Chicago’s Immigrant Working Class and the Rise of Urban Populism, 1867–73

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
John B. Jentz ◽  
Richard Schneirov
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Control Measure ◽  
Skilled Workers ◽  
Fire Control ◽  
Real Property ◽  
Labor Reform ◽  
Lower Middle Class ◽  
The City

This chapter examines Chicago's immigrant working class and the rise of urban populism. In January 1872—three months after the Great Fire—Anton Hesing, Chicago's German political boss, organized a protest against the city government's effort to ban new wooden housing in the city as a fire control measure. For Hesing, the fight against the “fire limits” was a battle against the proletarianization of Chicago's workers, whose distinctive independent status was based on the ownership of real property and a house. He fought to preserve a particular kind of working class independent of large-scale capital, and free of alien radicalism, particularly socialism. In leading the movement against the fire limits, Hesing then became the chief architect of urban populism in the city. With labor reform marginalized, urban populism helped politicize the city's immigrant skilled workers and lower middle class.

The organisation and activism of Dublin’s Protestant working class, 1883–1935

1994 ◽  
Vol 29 (113) ◽  
pp. 65-87 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Maguire
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Royal College ◽  
General Meeting ◽  
Annual General ◽  
Annual General Meeting ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Lower Middle Class ◽  
The City

Protestant working-class loyalists have been found not only in Belfast, behind the painted kerbs and muralled gables of the Shankill Road and Ballysillan. Recent research has found working-class loyalism in the Ulster hinterland of mid-Armagh. However, most of what has been written on southern Protestantism, beyond Belfast and Ulster, has been on the gentry class. Yet Dublin was once the centre of organised Protestant opinion in Ireland and had, in the early nineteenth century, an assertive and exuberantly sectarian Protestant working class. This paper is based on a study of the Protestant working class of Dublin, and examines its organisation and activism as revealed in the City and County of Dublin Conservative Workingmen’s Club (henceforth C.W.C.). The club owned a substantial Georgian house on York Street, off St Stephen’s Green where the modern extension to the Royal College of Surgeons now stands. The club was sustained by a core of activists numbering around three hundred, the usual print-run for the ballot papers at the annual general meeting. The Protestant working class numbered 5,688 in the city in 1881. The county area numbered 4,096, making a total of 9,784 Protestant workingclass men. The city and county total of about 10,000 remained stable up to the census of 1911. Combined with the Protestant lower middle class of clerks and shopkeepers, the potential to be mobilised by the C.W.C. numbered over 20,000. The club records are used to relate the experience of the Dublin Protestant working class firstly to the more familiar working-class loyalism of Ulster, and secondly to working-class Toryism and the concept of the labour aristocracy.

scholarly journals Between field and home: notes from the balcony

2021 ◽  
pp. 147447402110205
Author(s):  
Shruti Ragavan
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Personal Narratives ◽  
Dairy Farms ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Liminal Space ◽  
Lower Middle Class ◽  
The Past ◽  
Urban Village ◽  
The City

Balconies, windows and terraces have come to be identified as spaces with newfound meaning over the past year due to the Covid-19 pandemic and concomitant lockdowns. There was not only a marked increase in the use of these spaces, but more importantly a difference in the very nature of this use since March 2020. It is keeping this latter point in mind, that I make an attempt to understand the spatial mobilities afforded by the balcony in the area of ethnographic research. The street overlooking my balcony, situated amidst an urban village in the city of Delhi – one of my field sites, is composed of middle and lower-middle class residents, dairy farms and farmers, bovines and other nonhumans. In this note, through ethnographic observations, I reflect upon the balcony as constituting that liminal space between ‘field’ and ‘home’, as well as, as a spatial framing device which conditions and affects our observations and interactions. This is explored by examining two elements – the gendered nature of the space, and the notion of ‘distance and proximity’, through personal narratives of engaging-with the field, and subjects-objects of study in the city.

scholarly journals "So oft to the movies they've been": British fan writing and female audiences in the silent cinema

2010 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa Rose Stead
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Film Culture ◽  
Female Representation ◽  
Archival Research ◽  
Silent Cinema ◽  
Lower Middle Class ◽  
Silent Era

This article aims to address the ways in which working-class and lower-middle-class British women used silent-era fan magazines as a space for articulating their role within the development of a female film culture. The article focuses on letter pages that formed a key site for female contribution to British fan magazines across the silent era. In contributing to these pages, women found a space to debate and discuss the appeal and significance of particular female representations within film culture. Using detailed archival research tracing the content of a specific magazine, Picturegoer, across a 15-year period (1913–28), the article will show the dominance of particular types of female representation in both fan and "official" magazine discourses, analyzing the ways in which British women used these images to work through national tensions regarding modern femininity and traditional ideas of female propriety and restraint.

