Book Description
Between World War I and World War II, African Americans' quest for civil rights took on a more aggressive character as a new group of black activists challenged the politics of civility traditionally embraced by old-guard leaders in favor of a more forceful protest strategy. Beth Tompkins Bates traces the rise of this new protest politics--which was grounded in making demands and backing them up with collective action--by focusing on the struggle of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP) to form a union in Chicago, headquarters of the Pullman Company.
Bates shows how the BSCP overcame initial opposition from most of Chicago's black leaders by linking its union message with the broader social movement for racial equality. As members of BSCP protest networks mobilized the black community around the quest for manhood rights and economic freedom, they broke down resistance to organized labor even as they expanded the boundaries of citizenship to include equal economic opportunity. By the mid-1930s, BSCP protest networks gained platforms at the national level, fusing Brotherhood activities first with those of the National Negro Congress and later with the March on Washington Movement. Lessons learned during this era guided the next generation of activists, who carried the black freedom struggle forward after World War II.
Book Description
Hearing the news from South America at the turn of the millennium can be like traveling in time: here are the trials of Pinochet, the searches for "the disappeared" in Argentina, the investigation of the death of former president Goulart in Brazil, the Peace Commission in Uruguay, the Archive of Terror in Paraguay, a Truth Commission in Peru. As societies struggle to come to terms with the past and with the vexing questions posed by ineradicable memories, this wise book offers guidance.
Combining a concrete sense of present urgency and a theoretical understanding of social, political, and historical realities, State Repression and the Labors of Memory fashions tools for thinking about and analyzing the presences, silences, and meanings of the past. With unflappable good judgment and fairness, Elizabeth Jelin clarifies the often muddled debates about the nature of memory, the politics of struggles over memories of historical injustice, the relation of historiography to memory, the issue of truth in testimony and traumatic remembrance, the role of women in Latin American attempts to cope with the legacies of military dictatorships, and problems of second-generation memory and its transmission and appropriation.
Jelin's work engages European and North American theory in its exploration of the various ways in which conflicts over memory shape individual and collective identities, as well as social and political cleavages. In doing so, her book exposes the enduring consequences of repression for social processes in Latin America, and at the same time enriches our general understanding of the fundamentally conflicted and contingent nature of memory.
Elizabeth Jelin is senior researcher for the National Council of Scientific Research, Argentina, and academic director of the Center for the Study of Memory in Buenos Aires.
Book Description
American feminism has always been about more than the struggle for individual rights and equal treatment with men. There's also a vital and continuing tradition of women's reform that sought social as well as individual rights and argued for the dismantling of the masculine standard. In this much anticipated book, Dorothy Sue Cobble retrieves the forgotten feminism of the previous generations of working women, illuminating the ideas that inspired them and the reforms they secured from employers and the state. This socially and ethnically diverse movement for change emerged first from union halls and factory floors and spread to the "pink collar" domain of telephone operators, secretaries, and airline hostesses. From the 1930s to the 1980s, these women pursued answers to problems that are increasingly pressing today: how to balance work and family and how to address the growing economic inequalities that confront us. The Other Women's Movement traces their impact from the 1940s into the feminist movement of the present.
The labor reformers whose stories are told in The Other Women's Movement wanted equality and "special benefits," and they did not see the two as incompatible. They argued that gender differences must be accommodated and that "equality" could not always be achieved by applying an identical standard of treatment to men and women. The reform agenda they championed--an end to unfair sex discrimination, just compensation for their waged labor, and the right to care for their families and communities--launched a revolution in employment practices that carries on today.
Unique in its range and perspective, this is the first book to link the continuous tradition of social feminism to the leadership of labor women within that movement.
Customer Reviews:
Superb and Genius.......2003-12-15
A brilliant novel that sets precedents.
Book Description
To say that technology is male comes as no surprise, but the claim that its history is a short one strikes a new note. Making Technology Masculine: Men, Women, and Modern Machines in America, 1870-1945 maps the historical process through which men laid claims to technology as their exclusive terrain. It also explores how women contested this ascendancy of the male discourse and engineered alternative plots. From the moral gymnasium of the shop floor to the staging grounds of World's Fairs, engineers, inventors, social scientists, activists, and novelists emplotted and questioned technology as our modern male myth. Oldenziel recounts the history of technology - both as intellectual construct and material practice - by analyzing these struggles. Drawing on a broad range of sources, she explains why male machines rather than female fabrics have become the modern markers of technology. She shows how technology developed as a narrative production of modern manliness, allowing women little room for negotiation
Customer Reviews:
How and Why Do We Think of "Technology" as "Masculine"?.......2000-07-24
Highly recommended accessibly-written feminist text contributes to history of technology studies and to feminist science studies scholarship.
