Download or read book Union Busting in the Tri State written by George Graham Suggs (Jr.) and published by . This book was released on 1986 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Union Busting in the Tri-State District is an example of labor history at its finest."--THE HISTORIAN.

Download or read book Poor Man s Fortune written by Jarod Roll and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2020-04-08 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: White working-class conservatives have played a decisive role in American history, particularly in their opposition to social justice movements, radical critiques of capitalism, and government help for the poor and sick. While this pattern is largely seen as a post-1960s development, Poor Man's Fortune tells a different story, excavating the long history of white working-class conservatism in the century from the Civil War to World War II. With a close study of metal miners in the Tri-State district of Kansas, Missouri, and Oklahoma, Jarod Roll reveals why successive generations of white, native-born men willingly and repeatedly opposed labor unions and government-led health and safety reforms, even during the New Deal. With painstaking research, Roll shows how the miners' choices reflected a deep-seated, durable belief that hard-working American white men could prosper under capitalism, and exposes the grim costs of this view for these men and their communities, for organized labor, and for political movements seeking a more just and secure society. Roll's story shows how American inequalities are in part the result of a white working-class conservative tradition driven by grassroots assertions of racial, gendered, and national privilege.

Download or read book Hard As the Rock Itself written by David Robertson and published by University Press of Colorado. This book was released on 2011-05-18 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first intensive analysis of sense of place in American mining towns, Hard as the Rock Itself: Place and Identity in the American Mining Town provides rare insight into the struggles and rewards of life in these communities. David Robertson contends that these communities - often characterized in scholarly and literary works as derelict, as sources of debasing moral influence, and as scenes of environmental decay - have a strong and enduring sense of place and have even embraced some of the signs of so-called dereliction. Robertson documents the history of Toluca, Illinois; Cokedale, Colorado; and Picher, Oklahoma, from the mineral discovery phase through mine closure, telling for the first time how these century-old mining towns have survived and how sense of place has played a vital role. Acknowledging the hardships that mining's social, environmental, and economic legacies have created for current residents, Robertson argues that the industry's influences also have contributed to the creation of strong, cohesive communities in which residents have always identified with the severe landscape and challenging, but rewarding way of life. Robertson contends that the tough, unpretentious appearance of mining landscapes mirrors qualities that residents value in themselves, confirming that a strong sense of place in mining regions, as elsewhere, is not necessarily wedded to an attractive aesthetic or even to a thriving economy.

Download or read book Eagle Picher Industries written by Douglas Knerr and published by Ohio State University Press. This book was released on 1992 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This comprehensive history traces the evolution of Eagle-Picher Industries, a manufacturing firm based in Cincinnati, Ohio, for almost 150 years. Focusing on events prior to the company's involvement in toxic tort litigation, which forced it to file bankruptcy, this work examines Eagle-Picher's development as a diversified industrial manufacturer. From a closely held, regional producer of white lead and other paint pigments, Eagle-Picher became an important miner and processor of non-ferrous metals by investing in zinc-lead fields in Missouri, Kansas, and Oklahoma during the early twentieth century. Once ore reserves in these areas were depleted, the company turned to manufacturing industrial goods and pursued an aggressive and unique expansion and diversification program during the post-World War II era. During the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, Eagle-Picher acquired over twenty-five firms, all manufacturers of industrial goods, and assembled a broadly based specialized productive capacity. Eagle-Picher's history illustrates a number of important trends and concepts. First, its experiences in the late nineteenth century provide a valuable look at how smaller firms adapted to the forces of consolidation in the economy. Further, Eagle-Picher's experience as an industrial manufacturer demonstrates the ways in which mid-sized firms grew by focusing on market niches overlooked by larger firms. Finally, Eagle-Picher's approach to acquisition and diversification is unique in today's competitive marketplace. Eagle-Picher's commitment to limited diversification built around historical strengths, its acquisition of successful firms, and its efforts to establish strong lines of communication andeffective controls between the central office and the divisions stand in stark contrast to the efforts of many acquisitive firms during recent mergers.

Download or read book Deadly Dust written by David Rosner and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the Depression, silicosis, an industrial lung disease, emerged as a national social crisis. Experts estimated that hundreds of thousands of workers were at risk of disease, disability, and death by inhaling silica in mines, foundries, and quarries. By the 1950s, however, silicosis was nearly forgotten by the media and health professionals. Asking what makes a health threat a public issue, David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz examine how a culture defines disease and how disease itself is understood at different moments in history. They also consider who should assume responsibility for occupational disease.

Download or read book The CIO 1935 1955 written by Robert H. Zieger and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2000-11-09 with total page 504 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) encompassed the largest sustained surge of worker organization in American history. Robert Zieger charts the rise of this industrial union movement, from the founding of the CIO by John L. Lewis in 1935 to its merger under Walter Reuther with the American Federation of Labor in 1955. Exploring themes of race and gender, Zieger combines the institutional history of the CIO with vivid depictions of working-class life in this critical period. Zieger details the ideological conflicts that racked the CIO even as its leaders strove to establish a labor presence at the heart of the U.S. economic system. Stressing the efforts of industrial unionists such as Sidney Hillman and Philip Murray to forge potent instruments of political action, he assesses the CIO's vital role in shaping the postwar political and international order. Zieger's analysis also contributes to current debates over labor law reform, the collective bargaining system, and the role of organized labor in a changing economy.