New Bodies in Cities

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachana Johri
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Caste System ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Lower Middle Class ◽  
Contested Spaces ◽  
Gender Based ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The City

Globalizing cities in India offer the promise of escape from caste- and gender-based identities, but those who make the journey often encounter difficulties, including the fragmentation of their home experience, and even violence once they get to the city. Lower-middle-class girls are seen as a challenge to ideals of chaste Indian womanhood, while Dalit boys and girls are challenging dominant ideals in Brahmanical India by questioning the nation state and its inherited ideals, including the caste system. This paper draws on cinematic and lived narratives to argue that cities in India are characterized by highly contested spaces, bodily practices, and technologies of the self, where the body of the city, and bodies in the city, are the lived realities of these tense negotiations.

‘An intensive study of – feet!’ in two films by Lois Weber: Shoes and The Blot

2021 ◽  
pp. 38-48
Author(s):  
Pamela Hutchinson
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Social Mobility ◽  
Wage Inequality ◽  
Consumer Culture ◽  
Intensive Study ◽  
Lower Middle Class ◽  
Moral Compromise ◽  
The Relationship

In Shoes (1916), Lois Weber re-examines the relationship between shoes and social mobility. Far from guiding the working-class protagonist’s progress, a pair of worn boots trap her into a moral compromise, which destroys her hope of future advancement, either romantically or socially. Weber’s investigation into wage inequality, the rights of women and the influence of consumer culture via footwear continues in The Blot (1921), which revisits the same plot in a lower middle-class milieu and expands on the theme. Here, shoes are again a danger to women, but also an indicator of genteel distress and a cheap, impractical commodity, good only for profiteering rather than practicality.

Local accents in England and Wales

1970 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 231-252 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. C. Wells
Keyword(s):  
Rural Communities ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Standard English ◽  
Linguistic Variables ◽  
Lower Middle Class ◽  
Urban Forms ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
Received Pronunciation ◽  
Urban Working

1. Dialectologists in England have concentrated on the speech of small and relatively isolated rural communities (see, for example, Orton and Dieth, 1962: Introduction, 14). Other linguists and phoneticians concerned with the English of England have almost without exception described Standard English and the form of pronunciation they call, using an established but less than happy term, ‘Received Pronunciation’ (Jones, 1967:xvii). Yet the English of most English (and English-speaking Welsh) people is neither RP Standard English nor a rural dialect. The vast mass of urban working-class and lower-middle-class speakers use a pronunciation nearer to RP, and lexical and grammatical forms much nearer to Standard English, than the archaic rural dialects recorded by the dialectologists. Yet their speech diverges in many ways from what is described as standard. The purpose of this article, which must be regarded as preliminary and tentative, is to sketch the principal phonetic variables among such local, mainly urban, forms of English.1 It is the task of anyone concerned with the description of these ‘accents’ of English to investigate whatever phonetic variables can be identified and to establish their correlation with the non-linguistic variables of age, social standing and education, and geographical provenance. (For discussion of some of the problems of urban dialectology, see particularly Wright, 1966.)

The Unspeakable Events at the Glasgow Music Halls, 1875

1995 ◽  
Vol 11 (43) ◽  
pp. 225-229
Author(s):  
Dagmar Kift
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Lower Middle Class ◽  
Class Culture ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
History Of ◽  
German Edition ◽  
Music Hall ◽  
National Perspective

The history of the music hall has for the most part been written as the history of the London halls. In Dagmar Kift's book, The Victorian Music Hall and Working-Class Culture (the German edition of which was reviewed in NTQ 35, and which is due to appear in English from Cambridge University Press), she attempts to redress the balance by setting music-hall history within a national perspective. Arguing that between the 1840s and the 1890s the halls catered to a predominantly working-class and lower middle-class audience of both sexes and all ages, she views them as instrumental in giving these classes a strong and self-confident identity. The sustaining by the halls of such a distinct class-awareness was one of their greatest strengths – but was also at the root of many of the controversies which surrounded them. The music-hall image of the working class – with its sexual and alcohol-oriented hedonism, its ridicule of marriage, and its acceptance of women and young people as partners in work as in leisure – was in marked contrast to most so-called Victorian values. The following case study from Glasgow documents the shift of music-hall opposition in the 1870s away from teetotallers of all classes attacking alcohol consumption towards middle-class social reformers objecting to the entertainment itself. Dagmar Kift, who earlier published an essay on the composition of music-hall audiences in Music Hall: the Business of Pleasure (Open University Press), is curator of the Westphalian Industrial Museum in Dortmund.

