scholarly journals Working-Class Environmentalism in America

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Scott Dewey
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Working Class ◽  
New England ◽  
Urban Pollution ◽  
Workplace Safety ◽  
Timber Harvesting ◽  
Surface Coal Mining ◽  
Minority Community ◽  
United Mine Workers ◽  
Class Youth

“Working-Class Environmentalism in America” traces working Americans’ efforts to protect the environment from antebellum times to the present. Antebellum topics include African American slaves’ environmental ethos; aesthetic nature appreciation by Lowell, Massachusetts “mill girls” working in New England’s first textile factories; and Boston’s 1840s fight for safe drinking water. Late-19th-century topics include working-class support for creating urban parks, workers’ early efforts to confront urban pollution and the “smoke nuisance,” and the exploration of conservationist ideas and policies by New England small farmers and fishermen in the late 1800s. In the early 20th century, working-class youth, including immigrants and African Americans, participated in the youth camping movement and the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts of America, while working-class adults and their families, enjoying new automobility and two-day weekends, discovered picnicking, car-camping, and sport hunting and fishing in newly created wilderness preserves. Workers also learned of toxic dangers to workplace safety and health from shocking stories of 1920s New Jersey “radium girls” and tetraethyl lead factory workers, and from 1930s Midwestern miners who went on strike over deadly silicosis. The 1930s United States rediscovered natural resource conservation when the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) employed millions of working-class youth. Lumber workers advocated federal regulation of timber harvesting. Postwar America saw the United Auto Workers (UAW), United Steelworkers (USWA), Oil Chemical and Atomic Workers (OCAW), American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), and other labor unions lobbying for wilderness and wildlife preservation, workplace and community health, and fighting air and water pollution, while the United Farmworkers (UFW) fought reckless pesticide use, and dissidents within the United Mine Workers (UMW) sought to ban surface coal mining. Radical organizations explored minority community environmentalism and interracial cooperation on environmental reform. Following post-1970s nationwide conservative retrenchment, working-class activists and communities of color fought toxic wastes and explored environmental justice and environmental racism at places like Love Canal, New York and Warren County, North Carolina and formed the Blue-Green Alliance with environmentalists.

Reflections on Americanism

2005 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 98-102
Author(s):  
Gary Gerstle
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
Working Class ◽  
New England ◽  
Automobile Industry ◽  
Labor Movement ◽  
Industrial Workers ◽  
Industry Studies ◽  
United Automobile Workers ◽  
Single Industry

Charles Williams's essay on the nature of progressive Americanism takes me back to where my quest to understand this phenomenon began: the labor movement of the 1930s. The broad nature and intensity of working-class rebellion and mobilization during the Depression decade once led the historian Irving Bernstein to label this period, the “Turbulent Years.” I was part of a group of self-described “new labor historians” that set out to penetrate the mysteries of this movement and especially the consciousness of the workers who participated in it. Most of us undertook community or single industry studies, out of the conviction that the kind of in-depth investigations that such focused work allowed would yield fully realized portraits of working-class insurgencies and of the workplaces and communities out of which they emerged. I chose to explore a New England textile city while others opted to work on transit workers in New York City, dockworkers in West Coast port cities, electrical workers in Pittsburgh and Schenectady, teamsters in Minneapolis, and a broad range of industrial workers in Chicago. All of us, however, had one eye on the automobile industry in Detroit and its environs, for this industry had produced what became, arguably, the most successful, innovative, and progressive CIO union, the United Automobile Workers (UAW).

Ambivalent Relationships: London's Youth Culture and the Making of the Multi-Racial Society in the 1960s

2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 4-26 ◽  
Author(s):  
Felix Fuhg
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Youth Culture ◽  
Global Culture ◽  
Local Conditions ◽  
White Working Class ◽  
Ambivalent Relationship ◽  
Post War ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Class Youth

The emergence and formation of British working-class youth cultures in the 1960s were characterized by an ambivalent relationship between British identity, global culture and the formation of a multicultural society in the post-war decades. While national and local newspapers mostly reported on racial tensions and racially-motivated violence, culminating in the Notting Hill riots of 1958, the relationship between London's white working-class youth and teenagers with migration backgrounds was also shaped by a reciprocal, direct and indirect, personal and cultural exchange based on social interaction and local conditions. Starting from the Notting Hill Riots 1958, the article reconstructs places and cultural spheres of interaction between white working-class youth and teenagers from Caribbean communities in London in the 1960s. Following debates and discussions on race relations and the participation of black youth in the social life of London in the 1960s, the article shows that British working-class youth culture was affected in various ways by the processes of migration. By dealing with the multicultural dimension of the post-war metropolis, white working-class teenagers negotiated socio-economic as well as political changes, contributing in the process to an emergent, new image of post-imperial Britain.

