Karl Marx's Vision of America: A Biographical and Bibliographical Sketch

1980 ◽  
Vol 42 (4) ◽  
pp. 465-503
Author(s):  
Robert Weiner
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Karl Marx ◽  
The United States ◽  
Abraham Lincoln ◽  
New Era ◽  
War Of Independence ◽  
Made In

Karl Marx and the United States is a subject which immediately elicits interest, but also surprise. Interest, because of its contemporary importance; surprise, because Marx and America have appeared so remote from one another. Marx has definitely influenced America, but that will not be the theme of this essay —instead, we will concern ourselves with the role of America in the thought of Marx. The magnitude of this role is illustrated by a statement made in Marx's letter to Abraham Lincoln, written in 1864 on behalf of the International Workingmen's Association:The workingmen of Europe feel sure that as the American war of independence initiated a new era of the ascendency of the middle-class, so the American Anti-slavery war will do for the working-class.

The Role of Anti-Slavery Sentiment in English Reactions to the American Civil War

1976 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 405-420 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas A. Lorimer
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Political Attitudes ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Democracy ◽  
Testing Ground ◽  
Parliamentary Reform

From 1861 to 1865, English politicians and journalists watched with passionate interest as the United States seemed to tear itself apart over the question of slavery. During these years, English public men, politicians and writers of all qualities and degrees, gave extensive airing to their views both of slavery and of American democracy. This extensive commentary on the American conflict, and the subsequent revival of interest in parliamentary reform, have made the divisions in English opinion on the war a useful testing ground of mid-Victorian social and political attitudes. Early studies, written from the perspective of the northern victory, the abolition of slavery, and the martyrdom of Lincoln, found it difficult to comprehend the extent of pro-confederate sympathy in England. On the slavery question, the mid-Victorians seemed to have lost the abolitionist enthusiasm of their evangelical forebears in the Clapham Sect. In order to fathom this failure of English judgement, historians attempted to show that the more articulate minority, the upper echelons of mid-Victorian society, sided with an aristocratic, slave-owning south, while the less articulate majority, middle-class radicals and the working class, sided with a democratic, abolitionist north.

Middle-Class Victorian Street Arabs: Modern Re-creations of the Baker Street Irregulars

2012 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 36-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dominic Cheetham
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Children's Literature ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Street Children ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
The United States ◽  
Sherlock Holmes ◽  
Upward Shift

In three of Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories there are brief appearances of the Baker Street Irregulars, a group of ‘street Arabs’ who help Holmes with his investigations. These children have been re-imagined in modern children's literature in at least twenty-seven texts in a variety of media and with writers from both Britain and the United States. All these modern stories show a marked upward shift in the class of the Irregulars away from the lower working class of Conan-Doyle's originals. The shift occurs through attributing middle-class origins to the leaders of the Irregulars, through raising the class of the Irregulars in general, and through giving the children life environments more comfortable, safe, and financially secure than would have been possible for late-Victorian street children. Because of the variety in texts and writers, it is argued that this shift is not a result of the conscious political or ideological positions of individual writers, but rather reflects common unconscious narrative choices. The class-shift is examined in relation to the various pressures of conventions in children's literature, concepts of audience, and common concepts of class in society.

My Little Girl Wife

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas L. Syrett
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
The United States ◽  
Child Marriage ◽  
Statutory Rape ◽  
Age Of Consent ◽  
Minor Children ◽  
Meaningful Category

By the later nineteenth century, ideas about childhood and about marriage had undergone significant transformations in the United States, especially among the middle class. Children were now seen as innocents in need of protection and marriage was meant to be a complementary (if still unequal) union of two companionate souls. Both of these trends meant that child marriage increasingly came into disfavor. Focusing on depictions of child marriage in newspapers, debates about statutory rape laws, and marriage and divorce reform leagues, this chapter documents succesful efforts to raise the age of consent to marriage. It also shows the ways that working-class parents, generally those least likely to identify age as a meaningful category of identity, used these new laws to prevent their minor children from marrying.

