Download or read book John L Lewis written by Melvyn Dubofsky and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 1986 with total page 442 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John L. Lewis (1880-1969), who ruled the United Mine Workers for four decades beginning in 1919, defied presidents, challenged Congress, and kept American political life in an uproar. Drawing upon previously untapped resources in the UMW archives and upon oral histories by major figures of the 1930s and 1940s, the authors have created a remarkable portrait of this 'self-made man' and his times. "This well-illustrated, engagingly-written volume deserves a prominent place on the bookshelf of anyone interested in the history of American labor in the twentieth century." -- Labor History

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 1997-02-01 with total page 508 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Robert Zieger charts the rise of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) from its founding in 1935 to its merger with the American Federation of Labor in 1955. The book combines the institutional history of the CIO with depictions of working-class life in this critical period.

Download or read book Run written by John Lewis and published by Abrams. This book was released on 2021-08-03 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: RUN, the Eisner Award-Winner for Best Graphic Memoir, is one of the most heralded books of the year including being named a: New York Times Top 5 YA Books of the Year · Top 10 Great Graphic Novels for Teens (Young Adult Library Services Association) · Washington Post Best Books of the Year · Variety Best Books of the Year · School Library Journal Best Books of the Year · Kirkus Reviews Best Books of the Year · Amazon Best History Book of 2021 • Top Ten Title of the Year (In the Margins Book Award) · In the Margins Book Award for Nonfiction winner · Top Ten Graphic Novels for Adults (American Library Association) · Best Books for Young Readers (U of Penn Graduate School of Education) · Books All Young Georgians Should Read (Georgia Center for the Book) First you march, then you run. From the #1 bestselling, award–winning team behind March comes the first book in their new, groundbreaking graphic novel series, Run: Book One. “Run recounts the lost history of what too often follows dramatic change—the pushback of those who refuse it and the resistance of those who believe change has not gone far enough. John Lewis’s story has always been a complicated narrative of bravery, loss, and redemption, and Run gives vivid, energetic voice to a chapter of transformation in his young, already extraordinary life.” –Stacey Abrams “In sharing my story, it is my hope that a new generation will be inspired by Run to actively participate in the democratic process and help build a more perfect Union here in America.” –Congressman John Lewis The sequel to the #1 New York Times bestselling graphic novel series March—the continuation of the life story of John Lewis and the struggles seen across the United States after the Selma voting rights campaign. To John Lewis, the civil rights movement came to an end with the signing of the Voting Rights Act in 1965. But that was after more than five years as one of the preeminent figures of the movement, leading sit–in protests and fighting segregation on interstate busways as an original Freedom Rider. It was after becoming chairman of SNCC (the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) and being the youngest speaker at the March on Washington. It was after helping organize the Mississippi Freedom Summer and the ensuing delegate challenge at the 1964 Democratic National Convention. And after coleading the march from Selma to Montgomery on what became known as “Bloody Sunday.” All too often, the depiction of history ends with a great victory. But John Lewis knew that victories are just the beginning. In Run: Book One, John Lewis and longtime collaborator Andrew Aydin reteam with Nate Powell—the award–winning illustrator of the March trilogy—and are joined by L. Fury—making an astonishing graphic novel debut—to tell this often overlooked chapter of civil rights history.

Download or read book From Harvard to the Ranks of Labor written by Robert Bussel and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2010-11-01 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the first half of the twentieth century, many young intellectuals and reformers sympathized with the aspirations of working people and supported the struggles of the labor movement. Powers Hapgood (1899&–1949) was one of the most colorful and recognizable symbols of this crucial historical relationship. A Harvard graduate and the scion of a famous Progressive-Era family, Hapgood chose to devote his life to the working class. His fascinating political career, marked by a staunch commitment to workers' rights and civil liberties, also included important roles in the Socialist Party and the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). Robert Bussel's book is the first full-length biography of this prominent American Socialist, labor organizer, and social crusader. Hapgood participated in some of the most stirring historical events of his time&—an epic coal miners' strike in Western Pennsylvania, an insurgent attempt to oust John L. Lewis as president of the United Mine Workers of America, the defense of Niccolo Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, and the electrifying victories of sit-down strikers in Akron, Ohio, and Flint, Michigan. In the latter stages of his career, he took unpopular stands on issues of racial justice, civil liberties, and union democracy that foreshadowed the fault lines along which the post&–World War II labor movement would founder. Recording and reflecting upon these experiences in journals he kept throughout his life, Hapgood left behind an unusually rich chronicle of the American working class, the labor movement, and the practice of radical politics. Hapgood's career illustrates important developments in the evolution of liberalism and radicalism, the industrial union movement, and the relationship between the middle and working classes in twentieth-century America. At a time when the American labor movement is attempting to recruit young people, forge a rapprochement with liberals, and reclaim its role as a voice for American workers, the appearance of a Hapgood biography is timely.

Download or read book His Truth Is Marching On written by Jon Meacham and published by Random House. This book was released on 2020-08-25 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • An intimate and revealing portrait of civil rights icon and longtime U.S. congressman John Lewis, linking his life to the painful quest for justice in America from the 1950s to the present—from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Soul of America NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST AND COSMOPOLITAN John Lewis, who at age twenty-five marched in Selma, Alabama, and was beaten on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, was a visionary and a man of faith. Drawing on decades of wide-ranging interviews with Lewis, Jon Meacham writes of how this great-grandson of a slave and son of an Alabama tenant farmer was inspired by the Bible and his teachers in nonviolence, Reverend James Lawson and Martin Luther King, Jr., to put his life on the line in the service of what Abraham Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature.” From an early age, Lewis learned that nonviolence was not only a tactic but a philosophy, a biblical imperative, and a transforming reality. At the age of four, Lewis, ambitious to become a minister, practiced by preaching to his family’s chickens. When his mother cooked one of the chickens, the boy refused to eat it—his first act, he wryly recalled, of nonviolent protest. Integral to Lewis’s commitment to bettering the nation was his faith in humanity and in God—and an unshakable belief in the power of hope. Meacham calls Lewis “as important to the founding of a modern and multiethnic twentieth- and twenty-first-century America as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison and Samuel Adams were to the initial creation of the Republic itself in the eighteenth century.” A believer in the injunction that one should love one's neighbor as oneself, Lewis was arguably a saint in our time, risking limb and life to bear witness for the powerless in the face of the powerful. In many ways he brought a still-evolving nation closer to realizing its ideals, and his story offers inspiration and illumination for Americans today who are working for social and political change.

Download or read book The State and Labor in Modern America written by Melvyn Dubofsky and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2000-11-09 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this important new book, Melvyn Dubofsky traces the relationship between the American labor movement and the federal government from the 1870s until the present. His is the only book to focus specifically on the 'labor question' as a lens through which to view more clearly the basic political, economic, and social forces that have divided citizens throughout the industrial era. Many scholars contend that the state has acted to suppress trade union autonomy and democracy, as well as rank-and-file militancy, in the interest of social stability and conclude that the law has rendered unions the servants of capital and the state. In contrast, Dubofsky argues that the relationship between the state and labor is far more complex and that workers and their unions have gained from positive state intervention at particular junctures in American history. He focuses on six such periods when, in varying combinations, popular politics, administrative policy formation, and union influence on the legislative and executive branches operated to promote stability by furthering the interests of workers and their organizations.

Download or read book Labor s Home Front written by Andrew E. Kersten and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2006-10 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the oldest, strongest, and largest labor organizations in the U.S., the American Federation of Labor (AFL) had 4 million members in over 20,000 union locals during World War II. The AFL played a key role in wartime production and was a major actor in the contentious relationship between the state, organized labor, and the working class in the 1940s. The war years are pivotal in the history of American labor, but books on the AFL’s experiences are scant, with far more on the radical Congress of Industrial Unions (CIO). Andrew E. Kersten closes this gap with Labor’s Home Front, challenging us to reconsider the AFL and its influence on twentieth-century history. Kersten details the union's contributions to wartime labor relations, its opposition to the open shop movement, divided support for fair employment and equity for women and African American workers, its constant battles with the CIO, and its significant efforts to reshape American society, economics, and politics after the war. Throughout, Kersten frames his narrative with an original, central theme: that despite its conservative nature, the AFL was dramatically transformed during World War II, becoming a more powerful progressive force that pushed for liberal change.

Download or read book Organizing the Unemployed written by James J. Lorence and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 1996-07-03 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the organization of the unemployed during the Great Depression and demonstrates the linkage between their mobilization and automobile-industry organization.

Download or read book The Gospel of the Working Class written by Erik S. Gellman and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2011-07-15 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this exceptional dual biography and cultural history, Erik S. Gellman and Jarod Roll trace the influence of two southern activist preachers, one black and one white, who used their ministry to organize the working class in the 1930s and 1940s across lines of gender, race, and geography. Owen Whitfield and Claude Williams, along with their wives Zella Whitfield and Joyce Williams, drew on their bedrock religious beliefs to stir ordinary men and women to demand social and economic justice in the eras of the Great Depression, New Deal, and Second World War. Williams and Whitfield preached a working-class gospel rooted in the American creed that hard, productive work entitled people to a decent standard of living. Gellman and Roll detail how the two preachers galvanized thousands of farm and industrial workers for the Southern Tenant Farmers Union and the Congress of Industrial Organizations. They also link the activism of the 1930s and 1940s to that of the 1960s and emphasize the central role of the ministers' wives, with whom they established the People's Institute for Applied Religion. This detailed narrative illuminates a cast of characters who became the two couples' closest allies in coordinating a complex network of activists that transcended Jim Crow racial divisions, blurring conventional categories and boundaries to help black and white workers make better lives. In chronicling the shifting contexts of the actions of Whitfield and Williams, The Gospel of the Working Class situates Christian theology within the struggles of some of America's most downtrodden workers, transforming the dominant narratives of the era and offering a fresh view of the promise and instability of religion and civil rights unionism.

Download or read book Pursuing Justice written by Gilbert J. Gall and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 1999-02-19 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As the nation's most prominent labor lawyer during a period of ascending labor power, Lee Pressman served as General Counsel of the Congress of Industrial Organizations from 1933 to 1948. Working among the movers and shapers of American politics, he was also one of the most highly-placed, though covert, adherents of communism in public life during the New Deal–Fair Deal years. This book chronicles Pressman's fascinating public life and examines his contributions to the rebirth of the American labor movement, to the development of U.S. labor law, and to the history of the New Deal–Fair Deal era. Pressman served as John L. Lewis's legal strategist during the CIO's successful campaign to unionize the mass production industries in the United States in the 1930s. Performing a similar role for Philip Murray, Lewis's successor, Pressman guided the new labor federation through the perils of wartime labor policy and the turbulent post-war economic reconversion. After he left the CIO in 1948 to support the independent Progressive Party campaign of Henry Wallace, he found his public career dissipating as he became embroiled in the Alger Hiss case and the rising anticommunist tide of the early Cold War years.

Download or read book Across That Bridge written by John Lewis and published by Legacy Lit. This book was released on 2012-05-15 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From celebrated Congressman John Lewis comes an eyewitness account of history from a key member of the Civil Rights Movement and confidant to Martin Luther King Jr. In turbulent times Americans look to the Civil Rights Movement as the apotheosis of political expression. As we confront a startling rise in racism and hate speech and remain a culture scarred by social inequality, there's no better time to revisit the lessons of the '60s and no better leader to learn from than the late Representative John Lewis. In the final book published before his passing, Across That Bridge, Congressman John Lewis draws from his experience as a prominent leader of the Civil Rights Movement to offer timeless wisdom, poignant recollections, and powerful principles for anyone interested in challenging injustices and inspiring real change toward a freer, more peaceful society. The Civil Rights Movement gave rise to the protest culture we know today, and the experiences of leaders like Congressman Lewis, a close confidant to Martin Luther King, Jr., have never been more relevant. Despite more than forty arrests, physical attacks, and serious injuries, John Lewis remained a devoted advocate of the discipline and philosophy of nonviolence. Now, in an era in which the protest culture he helped forge has resurfaced as a force for change, Lewis' insights have never been more relevant. In this heartfelt book, Lewis explores the contributions that each generation must make to achieve change. Now featuring an updated introduction from the author addressing the Trump administration, Across that Bridge offers a strong and moral voice to guide our nation through an era of great uncertainty. Winner of the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work/Biography.

Download or read book Walking with the Wind written by John Lewis and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2015-02-10 with total page 544 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Forty years ago, a teenaged boy stepped off a cotton farm in Alabama and into the epicenter of the struggle for civil rights in America, where he has remained to this day, committed still to the nonviolent ideals of his mentor Martin Luther King and the movement they both served. of photos.

Download or read book The Samuel Gompers Papers written by Samuel Gompers and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 1986 with total page 630 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With almost forty years' experience as a labor leader by 1909, Samuel Gompers had learned the value of practical achievements. Shorter hours, higher wages, safer and more sanitary workplaces, and a voice in establishing working conditions were the hallmarks of trade unionism in the Progressive Era, and these hard-won, incremental gains had significantly improved working-class lives. While these were not all he hoped to achieve, they represented, Gompers believed, essential victories in a bitter class struggle that was far from over. This installment of the multivolume documentary history of the nation's premier labor leader covers a period marked by industrial tragedies--such as the 1909 Cherry Hill mine disaster and the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist fire--and industrial violence, including the 1910 bombing of the Los Angeles Times building. These years were punctuated by hard-fought strikes and judicial proceedings directed against trade unionists, most notably the Danbury Hatters' and Buck's Stove cases and the prosecution of the McNamaras. For Gompers, these were demanding years that taxed his health and energy but ultimately strengthened his resolve as he became a crucial player in the AFL's efforts to establish collective bargaining as the basis of industrial democracy.

Download or read book Blood Runs Coal The Yablonski Murders and the Battle for the United Mine Workers of America written by Mark A. Bradley and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2020-10-13 with total page 455 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A vivid account of “one of the most shocking episodes in organized labor’s blood-soaked history” (Steve Halvonik, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette). In the early hours of New Year’s Eve 1969, in the small soft coal mining borough of Clarksville, Pennsylvania, longtime trade union insider Joseph “Jock” Yablonski and his wife and daughter were brutally murdered in their old stone farmhouse. Behind the assassination was the corrupt president of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), Tony Boyle, who had long embezzled UMWA funds, silenced intra-union dissent, and served the interests of Big Coal companies—and would do anything to maintain power. The most infamous crimes in the history of American labor unions, the Yablonski murders catalyzed the first successful rank-and-file takeover of a major labor union in modern US history. Blood Runs Coal is an extraordinary portrait of one of the nation’s major unions on the brink of historical change.

Download or read book The Face of Decline written by Thomas L. Dublin and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2016-11-15 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The anthracite coal region of Pennsylvania once prospered. Today, very little mining or industry remains, although residents have made valiant efforts to restore the fabric of their communities. In The Face of Decline, the noted historians Thomas Dublin and Walter Licht offer a sweeping history of this area over the course of the twentieth century. Combining business, labor, social, political, and environmental history, Dublin and Licht delve into coal communities to explore grassroots ethnic life and labor activism, economic revitalization, and the varied impact of economic decline across generations of mining families. The Face of Decline also features the responses to economic crisis of organized capital and labor, local business elites, redevelopment agencies, and state and federal governments. Dublin and Licht draw on a remarkable range of sources: oral histories and survey questionnaires; documentary photographs; the records of coal companies, local governments, and industrial development corporations; federal censuses; and community newspapers. The authors examine the impact of enduring economic decline across a wide region but focus especially on a small group of mining communities in the region's Panther Valley, from Jim Thorpe through Lansford to Tamaqua. The authors also place the anthracite region within a broader conceptual framework, comparing anthracite's decline to parallel developments in European coal basins and Appalachia and to deindustrialization in the United States more generally.

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 Red Seas written by Gerald Horne and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2009-09-01 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the heyday of the U.S. and international labor movements in the 1930s and 1940s, Ferdinand Smith, the Jamaican-born co-founder and second-in-command of the National Maritime Union (NMU), stands out as one of the most—if not the most—powerful black labor leaders in the United States. Smith’s active membership in the Communist Party, however, coupled with his bold labor radicalism and shaky immigration status, brought him under continual surveillance by U.S. authorities, especially during the Red Scare in the 1950s. Smith was eventually deported to his homeland of Jamaica, where he continued his radical labor and political organizing until his death in 1961. Gerald Horne draws on Smith’s life to make insightful connections between labor radicalism and the Civil Rights Movement—demonstrating that the gains of the latter were propelled by the former and undermined by anticommunism. Moreover, Red Seas uncovers the little-known experiences of black sailors and their contribution to the struggle for labor and civil rights, the history of the Communist Party and its black members, and the significant dimensions of Jamaican labor and political radicalism.