scholarly journals Trends of Social Polarisation and Segregation in Athens (1991–2011)

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 117-128 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Maloutas ◽  
Hugo Botton
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Social Geography ◽  
Main Question ◽  
Social Mix ◽  
Spatial Changes ◽  
Social Polarisation ◽  
Spatial Hierarchy ◽  
Surrounding Areas ◽  
The City

This article investigates social and spatial changes in the Athens metropolitan area between 1991 and 2011. The main question is whether social polarisation—and the contraction of intermediate occupational categories—unevenly developed across the city is related to the changing of segregation patterns during the examined period. We established that the working-class moved towards the middle and the middle-class moved towards the top, but the relative position of both parts did not change in the overall socio-spatial hierarchy. The broad types of socio-spatial change in Athens (driven by professionalisation, proletarianisation or polarisation) were eventually related to different spatial imprints in the city’s social geography. Broad trends identified in other cities, like the centralisation of higher occupations and the peripheralisation of poverty, were not at all present here. In Athens, changes between 1991 and 2011 can be summarised by (1) the relative stability and upward social movement of the traditional working-class and their surrounding areas, accounting for almost half of the city, (2) the expansion of traditional bourgeois strongholds to neighbouring formerly socially mixed areas—25% of the city—and their conversion to more homogeneous middle-class neighbourhoods through professionalisation, (3) the proletarianisation of 10% of the city following a course of perpetual decline in parts of the central municipality and (4) the polarisation and increased social mix of the traditional bourgeois strongholds related to the considerable inflow of poor migrants working for upper-middle-class households.

scholarly journals FASILITAS KEBUGARAN JASMANI DI KELURAHAN KALIDERES

2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 2367
Author(s):  
Vincent Vincent
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Target Market ◽  
Third Place ◽  
Lower Middle Class ◽  
Commercial Activities ◽  
To Come ◽  
The City ◽  
Middle Class People ◽  
Human Social Life

Human social life connected with the growth of the city itself, day now people in common are individualist so the idea of third place come up by sociologist Ray Oldenberg. According to Ray Oldenberg place divide into three, first place is a home, second place – workplace, and third place the place where you can relaxing, hangout, and socialize with the other. Third place have an important role to strengthen social relation, but third place day now is more focus on commercial activities, for example mall, café (Starbuck), bar or restaurant (Mcd) with the target market is upper middle class people so it create sense of ‘unwilling’ to lower middle class people to come to  the same place. This problem could cause social gap and third place no longer open for everyone (neutral). To answer this problem, writer designing SPA & Wellness Facility at Kalideres as third place for people in Kalideres region. This facility provide relaxation facility that can be enjoyed for free nor paid. The free facility consist of park, gymnastics area and shallow water pool for relaxation, this free facility is intended so the lower middle class people at Kalideres can enjoyed the third place facility. For the paid facility consist of gymnastics facility, hair treatment, pantry and SPA (massage, bath and pool).Keyword : Facility; Neutral; Relaxation; Third PlaceAbstrakKehidupan sosial manusia berhubungan dengan perkembangan kotanya, saat ini masyarakat pada umumnya bersifat individualis sehingga muncul isu mengenai third place yang diciptakan oleh Sosiolog Ray Oldenberg. Menurut Ray Oldenberg place dibagi menjadi tiga, yaitu first place yang merupakan rumah, second place -tempat bekerja, dan third place yang merupakan tempat untuk bersantai (hangout), berelaksasi dan bersosialisasi. Third place mempunyai peran yang penting untuk mempererat hubungan sosial, akan tetapi third place yang kita temui hari-hari ini di Jakarta lebih fokus kepada aktivitas komersial seperti mall, café (Starbuck), bar atau restoran (Mcd) dengan target marketnya adalah orang menengah ke atas sehingga menimbulkan rasa ‘segan’ bagi orang menengah ke bawah untuk datang ke tempat yang sama. Hal ini kemudian menciptakan kesenjangan sosial dan membuat third place tidak bisa dikunjungi semua orang. Untuk itu menjawab persoalan ini, penulis merancang Fasilitas Kebugaran Jasmani di Kalideres sebagai third place bagi masyarakat Kelurahan Kalideres. Fasilitas ini menyediakan fasilitas relaksasi yang dapat dinikmati secara tidak berbayar maupun berbayar. Fasilitas yang tidak berbayar meliputi area taman, area senam dan area relaksasi di kolam air dangkal, hal ini bertujuan agar orang menengah ke bawah di Kelurahan Kalideres juga dapat menikmati fasilitas third place. Untuk fasilitas yang berbayar terdiri dari fasilitas GYM, salon, pantry dan SPA (pijat, pemandian dan kolam renang).

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