The Ordeal of Assimilation: A Documentary History of the White Working Class

The article argues that the working-class realism of post-WWII British television single drama is neither as English nor as white as is often implied. The surviving audiovisual material and written sources (reviews, publicity material, biographies of television writers and directors) reveal ITV's dynamic role in offering a range of views and representations of Britain's black population and their multi-layered relationship with white working-class cultures. By examining this neglected history of postwar British drama, this article argues for more inclusive historiographies of British television and sheds light on the dynamism and diversity of British television culture.

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If All We Did Was to Weep at Home: A History of White Working-Class Women in America

Journal of American History ◽

10.2307/1889878 ◽

1980 ◽

Vol 67 (3) ◽

pp. 653

Author(s):

Alice Kessler-Harris ◽

Susan Estabrook Kennedy

Keyword(s):

Working Class ◽

History Of ◽

White Working Class ◽

Working Class Women ◽

At Home

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Fathering Orphans

10.5406/illinois/9780252036903.003.0005 ◽

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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White Workers in the Late Apartheid Period: A Report on the Wiehahn Commission and Mineworkers’ Union Archival Collections

History in Africa ◽

10.1017/hia.2015.29 ◽

2015 ◽

Vol 43 ◽

pp. 229-258 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Danelle van Zyl-Hermann

Keyword(s):

Working Class ◽

Black Population ◽

Racial Privilege ◽

History Of ◽

White Working Class ◽

Labour Legislation ◽

White Workers ◽

High Politics

Abstract:This paper offers a critique of the existing historiography on the late apartheid period, arguing that white workers’ role in and experience of the unraveling of racial privilege in the labor arena has been obscured by a focus on the high politics of reform and on anti-apartheid resistance emanating from African labor and the broader black population. Reporting from the archive, it discusses two under-utilized archival collections – that of the Commission of Inquiry into Labour Legislation and of the Mineworkers’ Union – as sources for starting to write white working-class organization, politics, identity, and experience into the history of reform and resistance, thereby adding a new dimension to South Africa’s broadly conceived struggle history.

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If All We Did Was to Weep at Home: A History of White Working-Class Woimen in America

The American Historical Review ◽

10.2307/1869073 ◽

1980 ◽

Vol 85 (4) ◽

pp. 992

Author(s):

Philip S. Foner ◽

Susan Estabrook Kennedy

Keyword(s):

Working Class ◽

History Of ◽

White Working Class ◽

At Home

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Making Blanket Statements: Rethinking the History and Politics of American Social Class

Journal of American Studies ◽

10.1017/s0021875818001524 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 53 (1) ◽

pp. 280-286

Author(s):

ANDREW SEAL

Keyword(s):

Social Class ◽

Working Class ◽

American History ◽

White People ◽

White Trash ◽

History Of ◽

White Working Class

In Joan C. Williams's White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America and Nancy Isenberg's White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America, the reader will find a nation riven by abiding class prejudice. Both have written explicitly with the goal of forcing readers to confront the deep, ugly, and ultimately destructive effects of elite snobbery towards working-class or impoverished white people. They both believe that educated readers tend to minimize or ignore how much class matters and has mattered in American history and to deny their own class biases; these books are meant to make that denial harder to sustain.

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