Download or read book Philadelphia Workers in a Changing Economy written by Gladys L. Palmer and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2016-11-11 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the story of what has happened to the ways in which Philadelphians make a living. It describes the impact of the two world wars, the depression, and postwar prosperity on the structure and functioning of the labor market. Philadelphia Workers in a Changing Economy places the findings of a unique research program investigating the problems and conditions of a metropolitan labor market in their historical setting. While the book has special interest for individuals and organizations concerned with the economic welfare of Philadelphia and its environs, its significance is more than local. It compares trends in the nation and in other metropolitan centers with those in Philadelphia. In addition the economic development problems of cities in general and the flexibilities and inflexibilities of an urban labor force in adjusting to a changing economy receive considerable attention. The statistical data, methodology, and analysis will be of value to regional economists, labor market analysts, and students of manpower problems in major industrial and occupational groups.
Download or read book The Peoples of Philadelphia written by Allen F. Davis and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 1998-10-29 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although much has been written about elite Philadelphians, only in recent decades have historians paid attention to the Jews and working-class blacks, the immigrant Irish, Italians, and Poles who settled in the city and gave such sections as Moyamensing, Southwark, South Philadelphia, and Kensington their vitality. In this classic of social and ethnic history, the authors draw on census schedules, court records, city directories, and tax records as well as newspaper files and other sources to give a picture of the ways in which these less-privileged groups of Philadelphians lived. What emerges is a picture of Philadelphia radically different from the conventional portrait of a staid old city.
Download or read book Working People of Philadelphia 1800 1850 written by Bruce Laurie and published by . This book was released on 1980 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Looks at the contours of working-class cultures in antebellum Philadelphia.
Download or read book A David Montgomery Reader written by David W. Montgomery and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2024-07-09 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A foundational figure in modern labor history, David Montgomery both redefined and reoriented the field. This collection of Montgomery’s most important published and unpublished articles and essays draws from the historian’s entire five-decade career. Taken together, the writings trace the development of Montgomery’s distinct voice and approach while providing a crucial window into an era that changed the ways scholars and the public understood working people’s place in American history. Three overarching themes and methods emerge from these essays: that class provided a rich reservoir of ideas and strategies for workers to build movements aimed at claiming their democratic rights; that capital endured with the power to manage the contours of economic life and the capacities of the state but that workers repeatedly and creatively mounted challenges to the terms of life and work dictated by capital; and that Montgomery’s method grounded his gritty empiricism and the conceptual richness of his analysis in the intimate social relations of production and of community, neighborhood, and family life.
Download or read book The Working Class and Its Culture written by Neil L. Shumsky and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-10-23 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Volume 5 "THE WORKING CLASS AND ITS CULTURE’ of the American Cities; series. This collection brings together more than 200 scholarly articles pertaining to the history and development of urban life in the United States during the past two centuries. Volume 5 contains articles that are closely related but which concentrate specifically on the changing nature of work in American cities during the past two centuries. While they obviously concern the development of the industrial and post-industrial economies, they also recognize that economic transformations are intimately related to cultural change and that economic and cultural change are inseparable and must be considered together. At the same time, taken as a group, the articles reveal differences in experience between black and white Americans, men and women, and native and foreign-born Americans, necessitating that each of these groups be considered separately. The selections also investigate and illuminate questions about the relationships among these different groups and the kinds of actions they have taken to achieve their goals—political protests, boycotts, strikes, and so on.
Download or read book Claiming the City written by Shelton Stromquist and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2023-02-14 with total page 881 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How workers fought for municipal socialism to make cities around the globe livable and democratic - and what the lessons are for today. For more than a century, municipal socialism has fired the imaginations of workers fighting to make cities livable and democratic. At every turn propertied elites challenged their right to govern. Prominent US labor historian, Shelton Stromquist, offers the first global account of the origins of this new trans-local socialist politics. He explains how and why cities after 1890 became crucibles for municipal socialism. Drawing on the colorful stories of local activists and their social-democratic movements in cities as diverse as Broken Hill, Christchurch, Malmö, Bradford, Stuttgart, Vienna, and Hamilton, OH, the book shows how this new urban politics arose. Long governed by propertied elites, cities in the nineteenth century were transformed by mass migration and industrialization that tore apart their physical and social fabric. Amidst massive strikes and faced with epidemic disease, fouled streets, unsafe water, decrepit housing, and with little economic security and few public amenities, urban workers invented a local politics that promised to democratize cities they might themselves govern and reclaim the wealth they created. This new politics challenged the class power of urban elites as well as the centralizing tendencies of national social-democratic movements. Municipal socialist ideas have continued to inspire activists in their fight for the right of cities to govern themselves.
