Download or read book The Damndest Radical written by Roger A. Bruns and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Roger A. Bruns's immensely entertaining biography, now available in paperback, throws a spotlight on a colorful, influential, but long-obscured Chicago character. This is the true story of Ben Reitman, ally of hobos, personal physician to scores of Al Capone's prostitutes, author, womanizer, founder of Chicago's Hobo College, and longtime lover of Emma Goldman."
Download or read book Chicago s War on Syphilis 1937 40 written by Suzanne Poirier and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "An eye for colorful vignettes and anecdotes. On target! She recognizes the importance of her subject." -- Thomas N. Bonner, author of To the Ends of the Earth: Women's Search for Education in Medicine Those struggling to deal with the AIDS epidemic might learn valuable lessons from the earlier struggle of the U.S. to deal with syphilis. Here, Suzanne Poirier tells the story of the Chicago Syphilis Control Program launched in 1937 by the Chicago Board of Health and the U.S. Public Health Service and severely limited from the start because of the refusal of government, the press, and the public to confront directly the issues underlying the problem. Poirier's narrative is memorable for its vivid scenes, colorful characters that include Chicago's "clap doctor," Dr. Ben Reitman, and its account of the heated debate that surrounded the effort. In an epilogue, the author discusses similarities between current efforts against AIDS and the handling and politics of the syphilis problem in the late 1930s.
Download or read book American Moderns written by Christine Stansell and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-05-11 with total page 437 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the early twentieth century, an exuberant brand of gifted men and women moved to New York City, not to get rich but to participate in a cultural revolution. For them, the city's immigrant neighborhoods--home to art, poetry, cafes, and cabarets in the European tradition--provided a place where the fancies and forms of a new America could be tested. Some called themselves Bohemians, some members of the avant-garde, but all took pleasure in the exotic, new, and forbidden. In American Moderns, Christine Stansell tells the story of the most famous of these neighborhoods, Greenwich Village, which--thanks to cultural icons such as Eugene O'Neill, Isadora Duncan, and Emma Goldman--became a symbol of social and intellectual freedom. Stansell eloquently explains how the mixing of old and new worlds, politics and art, and radicalism and commerce so characteristic of New York shaped the modern American urban scene. American Moderns is both an examination and a celebration of a way of life that's been nearly forgotten.
Download or read book Sasha and Emma written by Paul Avrich and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2012-11-01 with total page 505 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This “lively” dual biography is “an enormously rich book, offering an absorbing portrait of the world of anarchists in turn-of-the-century America” (The New York Times Book Review). In 1889 two Russian immigrants, Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, met in a coffee shop on the Lower East Side. Over the next fifty years Emma and Sasha would be fast friends, fleeting lovers, and loyal comrades. This dual biography offers an unprecedented glimpse into their intertwined lives and the lasting influence of the anarchist movement they shaped. Berkman shocked the country in 1892 with “the first terrorist act in America,” the failed assassination of the industrialist Henry Clay Frick for his crimes against workers. Passionate and pitiless, gloomy yet gentle, Berkman remained Goldman’s closest confidant though the two were often separated—by his fourteen-year imprisonment and by Emma’s growing fame as a champion of causes from sexual liberation to freedom of speech. The blazing sun to Sasha’s morose moon, Emma became known as “the most dangerous woman in America.” Through an attempted prison breakout, multiple bombing plots, and a dramatic deportation from America, these two unrelenting activists insisted on the improbable ideal of a socially just, self-governing utopia, a vision that has shaped movements across the past century, most recently Occupy Wall Street. Sasha and Emma is the culminating work of acclaimed historian of anarchism Paul Avrich. Before his death, Avrich asked his daughter to complete his magnum opus. The resulting collaboration, epic in scope, intimate in detail, examines the possibilities and perils of political faith and protest, through a pair who both terrified and dazzled the world. “A narrative laced with irony details the remarkable reorientation of this pair after they were deported to a Soviet Russia they had lauded as a utopia but soon fled as a monstrous dystopia. A fully human portrait of two tightly linked yet forever fiercely independent spirits.” —Booklist (starred review) “An in-depth look at a lesser-known chapter of American and world history.” —Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Download or read book The Tramp in America written by Tim Cresswell and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2004-06-01 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides the first account of the invention of the tramp as a social type in the United States between the 1870s and the 1930s. Tim Cresswell considers the ways in which the tramp was