Workers’ Housing and Houses: Interwar Planning from Dessau to Detroit

2020 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 314-335
Author(s):  
Michael McCulloch
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Working Class ◽  
World War ◽  
Social Unrest ◽  
Transatlantic Comparison ◽  
Housing Shortages ◽  
American Case

Facing post–World War I housing shortages and the prospect of social unrest, policymakers on both sides of the Atlantic supported the construction of modern workers’ dwellings. Their efforts produced an extraordinary volume of new units, transforming the working-class experience. Yet, architectural and planning historians have overlooked the comparative potential in this body of work, which includes landmarks of modernism and wood-framed bungalows. This article contributes a transatlantic comparison. It explores European and US policies and projects, shedding light on the particularity of the American case, epitomized by Detroit, where in the absence of planned developments workers sought houses as independent consumers.

Tram, mobilitŕ e crescita urbana in Spagna, 1900-1936

STORIA URBANA ◽  
2009 ◽  
pp. 21-48
Author(s):  
Banales José Luis Onyňn
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Urban Growth ◽  
Urban Structure ◽  
Mobility Patterns ◽  
World War ◽  
Unskilled Workers ◽  
Urban Pattern ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Relationship

- The article focuses on the relationship between tramway networks and urban structure in Spain during the period 1900-1936. It states that this relationship should be studied after considering the use of transport and the mobility patterns of different classes, specially the working class. Once these factors have been studied it is possible to assert the impact of the tramway netmark on urban growth. The impact of the tramways on major Spanish cities did not take the form of a transport revolution that would radically changed the urban pattern. Tramways did not direct urban growth until use of tramway lines by the working class became general. This did not happen until World War I. Since then, skilled and some unskilled workers did change their mobility patterns and tramway use experienced a cycle of growth that continued until the late 1950s.

The Limits of Economic Restructuring

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles S. Maier
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Economic Restructuring ◽  
Coal Industry ◽  
Red Scare ◽  
World War ◽  
Middle Classes

This chapter examines the problems encountered by France, Germany, and Italy as they each embarked on economic restructuring after World War I. A new bourgeois equilibrium seemed attainable in each country during the period; it rested on a consensus that united elites and middle classes against militant working-class claims. Capitalism and bourgeois hierarchies proved more resilient than either defenders or attackers had assumed. Furthermore, the movement of restoration was wider than the three societies. Across the Atlantic, “red scare” and recession were ushering in the era of normalcy. The chapter considers the evolution of leftist objectives in France, Germany, and Italy that accompanied the transition from the turmoil of 1918–1919 to the bourgeois recovery of 1920–1921. It also discusses the strategies of bourgeois defense and the failure of socialization in the German coal industry.

Red-Blooded, Rugged Individuals

2020 ◽  
pp. 165-199
Author(s):  
Jarod Roll
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Risk Taking ◽  
Health And Safety ◽  
Organized Labor ◽  
World War ◽  
White American ◽  
Piece Rate ◽  
Mining Companies ◽  
Lead And Zinc

World War I made the Tri-State district more productive and profitable than ever before. War industry demand for lead and zinc raised prices and wages, and led to the dramatic expansion of mines in the Oklahoma part of the district. Wartime nationalism also supercharged the risk-taking masculinity of the district’s miners who asserted their racist claims to the piece rate with new fervor that further undermined the appeals of union organizers and government health and safety reformers. But in the 1920s miners found their employers, who had grown bigger and stronger during the war, newly reluctant to pay them high wages. This stand-off created new opportunities for union organizers in the district, but Tri-State miners ultimately rejected solidarity in favor of the economic advantages they believed loyal, white American men deserved. By the 1920s, their working-class communities were organized around a faith in capitalism, violent masculinity, and white racism now transformed during the war into a staunch white nationalism. Having abandoned organized labor, Tri-State miners found themselves without allies as mining companies moved in the late 1920s to constrain their risk-taking behavior through new health controls aimed to eliminate silicosis and damaged men from the district.

scholarly journals George Patrick Leonard Walker. 2 March 1926 — 17 January 2005

2006 ◽  
Vol 52 ◽  
pp. 423-436
Author(s):  
S. Self ◽  
R.S.J. Sparks
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Elementary School ◽  
Natural History ◽  
World War I ◽  
Secondary School ◽  
Working Class ◽  
World War ◽  
The South ◽  
Interest In Science

George Walker was one of the most creative, inspirational and influential volcanologists of the twentieth century. Born in Harlesden, London, on 2 March 1926 in a respectable working–class neighbourhood, he was the first member of his family to take an interest in science and to attend university. His father, Leonard Walker, an insurance salesman, was badly wounded at Passchendaele in World War I as a sergeant bomber and never fully recovered. He died in 1932, when George was six years old. His mother, Evelyn Frances ( née McConkey), was a nurse. George had no siblings. He attended Acton Lane Elementary School and recollected a lesson on the making of iron as being memorable. Other influences included natural history, adventure books and visits to the South Kensington Museum and London Zoo. He did well at school and in 1937 won a scholarship to Willesden Secondary School.