Oldenziel presents a hundred-year geneaology of our modern idea of "technology" in the US during the 19th-20th centuries, arguing that its definition was explicitly linked to modernist and white male subjectivity and masculine cultural production, while both women's work and the work of racial others was disqualified as non-technological.
Relying on archival research, discourse analysis and feminist theory, Oldenziel examines engineering's creation of a "cultural infrastructure" of myths, metaphors and images which effectively promoted a "male mystique" about men's affinity with machines and computer technologies, as part of the erection of a "a modern male and western prowess." She shows how this discursive formation depended on a corresponding invention of female "technophobia."
To ask, "why are so few women figured in engineering?" is to pose the wrong question according to Oldenziel, since it is biased by the conventional defintion of technology as inherently masculine. Instead we should inquire as to *how* the illusion of the invisibility (and inadequacy) of the labor of women and all non-white subjects was achieved in the official history of technology. Thus Olednziel investigates the legitimation strategies and methods of systemic exclusion according to which only certain inventions/products were considered "technology" and only certain subjects'labor was recognized as "inventive genius" and authorized as "engineering."
This text is a history of engineering, an example of feminist cultural studies and of gender & masculinity studies, and will be of interest to anyone teaching a course on gender + technology. (suitable for undergraduates) I read it for pleasure and found it truly informative, engaging, and inspiring scholarship.
Technology as a modern male myth.......1999-11-05
This is a pioneering cultural study of the relations between gender and technology. Why do we think of engineers as stereotypically male and of technology as part of the masculine realm? Ruth Oldenziel has cleverly utilized many kinds of sources - including an astonishing amount of information about American women engineers - and has applied insights from cultural and feminist studies in order to create this fascinating answer to those two questions.
Book Description
Between 1802 and 1902, over 2000 Irish emigrants, mainly Catholics from Ulster, relocated to northern Delaware, where they found steady employment in E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company's black powder yards. Explosives work was dangerous, but the du Ponts, perhaps best described as sincere paternalists, provided a host of benefits, including assisted migration, free or low-cost housing, interest-bearing savings accounts, and widows' pensions. As a result, the Irish remained loyal to their employers, convinced by their everyday experiences that their interests and the du Ponts' were one and the same.
These generally peaceable labor relations underscore Mulrooney's innovative exploration of cultural identity. Employing a wide array of sources, she turns away from worksite and instead turns to the domestic sphere as, "broadly defined to include everything from labor relations, emigration patterns, religious beliefs, and gender roles to attitudes about housing, consumer goods, yards, and foodways." Her research reveals that powder mill families asserted their distinctive ethno-religious heritage at the same time as they embraced what U.S. capitalism had to offer.
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Harry, Tom, and Father Rice: Accusation and Betrayal in America's Cold War
John Hoerr
Manufacturer: University of Pittsburgh Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
 Mid Atlantic
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1945 - Present
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ASIN: 0822942658 |
Book Description
John Hoerr tells the story of three men—his uncle, Congressman Harry Davenport, union leader Tom Quinn, and Father Charles Owen Rice—whose lives became intertwined during the anti-Communist witch hunts of the McCarthy Era. The story helps illuminate one of the more repressive periods in American history, when thousands of Americans guilty only of enlisting in leftist causes were caught up in dragnets cast by overzealous Communist hunters on behalf of the House Un-American Activities Committee and other bodies. Much has been written about well-known cultural figures (the Hollywood Ten), and prominent writers (Arthur Miller and Lillian Hellman) who contended with HUAC. Hoerr tells of mostly ordinary Americans who were largely unknown at the time, but whose stories are nonetheless remarkable.
Writing from personal experience with the title characters, as well as archival research, Hoerr recreates the events of the 1949 HUAC hearings, where rigged testimony by a few workers cast suspicion on their union brothers. The results would echo through the years, causing people to lose jobs, marriages, and self-respect. Hoerr traces the paths followed by Harry, Tom, and Father Rice and relates their individual experiences to the great conflict between anti-Communist and Communist forces in the American labor movement, leading to the eventual demise of the CIO (Congress of Industrial Organizations).
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- A Revisionist look at the Tripartite Relationship
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The State and Labor in Modern America
Melvyn Dubofsky
Manufacturer: The University of North Carolina Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
Labor & Industrial Relations
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Similar Items:
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American Workers, American Unions: The Twentieth Century (The American Moment)
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The CIO, 1935-1955
ASIN: 0807844365 |
Book Description
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.