imagined and described and how, by World War II, it was being reclassified and rendered invisible. He describes the "tramp scare" of the late nineteenth century and explores the assumption that tramps were invariably male and therefore a threat to women. Cresswell also examines tramps as comic figures and looks at the work of prominent American photographers which signaled a sympathetic portrayal of this often-despised group. Perhaps most significantly, The Tramp in America calls into question the common assumption that mobility played a central role in the production of American identity. “This is an effective, and sometimes touching, account of how a social phenomenon was created, classified and reclassified. The quality of the writing, the excellent illustrations and the high production standards give this reasonably-priced hardback a chance of appealing to a general audience . . . an important contribution to American studies, providing new perspectives on the significance of mobility and rootlessness at an important time in the development of the nation. Cresswell successfully illuminates the history of a disadvantaged and marginal group, while providing a lens by which to focus on the thinking and practices of the mainstream culture with which they dealt. As such, this book represents a considerable achievement.”—Cultural Geographies “An important book. Cresswell has made an important contribution to a homelessness literature still lacking a more sophisticated theoretical edge. Clearly written, beautifully illustrated and with a strong argument throughout, the book deserves to be widely read by students and practitioners alike.”—Progress in Human Geography
Download or read book Love Anarchy Emma Goldman written by Candace Falk and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2019-06-27 with total page 550 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: More than an account of Emma Goldman's legendary career as a political activist, this biography offers an intimate look into her tumultuous affair with Chicago activist and red-light-district gynecologist Ben Reitman. As it charts her twin passions for Reitman and for social reform, it provides new insights into a brilliant, complex woman.
Download or read book Atlantic Automobilism written by Gijs Mom and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2014-12-01 with total page 768 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Our continued use of the combustion engine car in the 21st century, despite many rational arguments against it, makes it more and more difficult to imagine that transport has a sustainable future. Offering a sweeping transatlantic perspective, this book explains the current obsession with automobiles by delving deep into the motives of early car users. It provides a synthesis of our knowledge about the emergence and persistence of the car, using a broad range of material including novels, poems, films, and songs to unearth the desires that shaped our present “car society.” Combining social, psychological, and structural explanations, the author concludes that the ability of cars to convey transcendental experience, especially for men, explains our attachment to the vehicle.
Download or read book Rich People s Movements written by Isaac William Martin and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2015-02 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why do protesters sometimes take to the streets to demand lower taxes on the rich? In this urgently relevant study, sociologist Isaac William Martin examines how these protesters used tactics that they learned in movements of the poor and powerless-and sometimes won big.
Download or read book The Tradition of the Chicago School of Sociology written by Luigi Tomasi and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-10-16 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The value of the book lies in its reassessment of the distinctive features of the Chicago School, of its contributions in the theoretical and methodological fields and of its influence on the growth of sociology throughout the world and in America in particular. The book pays particularly close attention to the eclectic nature of the research methods used by the Chicago sociologists as they sought to integrate subjective and objective aspects of human life. It demonstrates that this eclecticism formed an integral part of their theories but also emphasises that empirical observation, too, was important, although not as an end in itself. While, for example, they were working on the concepts of organization, marginality and interaction, they did not consider these as ends in themselves but as additions to the development of a more general theoretical approach. Often in the past, and wrongly, Chicago’s theoretical contribution has been restricted to the urban sector. The book clearly and unequivocally reveals how the tendency to see the Chicago School as a 'theoretical' is the result of misinterpretation and of a failure to realize that, for the sociologists of the period, understanding the social dynamics of the city of Chicago was tantamount to interpreting the central tendencies of modern society itself. The book analyzes how empirical observation was important but not an end in itself. The Chicago School developed a profusion of sociological theories in many areas of inquiry and never opted for any one particular approach. The various essays in the book also make it clear that the School decisively contributed to the development of qualitative and quantitative techniques.