The Italian Immigrant Working-Class Experience in the United States

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcella Bencivenni
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War I ◽  
Working Class ◽  
The United States ◽  
Immigrant Workers ◽  
World War ◽  
Italian Americans ◽  
Political Events ◽  
American Working Class ◽  
Steel Industries

Close to seventeen million people in the United States, approximately 6 percent of the total population, identified themselves as Italian Americans in the 2016 census. Constituting the nation’s fifth largest ancestry group, they are the descendants of one of the greatest diasporas in human history. Since 1860, twenty-nine million Italians have left their homeland for better opportunities worldwide. Close to six million of them have settled in the United States with about five million arriving prior to World War I. Along with other European groups of the great transatlantic migrations of 1870–1920—Jews, Poles, Croatians, and Finns—they became an essential part of the American working class, building, shaping, and enriching its life and culture. Among the most ubiquitous of the early foreigners, Italians were initially confined to unskilled and manual jobs but gradually made their way into the ranks of semi-skilled operatives in mass-production manufacturing. By 1910, they constituted a vital segment of the American multinational workforce in the mining, garment, and steel industries and played key roles in the labor struggles of the early 20th century, providing both key leadership and mass militancy. Like other ethnic groups, Italian immigrant workers lived deeply transnational lives. Their class consciousness was continually informed by their ethnic identity and their complicated relationship to both Italy and the United States, as they sought to transform, and were transformed by, the political events, industrial conditions, and cultures of the two countries. The story of how Italian immigrant workers became “American” sheds light not only on their experience in the United States but also on the transnational character of the labor movement and the interplay of class, race, gender, and ethnic identities.

scholarly journals Respectable Citizens: Civic Militias, Local Patriotism, and Social Order in Late Habsburg Austria (1890‒1920)

2020 ◽  
Vol 51 ◽  
pp. 193-219
Author(s):  
Claire Morelon
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War I ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Social Order ◽  
World War ◽  
Social Hierarchies ◽  
Social Unrest ◽  
Good Citizenship

AbstractThis article analyzes the role of urban civic militias (burgher corps) in Habsburg Austria from the end of the nineteenth century to the aftermath of World War I. Far from a remnant of the early modern past, by the turn of the twentieth century these militias were thriving local institutions. They fostered dynastic patriotism and participated in the growing promotion of shooting among the population in the lead-up to the conflict. But they also played a major role in upholding the bourgeois ideals of protection of social hierarchies and property. In the context of the rise of the workers' movement and social unrest, the militias saw themselves as bulwarks of social order and bastions of bourgeois virtue. They reflected an exclusive conception of armed citizenship opposed to the egalitarian notion of the citizen-soldier that survived into the twentieth century. The sensory experience of burgher corps parades during the patriotic or church celebrations was supposed to convey stability and express hierarchies in the urban space. This article also links the practices of armed civilians before the war to the paramilitary groups that emerged in 1918 and emphasizes the legacy of local conceptions of armed defense of property and of notions of “good” citizenship in the aftermath of the war.

O’Casey, Sean (1880–1964)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emilie Pine
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Close Association ◽  
World War ◽  
Irish Nationalism ◽  
Sean O'casey ◽  
Abbey Theatre ◽  
Blood Sacrifice ◽  
Political Essays

Born into Dublin tenement life in 1880, Sean O’Casey (originally John O’Casey) went on to become one of Ireland’s most important playwrights, best known for his realist Dublin Trilogy, which premiered at the Abbey Theatre and included The Shadow of a Gunman (1923), Juno and the Paycock (1924), and The Plough and the Stars (1926). The four-act Plough and the Stars provoked riots on its second night as protestors objected to the play’s critique of Irish nationalism. O’Casey’s close association with the Abbey ended in 1928 when W. B. Yeats rejected his play about World War I, The Silver Tassie, which combined Realism and Expressionism. O’Casey moved to England in 1926, where he married the actress Eileen Carey, and he continued to write politically focused plays for English and American stages. He also wrote political essays and six volumes of autobiography. O’Casey’s family were working-class Dubliners who struggled financially after his father was seriously injured, and O’Casey started work at the age of fourteen. This first-hand understanding of gruelling poverty informed his life-long Socialism and his involvement in the 1913 Dublin Lockout strike. In The Plough and the Stars, his critique of nationalism centered on the disparity between the rhetoric of freedom through blood sacrifice and the hardships of working-class life.

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