Download or read book The Emergence of the Middle Class written by Stuart M. Blumin and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1989-09-29 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book traces the emergence of the recongnizable 'middle class' from the 1760-1900.
Download or read book History of Pennsylvania written by Philip S. Klein and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2010-11-01 with total page 651 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Making the Empire Work written by Alison Gilbert Olson and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1992 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Annotation Olson (history, U. of Maryland) argues that, until the eve of the revolution, the British crown could rule its American colonies peacefully with so few administrators because an extensive network of voluntary interest groups, tying the colonies and London, allowed colonists a measure of influence over the central government. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.
Download or read book Wobblies on the Waterfront written by Peter Cole and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2010-10-01 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The rise and fall of America's first truly interracial labor union For almost a decade during the 1910s and 1920s, the Philadelphia waterfront was home to the most durable interracial, multiethnic union seen in the United States prior to the CIO era. For much of its time, Local 8 was majority black, always with a cadre of black leaders. The union also claimed immigrants from Eastern Europe, as well as many Irish Americans, who had a notorious reputation for racism. This important study is the first book-length examination of how Local 8, affiliated with the Industrial Workers of the World, accomplished what no other did at the time. Peter Cole outlines the factors that were instrumental in Local 8's success, both ideological (the IWW's commitment to working-class solidarity) and pragmatic (racial divisions helped solidify employer dominance). He also shows how race was central not only to the rise but also to the decline of Local 8, as increasing racial tensions were manipulated by employers and federal agents bent on the union's destruction.
Download or read book The Private City written by Sam Bass Warner and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 1987-06 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Albert J. Beveridge Award in American History. "Packed with suggestive historical detail."--
Download or read book Freedom From the Market written by Mike Konczal and published by The New Press. This book was released on 2021-02-02 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The progressive economics writer redefines the national conversation about American freedom “Mike Konczal [is] one of our most powerful advocates of financial reform‚ [a] heroic critic of austerity‚ and a huge resource for progressives.”—Paul Krugman Health insurance, student loan debt, retirement security, child care, work-life balance, access to home ownership—these are the issues driving America’s current political debates. And they are all linked, as this brilliant and timely book reveals, by a single question: should we allow the free market to determine our lives? In the tradition of Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine, noted economic commentator Mike Konczal answers this question with a resounding no. Freedom from the Market blends passionate political argument and a bold new take on American history to reveal that, from the earliest days of the republic, Americans have defined freedom as what we keep free from the control of the market. With chapters on the history of the Homestead Act and land ownership, the eight-hour work day and free time, social insurance and Social Security, World War II day cares, Medicare and desegregation, free public colleges, intellectual property, and the public corporation, Konczal shows how citizens have fought to ensure that everyone has access to the conditions that make us free. At a time when millions of Americans—and more and more politicians—are questioning the unregulated free market, Freedom from the Market offers a new narrative, and new intellectual ammunition, for the fight that lies ahead.
Download or read book The Making of Tocqueville s America written by Kevin Butterfield and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2015-11-19 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alexis de Tocqueville famously said that Americans were "forever forming associations" and saw in this evidence of a new democratic sociability--though that seemed to be at odds with the distinctively American drive for individuality. Yet Kevin Butterfield sees these phenomena as tightly related: in joining groups, early Americans recognized not only the rights and responsibilities of citizenship but the efficacy of the law. A group, Butterfield says, isn't merely the people who join it; it's the mechanisms and conventions that allow it to function and, where necessary, to regulate itself and its members. Tocqueville, then, was wrong to see associations as the training grounds of democracy, where people learned to honor one another's voices and perspectives--rather, they were the training grounds for increasingly formal and legalistic relations among people. They were where Americans learned to treat one another impersonally.