Download or read book Clarence Darrow written by John A. Farrell and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2012-05-01 with total page 594 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Biography The definitive biography of Clarence Darrow, the brilliant, idiosyncratic lawyer who defended John Scopes in the “Monkey Trial” and gave voice to the populist masses at the turn of the twentieth century, thus changing American law forever. Amidst the tumult of the industrial age and the progressive era, Clarence Darrow became America’s greatest defense attorney, successfully championing poor workers, blacks, and social and political outcasts, against big business, fundamentalist religion, Jim Crow, and the US government. His courtroom style—a mixture of passion, improvisation, charm, and tactical genius—won miraculous reprieves for men doomed to hang. In Farrell’s hands, Darrow is a Byronic figure, a renegade whose commitment to liberty led him to heroic courtroom battles and legal trickery alike.
Download or read book Citizen Hobo written by Todd DePastino and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-03-15 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the years following the Civil War, a veritable army of homeless men swept across America's "wageworkers' frontier" and forged a beguiling and bedeviling counterculture known as "hobohemia." Celebrating unfettered masculinity and jealously guarding the American road as the preserve of white manhood, hoboes took command of downtown districts and swaggered onto center stage of the new urban culture. Less obviously, perhaps, they also staked their own claims on the American polity, claims that would in fact transform the very entitlements of American citizenship. In this eye-opening work of American history, Todd DePastino tells the epic story of hobohemia's rise and fall, and crafts a stunning new interpretation of the "American century" in the process. Drawing on sources ranging from diaries, letters, and police reports to movies and memoirs, Citizen Hobo breathes life into the largely forgotten world of the road, but it also, crucially, shows how the hobo army so haunted the American body politic that it prompted the creation of an entirely new social order and political economy. DePastino shows how hoboes—with their reputation as dangers to civilization, sexual savages, and professional idlers—became a cultural and political force, influencing the creation of welfare state measures, the promotion of mass consumption, and the suburbanization of America. Citizen Hobo's sweeping retelling of American nationhood in light of enduring struggles over "home" does more than chart the change from "homelessness" to "houselessness." In its breadth and scope, the book offers nothing less than an essential new context for thinking about Americans' struggles against inequality and alienation.
Download or read book Red Chicago written by Randi Storch and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Realities of the street-level American Communist experience during the worst years of the Depression "Red Chicago" is a social history of American Communism set within the context of Chicago's neighborhoods, industries, and radical traditions. Using local party records, oral histories, union records, party newspapers, and government documents, Randi Storch fills the gap between Leninist principles and the day-to-day activities of Chicago's rank-and-file Communists. Uncovering rich new evidence from Moscow's former party archive, Storch argues that although the American Communist Party was an international organization strongly influenced by the Soviet Union, at the city level it was a more vibrant and flexible organization responsible to local needs and concerns. Thus, while working for a better welfare system, fairer unions, and racial equality, Chicago's Communists created a movement that at times departed from international party leaders' intentions. By focusing on the experience of Chicago's Communists, who included a large working-class, African American, and ethnic population, this study reexamines party members' actions as an integral part of the communities in which they lived and the industries where they worked. "A volume in the series The Working Class in American History, edited by David Brody, Alice Kessler-Harris, David Montgomery, and Sean Wilentz"
Download or read book Chicago Whispers written by St. Sukie de la Croix and published by University of Wisconsin Pres. This book was released on 2012-07-11 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chicago Whispers illuminates a colorful and vibrant record of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered people who lived and loved in Chicago from the city’s beginnings in the 1670s as a fur-trading post to the end of the 1960s. Journalist St. Sukie de la Croix, drawing on years of archival research and personal interviews, reclaims Chicago’s LGBT past that had been forgotten, suppressed, or overlooked. Included here are Jane Addams, the pioneer of American social work; blues legend Ma Rainey, who recorded “Sissy Blues” in Chicago in 1926; commercial artist J. C. Leyendecker, who used his lover as the model for “The Arrow Collar Man” advertisements; and celebrated playwright Lorraine Hansberry, author of A Raisin in the Sun. Here, too, are accounts of vice dens during the Civil War and classy gentlemen’s clubs; the wild and gaudy First Ward Ball that was held annually from 1896 to 1908; gender-crossing performers in cabarets and at carnival sideshows; rights activists like Henry Gerber in the 1920s; authors of lesbian pulp novels and publishers of “physique magazines”; and evidence of thousands of nameless queer Chicagoans who worked as artists and musicians, in the factories, offices, and shops, at theaters and in hotels. Chicago Whispers offers a diverse collection of alternately hip and heart-wrenching accounts that crackle with vitality.