Spaces of Intentionality: Race, Class, and Horizontality at the United States Social Forum

2008 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 353-372 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Juris
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Open Space ◽  
The United States ◽  
World Social Forum ◽  
High Profile ◽  
Democratic Practice ◽  
The World ◽  
High Level

The World Social Forum process has sought to provide an "open space" for diverse movements to exchange ideas, interact, and coordinate as they build another world. Despite this inclusive impulse, many of the forums have been disproportionately white and middle class. Through an ethnographic account of the 2007 United States Social Forum (USSF) in Atlanta, I examine one high-profile attempt to overcome this lack of diversity by establishing what I refer to as an "intentional" space. I argue that the intentional strategy pursued by USSF organizers achieved a high level of diversity in racial and class terms, but de-emphasized the role of the forum as a "contact zone" for translation, sharing, and exchange among diverse movement sectors. However, given the strong desire to overcome past exclusions among participants, the privileging of intentionality over openness and horizontality was widely viewed as legitimate, which has important implications for democratic practice.

Queering Middle Class Gender in Nineteenth-Century US Theater

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gillian Rodger
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Gender Roles ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
The United States ◽  
Gender Construction ◽  
Narrative Forms

This chapter considers cross-dressed roles in nineteenth-century music-theatrical forms in the United States, and particularly in non-narrative and semi-narrative forms such as minstrelsy, circus, variety, and burlesque. It discusses the origins of cross-dressed roles in English theatrical traditions, as well as connections to similar roles in European opera and operetta. It also considers other kinds of performances present in variety that challenged middle class gender construction of the period, and suggests that variety represented working class gender roles, and humor was found at the expense of hegemonic middle class ideals. This becomes particularly clear in the performances by male impersonators in variety of the 1860s–1880s. By the end of the century the middle class had expanded to include portions of the variety audience, and audiences no longer found the satirical treatment of middle class men funny. This, and growing mainstream recognition of homosexual populations, particularly in urban areas, caused the decline of cross-dressed performance.

Not Really Single: The Deportation to Welfare Pathway for U.S. Citizen Mothers in Mixed-Status Marriage

2018 ◽  
Vol 45 (7-8) ◽  
pp. 1075-1092 ◽  
Author(s):  
April M. Schueths
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Latin American ◽  
The United States ◽  
Single Parent ◽  
Global Market ◽  
For Profit ◽  
Market Driven ◽  
Mixed Status

Working-class, Latin American men are increasingly removed from their families and exploited by the global market-driven for-profit detention system and then deported from the United States. Using gendered and racialized deportation regimes and neoliberal paternalism this research qualitatively analyzes the financial and emotional consequences of deportation for 17 U.S. citizen mothers who are part of a mixed-status marriage (primarily white non-Latina citizens, married to undocumented Latin American men). The state uses strict deportation policies as a mechanism to “protect” citizens from so-called dangerous criminals, most who have not committed a crime. This supposed safeguard suggests that citizens need to be protected from their own husbands and fathers. Citizens are suddenly cast into the role of single parent and sole provider and often rely on public assistance to replace their husband’s income, in what I call the deportation to welfare pathway.

scholarly journals EUROPEAN TRADITIONALISTS AND BLM CHALLENGES

2021 ◽  
Vol 24 (6) ◽  
pp. 155-164
Author(s):  
Pavel Ivanov ◽  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Political Culture ◽  
The United States ◽  
European Countries ◽  
Public Dialogue ◽  
Eu Countries ◽  
Cultural Roots ◽  
Further Development ◽  
Made In

The article examines the ideological contradictions and specificity of the Black Lives Matter movement in Europe and the development of the All Lives Matter response movement. The author analyzes the causes and patterns of the outbreak of anti-racist protests in the European space in 2020, their cultural roots in the United States and the reaction of traditionalists. The conflict potential of socio-political challenges and the acuteness of disagreements in the context of a new dichotomy and the need to search for a new identity are revealed. Conclusions are made about the similarity of the socio-political demarcation in a number of EU countries and the United States, the role and place of European countries in this conflict are determined. The author analyzes the correlation of US political culture with the process of public dialogue about the problem of racism in Europe, the role of «Cancel» culture and the consolidation of contradictions in the socio-political split among traditionalists and their opponents. Arguments are made in favor of the further development of the ideological conflict in a new dimension and the inevitable exacerbation of the problems of xenophobia.

scholarly journals "Controlling for what?" Folk economics, legal consciousness and the gender wage gap in the United States

