help explain why the Civil War remains a topic of interest. But the legacy of the war extends far beyond historical interest or scholarly attention. Here, McPherson draws upon his work over the past fifty years to illuminate the war's continuing resonance across many dimensions of American life. Touching upon themes that include the war's causes and consequences; the naval war; slavery and its abolition; and Lincoln as commander in chief, McPherson ultimately proves the impossibility of understanding the issues of our own time unless we first understand their roots in the era of the Civil War. From racial inequality and conflict between the North and South to questions of state sovereignty or the role of government in social change--these issues, McPherson shows, are as salient and controversial today as they were in the 1860s. Thoughtful, provocative, and authoritative, The War that Forged a Nation looks anew at the reasons America's civil war has remained a subject of intense interest for the past century and a half, and affirms the enduring relevance of the conflict for America today.

Download or read book The Constitutional Origins of the American Civil War written by Michael F. Conlin and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-07-18 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Demonstrates the crucial role that the Constitution played in the coming of the Civil War.

Download or read book Civil War Books written by Allan Nevins and published by . This book was released on 1970 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: