Download or read book The 1937 Chicago Steel Strike written by John F. Hogan and published by Arcadia Publishing. This book was released on 2014-01-21 with total page 157 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This in-depth history of the Memorial Day Massacre brings new clarity to the conflicting reports that left too many questions unanswered. A violent period of American labor history reached its bloody apex in 1937 when rattled Chicago police shot, clubbed, and gassed a group of men, women, and children attempting to picket Republic Steel’s South Chicago plant. Ten died and over one hundred were wounded in what became known as the Memorial Day Massacre. A newsreel camera captured about eight minutes of the confrontation, yet local and congressional investigations amazingly reached opposite conclusions about what happened and why. Now Chicago historian John Hogan sifts through the conflicting reports of all those entangled in that fateful day, including union leaders, news reporters, and an undercover National Guard observer revealed after seventy-six years.
Download or read book The Last Great Strike written by Ahmed White and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2016-01-04 with total page 410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In May 1937, seventy thousand workers walked off their jobs at four large steel companies known collectively as “Little Steel.” The strikers sought to make the companies retreat from decades of antiunion repression, abide by the newly enacted federal labor law, and recognize their union. For two months a grinding struggle unfolded, punctuated by bloody clashes in which police, company agents, and National Guardsmen ruthlessly beat and shot unionists. At least sixteen died and hundreds more were injured before the strike ended in failure. The violence and brutality of the Little Steel Strike became legendary. In many ways it was the last great strike in modern America. Traditionally the Little Steel Strike has been understood as a modest setback for steel workers, one that actually confirmed the potency of New Deal reforms and did little to impede the progress of the labor movement. However, The Last Great Strike tells a different story about the conflict and its significance for unions and labor rights. More than any other strike, it laid bare the contradictions of the industrial labor movement, the resilience of corporate power, and the limits of New Deal liberalism at a crucial time in American history.
Download or read book Labor Rights Are Civil Rights written by Zaragosa Vargas and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2007-10-28 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1937, Mexican workers were among the strikers and supporters beaten, arrested, and murdered by Chicago policemen in the now infamous Republic Steel Mill Strike. Using this event as a springboard, Zaragosa Vargas embarks on the first full-scale history of the Mexican-American labor movement in twentieth-century America. Absorbing and meticulously researched, Labor Rights Are Civil Rightspaints a multifaceted portrait of the complexities and contours of the Mexican American struggle for equality from the 1930s to the postwar era. Drawing on extensive archival research, Vargas focuses on the large Mexican American communities in Texas, Colorado, and California. As he explains, the Great Depression heightened the struggles of Spanish speaking blue-collar workers, and employers began to define citizenship to exclude Mexicans from political rights and erect barriers to resistance. Mexican Americans faced hostility and repatriation. The mounting strife resulted in strikes by Mexican fruit and vegetable farmers. This collective action, combined with involvement in the Communist party, led Mexican workers to unionize. Vargas carefully illustrates how union mobilization in agriculture, tobacco, garment, and other industries became an important vehicle for achieving Mexican American labor and civil rights. He details how interracial unionism proved successful in cross-border alliances, in fighting discriminatory hiring practices, in building local unions, in mobilizing against fascism and in fighting brutal racism. No longer willing to accept their inferior status, a rising Mexican American grassroots movement would utilize direct action to achieve equality.
Download or read book Blood On Steel written by Michael Dennis and published by Johns Hopkins University Press+ORM. This book was released on 2014-08-21 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This historical analysis of the 1937 Chicago Steel Strike demonstrates how it revealed systemic oppression and inspired the larger progressive movement. On Memorial Day 1937, thousands of steelworkers and labor rights supporters gathered on the Southeast Side of Chicago to protest Republic Steel. By the end of the day, ten marchers had been mortally wounded and more than one hundred badly injured, victims of a terrifying police riot that came to be known as the Memorial Day Massacre. In Blood on Steel, historian Michael Dennis identifies this tragic landmark in the fight for labor rights as a focal point in the larger movement for American equality during the New Deal. Dennis shows how the riot—captured on film by Paramount newsreels—validated the claims of labor activists and catalyzed public opinion in their favor. Senate hearings about the massacre revealed patterns of anti-union aggression among management, ranging from blacklists to harassment and vigilante violence. The following year, Congress would pass the Fair Labor Standards Act. Dennis’s wide-angle perspective reveals the Memorial Day Massacre as more than another bloody incident in the long story of American labor-management tensions. It was an all-too graphic illustration of the need for a broad-based social democracy movement.
Download or read book Teaching for Black Lives written by Flora Harriman McDonnell and published by . This book was released on 2018-04-13 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Black students' bodies and minds are under attack. We're fighting back. From the north to the south, corporate curriculum lies to our students, conceals pain and injustice, masks racism, and demeans our Black students. But it¿s not only the curriculum that is traumatizing students.
Download or read book Hard Times written by Studs Terkel and published by New Press/ORIM. This book was released on 2011-07-26 with total page 641 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Good War: A masterpiece of modern journalism and “a huge anthem in praise of the American spirit” (Saturday Review). In this “invaluable record” of one of the most dramatic periods in modern American history, Studs Terkel recaptures the Great Depression of the 1930s in all its complexity. Featuring a mosaic of memories from politicians, businessmen, artists, striking workers, and Okies, from those who were just kids to those who remember losing a fortune, Hard Times is not only a gold mine of information but a fascinating interplay of memory and fact, revealing how the 1929 stock market crash and its repercussions radically changed the lives of a generation. The voices that speak from the pages of this unique book are as timeless as the lessons they impart (The New York Times). “Hard Times doesn’t ‘render’ the time of the depression—it is that time, its lingo, mood, its tragic and hilarious stories.” —Arthur Miller “Wonderful! The American memory, the American way, the American voice. It will resurrect your faith in all of us to read this book.” —Newsweek “Open Studs Terkel’s book to almost any page and rich memories spill out . . . Read a page, any page. Then try to stop.” —The National Observer
Download or read book Chicago s Southeast Side written by Rod Sellers and published by Arcadia Publishing. This book was released on 1998-10 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Steel and the steel industry are the backbone of Chicago's southeast side, an often overlooked neighborhood with a rich ethnic heritage. Bolstered by the prosperous steel industry, the community attracted numerous, strong-willed people with a desire to work from distinct cultural backgrounds. In recent years, the vitality of the steel industry has diminished. Chicago's Southeast Side displays many rare and interesting pictures that capture the spirit of the community when the steel industry was a vibrant force. Although annexed in 1889 by the city of Chicago, the community has maintained its own identity through the years. In an attempt to remain connected to their homelands, many immigrants established businesses, churches, and organizations to ease their transition to a new and unfamiliar land. The southeast side had its own schools, shopping districts, and factories. As a result, it became a prosperous, yet separate, enclave within the city of Chicago.
Download or read book A People s History of the United States written by Howard Zinn and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2003-02-04 with total page 764 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since its original landmark publication in 1980, A People's History of the United States has been chronicling American history from the bottom up, throwing out the official version of history taught in schools -- with its emphasis on great men in high places -- to focus on the street, the home, and the, workplace. Known for its lively, clear prose as well as its scholarly research, A People's History is the only volume to tell America's story from the point of view of -- and in the words of -- America's women, factory workers, African-Americans, Native Americans, the working poor, and immigrant laborers. As historian Howard Zinn shows, many of our country's greatest battles -- the fights for a fair wage, an eight-hour workday, child-labor laws, health and safety standards, universal suffrage, women's rights, racial equality -- were carried out at the grassroots level, against bloody resistance. Covering Christopher Columbus's arrival through President Clinton's first term, A People's History of the United States, which was nominated for the American Book Award in 1981, features insightful analysis of the most important events in our history. Revised, updated, and featuring a new after, word by the author, this special twentieth anniversary edition continues Zinn's important contribution to a complete and balanced understanding of American history.
Download or read book Labor s Untold Story written by Richard Owen Boyer and published by . This book was released on 1976 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
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 A History of America in Ten Strikes written by Erik Loomis and published by The New Press. This book was released on 2018-10-02 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recommended by The Nation, the New Republic, Current Affairs, Bustle, In These Times An “entertaining, tough-minded, and strenuously argued” (The Nation) account of ten moments when workers fought to change the balance of power in America “A brilliantly recounted American history through the prism of major labor struggles, with critically important lessons for those who seek a better future for working people and the world.” —Noam Chomsky Powerful and accessible, A History of America in Ten Strikes challenges all of our contemporary assumptions around labor, unions, and American workers. In this brilliant book, labor historian Erik Loomis recounts ten critical workers' strikes in American labor history that everyone needs to know about (and then provides an annotated list of the 150 most important moments in American labor history in the appendix). From the Lowell Mill Girls strike in the 1830s to Justice for Janitors in 1990, these labor uprisings do not just reflect the times in which they occurred, but speak directly to the present moment. For example, we often think that Lincoln ended slavery by proclaiming the slaves emancipated, but Loomis shows that they freed themselves during the Civil War by simply withdrawing their labor. He shows how the hopes and aspirations of a generation were made into demands at a GM plant in Lordstown in 1972. And he takes us to the forests of the Pacific Northwest in the early nineteenth century where the radical organizers known as the Wobblies made their biggest inroads against the power of bosses. But there were also moments when the movement was crushed by corporations and the government; Loomis helps us understand the present perilous condition of American workers and draws lessons from both the victories and defeats of the past. In crystalline narratives, labor historian Erik Loomis lifts the curtain on workers' struggles, giving us a fresh perspective on American history from the boots up. Strikes include: Lowell Mill Girls Strike (Massachusetts, 1830–40) Slaves on Strike (The Confederacy, 1861–65) The Eight-Hour Day Strikes (Chicago, 1886) The Anthracite Strike (Pennsylvania, 1902) The Bread and Roses Strike (Massachusetts, 1912) The Flint Sit-Down Strike (Michigan, 1937) The Oakland General Strike (California, 1946) Lordstown (Ohio, 1972) Air Traffic Controllers (1981) Justice for Janitors (Los Angeles, 1990)
Download or read book Exit Zero written by Christine J. Walley and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2013-01-17 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of CLR James Book Prize from the Working Class Studies Association and 2nd Place for the Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing. In 1980, Christine J. Walley’s world was turned upside down when the steel mill in Southeast Chicago where her father worked abruptly closed. In the ensuing years, ninety thousand other area residents would also lose their jobs in the mills—just one example of the vast scale of deindustrialization occurring across the United States. The disruption of this event propelled Walley into a career as a cultural anthropologist, and now, in Exit Zero, she brings her anthropological perspective home, examining the fate of her family and that of blue-collar America at large. Interweaving personal narratives and family photos with a nuanced assessment of the social impacts of deindustrialization, Exit Zero is one part memoir and one part ethnography— providing a much-needed female and familial perspective on cultures of labor and their decline. Through vivid accounts of her family’s struggles and her own upward mobility, Walley reveals the social landscapes of America’s industrial fallout, navigating complex tensions among class, labor, economy, and environment. Unsatisfied with the notion that her family’s turmoil was inevitable in the ever-forward progress of the United States, she provides a fresh and important counternarrative that gives a new voice to the many Americans whose distress resulting from deindustrialization has too often been ignored. This book is part of a project that also includes a documentary film.
Download or read book The Great Chicago Beer Riot written by John F Hogan and published by Arcadia Publishing. This book was released on 2018-12-03 with total page 124 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An “exhaustive” account of the pivotal incident between “native-born Protestant Chicagoans who founded the city and newer German and Irish immigrants” (Bloomberg). In 1855, when Chicago’s recently elected mayor Levi Boone pushed through a law forbidding the sale of alcohol on Sunday, the city pushed back. To the German community, the move seemed a deliberate provocation from Boone’s stridently anti-immigrant Know-Nothing Party. Beer formed the centerpiece of German Sunday gatherings, and robbing them of it on their only day off was a slap in the face. On April 21, 1855, an armed mob poured across the Clark Street Bridge and advanced on city hall. The Chicago Lager Riot resulted in at least one death, nineteen injuries and sixty arrests. It also led to the creation of a modern police department and the political alliances that helped put Abraham Lincoln in the White House. Authors Judy E. Brady and John F. Hogan explore the riot and its aftermath, from pint glass to bully pulpit.
Download or read book The Age of Acquiescence written by Steve Fraser and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2015-02-17 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A groundbreaking investigation of how and why, from the 18th century to the present day, American resistance to our ruling elites has vanished. From the American Revolution through the Civil Rights movement, Americans have long mobilized against political, social, and economic privilege. Hierarchies based on inheritance, wealth, and political preferment were treated as obnoxious and a threat to democracy. Mass movements envisioned a new world supplanting dog-eat-dog capitalism. But over the last half-century that political will and cultural imagination have vanished. Why? The Age of Acquiescence seeks to solve that mystery. Steve Fraser's account of national transformation brilliantly examines the rise of American capitalism, the visionary attempts to protect the democratic commonwealth, and the great surrender to today's delusional fables of freedom and the politics of fear. Effervescent and razorsharp, The Age of Acquiescence is provocative and fascinating.
Download or read book Labor s New Millions written by Mary Heaton Vorse and published by Legare Street Press. This book was released on 2023-07-18 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A gripping account of the struggles of working-class people in America, Labors New Million is a must-read for anybody interested in the history of the labor movement. Through the personal stories of workers, this book provides an intimate portrayal of the harsh economic realities faced by the American proletariat in the early 20th century. Vorse's work is both a poignant social commentary and a call to action for all those who seek to build a fairer and more equal society. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
Download or read book Chicago Shakedown written by John F. Hogan and published by Arcadia Publishing. This book was released on 2018-07-16 with total page 142 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Ogden Gas Affair represented the biggest political scandal of Chicago's first sixty years. Mayor John P. Hopkins and Democratic Party boss Roger Sullivan conspired with ten other insiders to form a dummy corporation to blackmail Peoples Gas Company. The scam poured money into the coffers of beneficiaries who were never prosecuted, including the governor of Illinois, John P. Altgeld. As their lengthy swindle ran its course, Hopkins and Sullivan rubbed elbows with the most notorious grafters of the robber baron era, including Charles Yerkes and "Big Bill" Thompson. Author John Hogan follows the money in a scheme that became a template for the enrichment of the connected at the expense of the citizenry.
Download or read book Landscapes of Hope written by Brian McCammack and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2017-10-16 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Frederick Jackson Turner Award Winner of the George Perkins Marsh Prize Winner of the John Brinckerhoff Jackson Book Prize “A major work of history that brings together African-American history and environmental studies in exciting ways.” —Davarian L. Baldwin, Journal of Interdisciplinary History Between 1915 and 1940, hundreds of thousands of African Americans left the rural South to begin new lives in the urban North. In Chicago, the black population quintupled to more than 275,000. Most historians map the integration of southern and northern black culture by looking at labor, politics, and popular culture. An award-winning environmental historian, Brian McCammack charts a different course, considering instead how black Chicagoans forged material and imaginative connections to nature. The first major history to frame the Great Migration as an environmental experience, Landscapes of Hope takes us to Chicago’s parks and beaches as well as to the youth camps, vacation resorts, farms, and forests of the rural Midwest. Situated at the intersection of race and place in American history, it traces the contours of a black environmental consciousness that runs throughout the African American experience. “Uncovers the untold history of African Americans’ migration to Chicago as they constructed both material and immaterial connections to nature.” —Teona Williams, Black Perspectives “A beautifully written, smart, painstakingly researched account that adds nuance to the growing field of African American environmental history.” —Colin Fisher, American Historical Review “If in the South nature was associated with labor, for the inhabitants of the crowded tenements in Chicago, nature increasingly became a source of leisure.” —Reinier de Graaf, New York Review of Books