Google Hangout with Annie Baker, Playwright 1/25/16, 2:33 PM

2016 ◽  
Vol 69 (4) ◽  
pp. 57-64
Author(s):  
Genevieve Yue
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New England ◽  
Selection Process ◽  
Pulitzer Prize ◽  
Film Festival ◽  
The Past

Genevieve Yue interviews playwright Annie Baker, whose Pulitzer Prize–winning play The Flick focuses on the young employees of a single-screen New England movie house. Baker is one of the most critically lauded playwrights to emerge on the New York theater scene in the past ten years, in part due to her uncompromising commitment to experimentation and disruption. Baker intrinsically understands that arriving at something meaningful means taking a new way. Accordingly, Baker did not want to conduct a traditional interview for Film Quarterly. After running into each other at a New York Film Festival screening of Chantal Akerman's No Home Movie (2015)—both overwhelmed by the film—Yue and Baker agreed to begin their conversation by choosing a film neither of them had seen before and watching it together. The selection process itself led to a long discussion, which led to another, and then finally, to the Gmail hangout that forms the basis of the interview.

What’s Good for George Sánchez Is Good for Boyle Heights: Regenerative Scholarship, Urban Racism, Gentrification, and East LA Interchange

2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Gilbert Estrada
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Urban Pollution ◽  
Metropolitan Regions ◽  
The Past ◽  
Award Winning ◽  
Boyle Heights ◽  
Good For ◽  
Primary Focus ◽  
Deed Restrictions ◽  
Class Community

The inclusive ideals of George Sánchez have helped shape a new generation of academics who have promoted connections with nonacademic organizations. This article discusses how Sánchez has continued these efforts through his pivotal contributions to an award-winning documentary focusing on the multiethnic, working-class community of Boyle Heights: Betsy Kalin’s film East LA Interchange (2015). East LA Interchange’s greatest contribution to the generative scholarship Sánchez emphasizes is its critical analysis of modern urban problems, utilizing history as a tool for social change. The story of Boyle Heights is not just a history of a single working-class community with a diverse culture. It is also a tale of a neighborhood trying to solve real world problems such as gentrification, unaffordable housing, community displacement, and urban pollution. The film portrays these difficulties in the present while showing that they originated decades ago. Sánchez and East LA Interchange are at their best when they provide the historical contexts of contemporary problems, emphasizing that history is not only the study of the past. Rather, history is the unending dialogue between the past, present, and future, and any significant discourse on today’s urban ills must be rooted in the past. For students and others interested in the diverse communities common in many US metropolitan regions, East LA Interchange has much to offer regarding the issues of immigration, redlining, deed restrictions, political activism, freeway construction, living with racially and ethnically diverse community members, and the nationwide problem of gentrification. These themes, especially gentrification, are the primary focus of this article.

Maximum Security

2020 ◽  
Vol 26 (1-2020) ◽  
pp. 71-84
Author(s):  
Margo Okazawa-Rey ◽  
Gwyn Kirk
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Air Force ◽  
International Security ◽  
Armed Forces ◽  
Prison System ◽  
Correctional Facilities ◽  
Latina Women ◽  
Physical Force ◽  
Maximum Security ◽  
Class Youth

Okazawa-Rey and Kirk argue that the term maximum security, used in the context of the prison system, is an oxymoron. Jails, prisons, and other ‘correctional’ facilities provide no real security for communities, guards and other prison officials, or inmates. Imprisoning two million people, building more prisons, identifying poor and working-class youth of colour as ‘gang members,’ and criminalizing poor Black and Latina women does not increase security. Rather, the idea of security must be redefined in sharp contrast to everyday notions of personal security that are based on the protection of material possessions by locks and physical force, as well as prevailing definitions of national and international security based on a militarization that includes the police, border patrols, and armed forces such as the Navy, Army, Marines, and Air Force. To achieve genuine security, we must address the major sources of insecurity: economic, social, and political inequalities among and within nations and communities. The continual objectification of ‘others’ is a central mechanism underlying systems of oppression—and insecurity—based on class, race, gender, nation, and other significant lines of difference.

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