Download or read book Farmers Vs Wage Earners written by R. Alton Lee and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2005-01-01 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While predominantly agrarian, Kansas has a surprisingly rich heritage of labor history and played an active role in the major labor strife of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Farmers vs. Wage Earners is a survey of the organized labor movement in the Sunflower State, which reflected in a microcosm the evolution of attitudes toward labor in the United States. ø R. Alton Lee emphasizes the social and political developments of labor in Kansas and what it was like to work in the mines, the oil fields, and the factories that created the modern industrial world. He vividly describes the stories of working people: how they and their families lived and worked, their dreams and aspirations, their reasons for joining a union and how it served their interests, how they fought to achieve their goals through the political process, and how employment changed over the decades in terms of race, gender, and working conditions. ø The general public supported labor after the Civil War, but increasing urbanization and the farmer-dominated legislatures helped quell this sympathy, and new ire was eventually directed at the workingman. By examining the progress of industrial labor in an agrarian state, Lee shows how Kansans, like many Americans, could eagerly accept the federal largesse of the New Deal but at the same time bitterly denounce its philosophy and goals in the wake of the Great Depression.

Download or read book Power at Odds written by Colin John Davis and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the tumultuous era of World War I and the years immediately following, the leadership of the United States had shifted from Wilson to Harding and the mood of the nation from pro-labor to pro-business. Colin Davis introduces readers to the 400,000 railroad shopmen and their working world and to the national government's dynamic influence on labor from 1917 to 1922. Davis's study provides a much-needed synthesis of shifting power relations among labor, capital, and the state, as well as a cogent interpretation of union structural experimentation and failure. It will be of interest to social, political, business, legal, and labor historians.

Download or read book Anaconda written by Laurie Mercier and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mercier depicts the vibrant life of the smelter city at full steam, incorporating the candid, sometimes wry commentary of the locals ("the company furnished three pair of leather gloves . . . and all the arsenic dust] you could eat"). She documents the early history of the town and the distinctive culture of cooperation and activism that residents fostered in the 1930s and 1940s. Ultimately, their solidarity and discontent with the company converged in the successful 1934 strike and sustained five decades of devoted unionism. During the cold war years, Anacondans held to their communal values and to unions in the face of antilabor and anticommunist pressures, embracing an "alternative Americanism" that championed improved living standards for working people, rather than unlimited corporate power, as the best defense against communism. Mercier chronicles the bitter struggle between two rival unions--the anticommunist United Steelworkers of America and the red-tainted International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers--that undercut the town's labor solidarity in the postwar years. She also explores how gender definitions--especially the male breadwinner ideology and the limits placed on women's political, economic, and social roles--shaped the nature and outcome of labor struggles. Mercier carries her investigation through the closing of the smelter in 1980, covering debates over the environment and the community's transformation into a deindustrialized, nonunion town. Underscoring the role of the community in molding working-class consciousness, Anaconda offers important insights about the changing nature of working-class culture and the real potential for collective action under the midday sun of American industrial capitalism.

Download or read book Nonviolent Action written by Ronald M. McCarthy and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-07-04 with total page 752 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This comprehensive guide to research, sources, and theories about nonviolent action as a technique of struggle in social and political conficts discusses the methods and techniques used by groups in various encounters. Although violence and its causes have received a great deal of attention, nonviolent action has not received its due as an international phenomenon with a long history. An introduction that explains the theories and research used in the study provides a practical guide to this essential bibliography of English-language sources. The first part of the book covers case-study materials divided by region and subdivided by country. Within each country, materials are arranged chronologically and topically. The second major part examines the methods and theory of nonviolent action, principled nonviolence, and several closely related areas in social science, such as conflict analysis and social movements. The book is indexed by author and subject.

Download or read book Oil Wheat Wobblies written by Nigel Anthony Sellars and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Industrial Workers of the World, or Wobblies, a radical labor union, played an important role in Oklahoma between the founding of the union in 1905 and its demise in 1930. In Oil, Wheat, & Wobblies, Nigel Anthony Sellars describes IWW efforts to organize migratory harvest hands and oil-field workers in the state and relationships between the union and other radical and labor groups such as the Socialist Party and the American Federation of Labor. Focusing on the emergence of migratory labor and the nature of the work itself in industrializing the region, Sellars provides a social history of labor in the Oklahoma wheat belt and the midcontinent oil fields. Using court cases and legislation, he examines the role of state and federal government in suppressing the union during World War I. Oil, What, & Wobblies concludes with a description of the IWW revival and subsequent decline after the war, suggesting that the decline is attributable more to the union's failure to adapt to postwar technological change, its rigid attachment to outmoded tactics, and its internal policy disputes, than to political repression. In Sellars's view, the failure of the IWW in Oklahoma largely explains the failure of both the IWW and the labor movement in the United States during the twenties.

