Red History, Blue Mood: Labor History and Solidarity in an Age of Fragmentation

2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 35-47
Author(s):  
Jefferson Cowie
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Labor History ◽  
The United States ◽  
Class Formation ◽  
Political Fragmentation ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Control ◽  
Class Community

Beginning with labor historians’ efforts to create a synthesis of the field in the 1980s, this essay explores the problem of working-class political fragmentation and the intellectual problems that posed for the generation of “new” labor historians. Looking to culture, class, community, and control as their themes, historians overlooked deeper problems in American class formation as well as the monumental complexity of discussing the history of class in the United States.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-30
Author(s):  
Natalie Fixmer-Oraiz
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Homeland Security ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
The United States ◽  
Reproductive Politics ◽  
Security Culture ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Control ◽  
Theoretical Foundations

This chapter explores how recent discourses of motherhood and nation are deeply enmeshed and mutually constitutive. I trace a brief history of reproductive politics in the United States, clarifying how the project of nation building has consistently enlisted motherhood and worked to govern women’s reproduction through differential modes of surveillance and control. This chapter provides the historical and theoretical foundations for the book; it notes the precedents to homeland maternity while also elaborating on how contemporary alignments of motherhood and nation are distinct and specific to homeland security culture.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Jarod Roll
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Government Regulation ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Labor History ◽  
The United States ◽  
Organized Labor ◽  
Social Democratic ◽  
Non Union

The metal miners of the Tri-State district (Kansas, Missouri, and Oklahoma) opposed social democratic unions and government regulation for nearly a century. Historians of organized labor in the United States have neglected workers like these, opting instead to focus on workers who joined unions. This introduction outlines how this study of the non-union and anti-union miners of the Tri-State district changes the field of labor history. The story of the Tri-State miners shows how some American workers rejected the protections of working-class solidarity because they inherited and embraced a faith in capitalism, white supremacy, and aggressive masculinity.

Poverty and Progress: A Paradoxical Legacy

1986 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 15-22
Author(s):  
Michael Frisch
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Social Structure ◽  
The United States ◽  
Big Bang ◽  
Harvard University ◽  
Small City ◽  
History Of ◽  
Twentieth Anniversary ◽  
Original Edition

My Copy of Poverty and Progress provides shocking evidence that we have moved far enough along in time to have the necessary perspective: the price on the jacket of this Harvard University Press original edition—hardcover—reads $5.95. There is similarly little doubt about the judgment of time, for I think there would be general agreement with the assessment offered by Michael Katz (1982) several years ago that “in the last two decades there have been two landmark books in the history of social structure, one each for Britain and the United States. Both reflect not only the talents of the author but the national/intellectual contexts as well. For Britain the book is E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class [1964]; for America it is Stephan Thernstrom’s Poverty and Progress [1964].”It is thus appropriate that we honor Stephan Thernstrom on the twentieth anniversary of a slim volume on a small city, which made a disproportionately big bang. We know he understands that to the extent that our honorific twenty-one gun salute may occasionally seem to be aimed not over but at him, this is only to keep him from feeling uncomfortably like the guest at his own funeral eulogies. Whatever the mix of criticism and praise, however, I suspect that he will be amused: all of this solemn discussion devoted to what was initially only a doctoral thesis which Professor Thernstrom, if he was anything like most of us, may have had to struggle, from time to time, to take altogether seriously.

Fathering Orphans

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jessie B. Ramey
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
Child Care ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Family Life ◽  
The United States ◽  
History Of ◽  
White Working Class

This chapter begins with the James Caldwell story, which brings the experience of fathers into sharp relief—a significant, and all but forgotten, aspect of orphanage history—as well as the broader history of child care, in the United States. While many orphanage children had living fathers, the institutional managers constructed “orphans” as fatherless, perpetuating a gendered and racialized logic of dependency. Yet for those men using the orphanages as a form of child care, their experiences as widowers differed from those of solo women with children. Furthermore, the experiences of African American and white working-class men were also quite different. Ultimately, the orphanages help reveal the extent to which each group of men was involved with the care of their children, as well as the connection between their breadwinning role and family life.

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