Customer Reviews:
A Revisionist look at the Tripartite Relationship.......1999-12-30
In a revisionist look at labor history in the 20th century, Melvyn Dubofsky counters the typical claim that government has played a repressive role in government-union-capital relationships. His argument, not accepted by many labor scholars, is that labor benefitted in the long-run through the states intervention -- atempting to diffuse the potential revolutionary zeal of the masses by appeasing them with small gains.
Dubofsky's methodology launches a liberal attack on Marxist thinkers and activists by challenging the view that government is a tool of capital to hold workers in check. His work points out that unions gained when the people organized and threatened militantcy. Government sought to appease labor through putting pressure on capital. However, when labor crossed the line actually becoming militant and acting out against the states authority, government sided with capital -- an action more in line with providing the economic stability everyone needs.
Labor history in a raw sense is both shocking and appalling. His account of labor history is packed with detail, and historical accounts which sometimes get in the way of his thesis.
Book Description
While never one of the biggest unions in the United States, the Akron, Ohio-based labor organization, the United Rubber Workers (URW), wielded power for decades that seemed far disproportionate to the union's size. To tell the story of the URW is to tell a saga of conflict—internal and external. If the Rubber Workers were not battling a tire or rubber company at the bargaining table or on the picket line, then they were fighting within their ranks. Throughout the URW's history, its members operated a democratic union where the rank and file always made sure their leaders knew who really was in charge. The membership expected a lot from their officers, and if they were less than satisfied, then the leader would hear about it (and sometimes lose his job because of it). When the URW merged with the larger United Steelworkers of America (USWA) union in 1995, it was clear the URW's history needed to be chronicled soon.
Once and Future Union traces the history of the URW from its controversial beginning to the present incarnation of the union, if not the United Rubber Workers in name, then at least as the United Rubber Workers in spirit. This is the story of the members who lived through the battles and the conventions, the strikes and the organizational campaigns. It is these memories that give the URW's history the life and dimension it so deserved. Just as the union was theirs for nearly six decades, so too this story belongs to them.
Customer Reviews:
An outstanding history of a labor union.......2002-09-05
This is a highly detailed, factual yet lively book on the United Rubber Workers union. The author, through many, many interviews and extensive research, has fashioned a book that tells the story of a truly American institution's birth, growth, heyday, decline and recovery when it merged into a larger union.
This book is useful to anyone who is interested in the American labor movement. It should be a must read for economics and American history classes.
Book Description
Crippled Justice, the first comprehensive intellectual history of disability policy in the workplace from World War II to the present, explains why American employers and judges, despite the Americans with Disabilities Act, have been so resistant to accommodating the disabled in the workplace. Ruth O'Brien traces the origins of this resistance to the postwar disability policies inspired by physicians and psychoanalysts that were based on the notion that disabled people should accommodate society rather than having society accommodate them.
O'Brien shows how the remnants of postwar cultural values bogged down the rights-oriented policy in the 1970s and how they continue to permeate judicial interpretations of provisions under the Americans with Disabilities Act. In effect, O'Brien argues, these decisions have created a lose/lose situation for the very people the act was meant to protect. Covering developments up to the present, Crippled Justice is an eye-opening story of government officials and influential experts, and how our legislative and judicial institutions have responded to them.
Average customer rating:
- Examines labor activists both famous and obscure
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The Human Tradition in American Labor History (Human Tradition in America)
Eric Arnesen
Manufacturer: SR Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
General
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ASIN: 0842029869 |
Book Description
The Human Tradition in American Labor History is a comprehensive exploration of the American working class from the colonial period to the present. In marked contrast to most academic treatments of American labor, this book presents history through
Customer Reviews:
Examines labor activists both famous and obscure.......2004-05-06
Compiled and edited by Eric Arnesen, The Human Tradition In American Labor History is a highly recommended addition to any college-level collection focusing upon labor relations in the United States. This is a fine set of labor biographies, ranging from Beeswax Taylor to Walter Reuther, and examines labor activists both famous and obscure. From labor politics and race relations to individuals who helped shape the modern face of American labor, American Labor History will provide an excellent reference resource.
Books:
- Rebuilding Labor: Organizing and Organizers in the New Union Movement
- Rising Above the Gathering Storm: Energizing and Employing America for a Brighter Economic Future
- Rivethead: Tales from the Assembly Line
- Robert's Rules of Order Newly Revised in Brief (Roberts Rules of Order (in Brief))
- Spiritual Midwifery
- State of the Union: A Century of American Labor (Politics and Society in Twentieth Century America)
- The Age of Migration, Third Edition: International Population Movements in the Modern World
- The Art of Innovation: Lessons in Creativity from IDEO, America's Leading Design Firm
- The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears
- The Case Against the Fed
Books Index
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