Download or read book Labor Visions and State Power written by Victoria C. Hattam and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2014-07-14 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why has labor played a more limited role in national politics in the United States than it has in other advanced industrial societies? Victoria Hattam demonstrates that voluntarism, as American labor's policy was known, was the American Federation of Labor's strategic response to the structure of the American state, particularly to the influence of American courts. The AFL's strategic calculation was not universal, however. This book reveals the competing ideologies and acts of interpretation that produced these variations in state-labor relations. Originally published in 1993. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Download or read book Fortune s Frenzy written by Eilene Lyon and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2023-09-08 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The road to hell is paved with good intentions…and gold dust. When Henry Jenkins’s sawmill business goes bust and his family loses their Indiana farm to foreclosure, he sees gold as the answer to his financial woes. Joining a company of younger men, Jenkins and the other prospective miners sign fraudulent promissory notes to borrow from a ruthless businessman, Allen Makepeace, to reach the gold mines. They sail the risky route via Panama to the mines in 1851. But gold is not so easy to find by then. Making enough to survive and get home will be difficult; repaying Makepeace could be impossible. As Henry Jenkins becomes mired in mining, his wife, Abby, struggles to meet the needs of her large family amidst crop failures, waves of deadly disease, and harassment by Henry’s creditors. When Henry’s sons-in-law follow in his wake, they find themselves on a notorious death ship, stranded in the vast Pacific. Will any of these frantic men make it home to their distressed families? Fortune’s Frenzy reveals the plight of miners who borrowed at extortionate rates to get to California, and explores the dangerous and deadly sea routes to the west coast that killed roughly 10 percent of those who risked the journey. Alternating between the miners’ trials and terrors, and the challenges for the wives, children, and mothers left behind, Fortune’s Frenzy delves into the country’s pressing social, economic, and nationalist issues in the pre-Civil War decades. The theme is age-old, and still relevant: desperate people falling for get-rich-quick schemes. They fail to consider the sacrifices they will have to make and the dismal odds of their success.
Download or read book The Peoples of Philadelphia written by Allen Freeman Davis and published by . This book was released on 1973 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book had its origin in a conference on the history of the peoples of Philadelphia held at Temple University April 1-2, 1971, and sponsored by the Committee for Urban Studies and the Center for the Study of Federalism [Temple University]"
Download or read book America s First Chaplain written by Kevin J. Dellape and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2013-10-25 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: America’s First Chaplain is a biography of the life of Philadelphia’s Jacob Duché, the Anglican minister who offered the most famous prayer and wrote one of the most infamous letters of the American Revolution. For the prayer to open the First Continental Congress, Duché was declared a national hero and named the first chaplain to the newly independent American Congress. For the letter written to George Washington imploring the general to encourage Congress to rescind independence, he was accused of high treason and sent into exile. As a result of this apparently irreconcilable contradiction in the minister’s behavior, many of his contemporaries and most historians have assumed he was weak, that in the moment of crisis – his imprisonment by British authorities during their occupation of Philadelphia - he cut a deal with the British for his own safety. The evidence gathered from the life of Jacob Duché, however, points to a very different conclusion, one that reveals the immense complexity of the American Revolution and the havoc it wreaked on the lives of the people who experienced it. The story of this deeply religious rector of Christ Church and St. Peter’s reveals the human side of the Revolution, a story that includes great accomplishment and great tragedy. It also provides insight into the complicated nature of Pennsylvania’s “democratic” revolution, the unique difficulties faced by Anglican leaders during the revolution, and the weakness of simplistic categorizations such as patriot or loyalist. For more than two centuries two events – a prayer and a letter - have obscured our view of the extraordinary life lying in the background. This biography attempts to reinterpret the prayer and the letter in light of the man behind them and in the process to uncover the real significance of both as well as to gain a glimpse into the complexity and contradictions of the American Revolution.