Download or read book American Studies written by Jack Salzman and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1990-05-25 with total page 1124 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume supplements the acclaimed three volume set published in 1986 and consists of an annotated listing of American Studies monographs published between 1984 and 1988. There are more than 6,000 descriptive entries in a wide range of categories: anthropology and folklore, art and architecture, history, literature, music, political science, popular culture, psychology, religion, science and technology, and sociology.

Download or read book Tar Creek written by Larry G. Johnson and published by Tate Publishing. This book was released on 2009-03 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A small tribe of Indians, the Quapaws, survived civilization. A group of criminals, the likes of Bonnie and Clyde, found refuge. The wealth that poured from the ground created some of the richest Indians in the World. And Mickey Mantle got his start as a lead and zinc miner. All these events, and more, took place in or around a small community known as Picher, Oklahoma. And from the early part of the twentieth century, that community was nearly hidden under millions of tons of chat waste piles. Join author Larry Johnson on an exciting adventure starting with the origin of the Native American tribes, leading up to the horrific environmental hazards and final destruction of this town in the May 2008 tornadoes. Tar Creek effectively spins the true tale of the Quapaw Indians, the world's greatest discovery of lead and zinc, and the making of the oldest and largest environmental Superfund site in America. Organically encompassed in this tale are the first footsteps of the American Indian in the Western Hemisphere, the founding of the United States, and the transition of Indian Territories into statehood. Tar Creek is an hourglass with the discovery of lead and zinc at Picher as the skinny neck through which all of the interconnected acts and events preceding the discovery are slowly moving, resulting in the repercussions ninety years later. You'll be engaged and awed as you learn the real story on the journey to Tar Creek.

Download or read book Labor Conflict in the United States written by Ronald L. Filippelli and published by Garland Publishing. This book was released on 1990 with total page 672 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Covers the period from 1661 to 1989.

Download or read book Workers Health Workers Democracy written by Alan Derickson and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2019-05-15 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The most dangerous work in North America at the turn of the century may have been extracting metal-bearing ore from mountains of hard rock. Beginning in the 1890s miners in the West worked through local unions both to prevent occupational hazards and to assure themselves of adequate health care. Among other projects, they planned, built, and governed more than twenty general hospitals throughout the Western United States and Canada. Workers' Health, Workers' Democracy is an engaging and richly documented account of this first attempt to create a democratically controlled health care system in North America. Focusing on the efforts of local unions, Derickson illuminates the broader history of the Western labor movement, the self-help traditions of rank-and-file workers, and the evolution of health care on the industrial frontier.

Download or read book InsUrgent Media from the Front written by Chris Robé and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2020-11-03 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the 1940s, it was 16 mm film. In the 1980s, it was handheld video cameras. Today, it is cell phones and social media. Activists have always found ways to use the media du jour for quick and widespread distribution. InsUrgent Media from the Front takes a look at activist media practices in the 21st century and sheds light on what it means to enact change using different media of the past and present. Chris Robé and Stephen Charbonneau's edited collection uses the term "insUrgent media" to highlight the ways grassroots media activists challenged and are challenging hegemonic norms like colonialism, patriarchy, imperialism, classism, and heteronormativity. Additionally, the term is used to convey the sense of urgency that defines media activism. Unlike slower traditional media, activist media has historically sacrificed aesthetics for immediacy. Consequently, this "run and gun" method of capturing content has shaped the way activist media looks throughout history. With chapters focused on indigenous resistance, community media, and the use of media as activism throughout US history, InsUrgent Media from the Front emphasizes the wide reach media activism has had over time. Visibility is not enough when it comes to media activism, and the contributors provide examples of how to refocus the field not only to be an activist but to study activism as well.

Download or read book My World is Gone written by George G. Suggs and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Baseball. religion. work. death. and the company store-these figured eminently in the lives of Southern cotton mill workers and their families during the early decades of the twentieth century. In this firsthand account of his native Bladenboro, North Carolina, George G. Suggs, Jr., captures in rich detail the world of a thriving cotton mill town where the company was dominant but workers had forged a strong community. Here the focus is on the workers-their interests, personalities, and values-in their best and in their darker moments. Ultimately we see the many dimensions of working-class culture and taste a way of life that has vanished. Drawing upon childhood memories and his father's recollections, Suggs covers events in Bladenboro during the 1930s and 40s. He describes the nature of cottonmill work, the stresses and strains produced by undesirable working conditions, and the various ways in which workers and their families learned to cope. Many characters emerge from this story-from the kind woman who dispensed the company fiat money to the desperate men who would gamble it away. The book explores key topics such as social rankings, medical care, the company store, and workers' responses to death. Above all, we see how faith found expression on the job and in the surrounding evangelical churches. The workers of Bladenboro are gone, and little remains of the mills, but this work pays tribute to lives well lived under the most challenging circumstances.