Download or read book Down and Out on the Road written by Kenneth L. Kusmer and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2001-11-29 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Covering the entire period from the colonial era to the late twentieth century, this book is the first scholarly history of the homeless in America. Drawing on sources that include records of charitable organizations, sociological studies, and numerous memoirs of formerly homeless persons, Kusmer demonstrates that the homeless have been a significant presence on the American scene for over two hundred years. He probes the history of homelessness from a variety of angles, showing why people become homeless; how charities and public authorities dealt with this social problem; and the diverse ways in which different class, ethnic, and racial groups perceived and responded to homelessness. Kusmer demonstrates that, despite the common perception of the homeless as a deviant group, they have always had much in common with the average American. Focusing on the millions who suffered downward mobility, Down and Out, On the Road provides a unique view of the evolution of American society and raises disturbing questions about the repeated failure to face and solve the problem of homelessness.
Download or read book Emma Goldman and the Russian Revolution written by Frank Jacob and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2020-11-23 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What impact did Bolshevist rule have on Emma Goldmans’s perception of the Russian Revolutions of 1917 and why did she change her mind, going from defending the Russian Revolution to becoming a crusader against Bolshevism? The Russian Revolution changed the world and determined the history of the 20th century as the French Revolution had determined the history of the 19th century. Left-wing intellectuals around the world greeted the February Revolution with enthusiasm as their hope for a new world and social order and the end of capitalism seemed close. However, the joy did not last long as the ideals of February 1917 were replaced by the realities of October 1917 and Lenin crushed the revolution during the following Civil War. Emma Goldman, a famous Russian-born American anarchist was one of the intellectuals, whose admiration for the revolution turned into frustration about its corruption. Emma Goldman and the Russian Revolution discusses her evolving perception of the revolution between 1917 and the early 1920s. The analysis of such an intellectual transformation process, provides a case study of intellectual and revolutionary history alike, adding a closer reading to the research about the famous American anarchist, Emma Goldman, her transnational life and her role as a revolutionary intellectual.
Download or read book Indispensable Outcasts written by Frank Tobias Higbie and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Often overlooked in the history of Progressive Era labor, the hoboes who rode the rails in search of seasonal work have nevertheless secured a place in the American imagination. The stories of the men who hunted work between city and countryside, men alternately portrayed as either romantic adventurers or degenerate outsiders, have not been easy to find. Nor have these stories found a comfortable home in either rural or labor histories. Indispensable Outcasts weaves together history, anthropology, gender studies, and literary analysis to reposition these workers at the center of Progressive Era debates over class, race, manly responsibility, community, and citizenship. Combining incisive cultural criticism with the empiricism of a more traditional labor history, Frank Tobias Higbie illustrates how these so-called marginal figures were in fact integral to the communities they briefly inhabited and to the cultural conflicts over class, masculinity, and sexuality they embodied. He draws from life histories, the investigations of social reformers, and the organizing materials of the Industrial Workers of the World and presents a complex and compelling portrait of hobo life, from its often violent and dangerous working conditions to its ethic of "transient mutuality" that enabled survival and resistance on the road. More than a study of hobo life, this interdisciplinary book is also a meditation on the possibilities for writing history from the bottom up, as well as a frank discussion of the ways historians' fascination with personal narrative has colored their construction and presentation of history.
Download or read book Forty Years in the Struggle written by Chaim Leib Weinberg and published by Litwin Books. This book was released on 2014-05-14 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Memoir of Chaim Leib Weinberg, prominent member of the late 19th and early 20th century Philadelphia Jewish anarchist community, translated from the original Yiddish"--Provided by publisher.