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Hirschman
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Gender Wage Gap ◽  
Wage Gap ◽  
Occupational Segregation ◽  
The United States ◽  
Economic Life ◽  
Legal Consciousness ◽  
Stylized Facts ◽  
Made In

Studies of the political power of economic knowledge have tended to foreground the role of causal claims in the form of grand theories or more narrow findings produced by experimental methods. In contrast, scholars have paid relatively little attention to the role of economic experts' descriptions. This article highlights one category of influential, quantitative descriptive claim: stylized facts. Stylized facts are simple empirical regularities in need of explanation. Focusing on the example of the gender wage gap in the United States, this article showcases how stylized facts travel into political debates, and how the choices made in characterizing an aspect of economic life (such as controlling for full-time work, but little else) interact with social movement activism, and folk understandings of economic life shaped by legal consciousness. The gender wage gap was first calculated in the 1950s, but did not take on special importance until the 1960s-1970s when feminists rallied around the statistic as a useful aggregate measure of women's economic disempowerment. Academics soon followed, and sociologists and economists began to publish studies documenting trends in the gap and trying to account for its sources. The comparable worth movement of the 1980s explicitly argued that the wage gap resulted from occupational segregation and the devaluation of women's work. As that movement faltered in the late 1980s, the gender wage gap became increasingly understood through the lens of women's choices and tradeoffs between work and family, and occupational segregation dropped out of the narrative, even as academics documented the persistent importance of segregation in explaining the remaining gap. Throughout this period, the gap was frequently misunderstood or misrepresented as reflecting the narrow sort of same-job, different-pay discrimination made illegal by the 1963 Equal Pay Act, adding confusion to the public debate over women's economic position. These dynamics showcase how technical choices made in the identification of stylized facts, such as statistical controls, are simultaneously deeply political choices.

scholarly journals Artificial Intelligence: Serving American Security and Chinese Ambitions

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 42-52
Author(s):  
H. Obeid ◽  
F Hillani, ◽  
R. Fakih ◽  
K. Mozannar
Keyword(s):  
Artificial Intelligence ◽  
United States ◽  
Technological Development ◽  
The United States ◽  
New Era ◽  
The Us ◽  
The One ◽  
The Right ◽  
Technological Strength

In recent years artificial intelligence has entered a new era, which gives rise to many hopes for powerful states such as the United States and China. In this paper, we analyze the importance and role of artificial intelligence in technological development in each of the two countries on the one hand, and its influence on China-American relations in terms of technological and geopolitical conflict. To get the right results, we rely on a literature review of dozens of articles published on the phenomenon in order to compare the power of artificial intelligence between the United States and China where we found that the US still has technological strength, especially in the field of artificial intelligence, but we can say that a large force is beginning pose a threat for it which is China that has great technological capabilities so, we can say that the United States should work more in this field. Also, we found that artificial intelligence has a primary goal in both countries, it helps China to achieve its ambitions to be the leader of the world, and this intelligence, on the other hand, provides protection and security to the United States. This paper is divided into three sections. The first section focuses on the importance of artificial intelligence in achieving China’s ambitions, the second section explains the role of artificial intelligence in the US protection service, and the third section describes the technological and geopolitical conflict resulting from the competition in artificial intelligence between these two countries. Keywords: Artificial intelligence, United States, China, Conflict, leader.

After the Fact

2018 ◽  
pp. 120-150
Author(s):  
Sara Blair
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New Left ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Self ◽  
Visual Artists ◽  
Social Crisis ◽  
Martha Rosler ◽  
The Media ◽  
Made In

In “After the Fact: Postwar Dissent and the Art of Documentary,” Sara Blair analyzes the redirection of photo-documentary practice by visual artists Richard Avedon and Martha Rosler. Specifically, the chapter emphasizes the self-consciousness with which postwar figures represent and conduct their labor for a context of urgent social crisis and dissent. Both photographers experiment with the properties and forms of documentary imaging, wrested from its familiar contexts: Avedon in an evolving series of portraits of New Left leaders, activists, war prosecutors, and dissidents made in the United States and on the ground in Vietnam, Rosler in projects focusing on the role of photojournalism, documentary, and the media itself in perpetuating both a fog of war and a set of presumptions about documentary as a form of knowledge and power.

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