Combat in the Streets

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
John B. Jentz ◽  
Richard Schneirov
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Public Awareness ◽  
The United States ◽  
Fundamental Change ◽  
Labor Leader ◽  
Equal Footing ◽  
Working People

This chapter discusses the great railroad strike of 1877. In the summer of 1877, the United States experienced its first national strike, an unorganized, spontaneous rebellion of working people in cities from Baltimore and Pittsburgh to St. Louis and Chicago. The Great Strike produced a fundamental change in public awareness. Beforehand, according to Socialist and labor leader George Schilling, “the labor question was of little or no importance to the average citizen.” After the strike, no one could deny that there was a “labor question” or a working class that did not feel on an “equal footing” with the rest of society. In the new climate of opinion, the Socialists prospered because they had answers to the new labor question, whereas others had denied its existence.

Introduction: The Conservative Turn in Postwar United States Working-Class History

2008 ◽  
Vol 74 (1) ◽  
pp. 70-75
Author(s):  
Jefferson Cowie
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Political Culture ◽  
Domestic Politics ◽  
The United States ◽  
The World ◽  
Working People ◽  
Working Class History ◽  
Big Box ◽  
Conservative Turn

The topic of working-class conservatism in the postwar United States might seem a particularly narrow and nationally-specific theme for a journal that stakes its reputation on the broader terrain of comparative and transnational history. Yet, in so many ways, the United States—despite its recently diminished role both economically and militarily around the world—continues to be the center of the globe's economic and military power structure. To risk overstatement, the domestic politics of the United States are a central part of international politics. At the core of a nation's political culture, it might be added, are its working people, whether in dying industrial towns or burgeoning big box retail centers. Readers outside the United States might have some sympathy for the plea of British rocker Billy Bragg who included a note to his American fans in his 1988 release. “I have no vote in your Presidential election,” Bragg explained as the Reagan years wound to a close, “yet its outcome will directly affect my future and the future of millions of other people around the world. Forgive me for putting this immense responsibility on your shoulders… . Remember, when you elect a President, you are electing a President for all of us. Please be more careful this time.”

Middle-Class Victorian Street Arabs: Modern Re-creations of the Baker Street Irregulars

2012 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 36-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dominic Cheetham
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Children's Literature ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Street Children ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
The United States ◽  
Sherlock Holmes ◽  
Upward Shift

In three of Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories there are brief appearances of the Baker Street Irregulars, a group of ‘street Arabs’ who help Holmes with his investigations. These children have been re-imagined in modern children's literature in at least twenty-seven texts in a variety of media and with writers from both Britain and the United States. All these modern stories show a marked upward shift in the class of the Irregulars away from the lower working class of Conan-Doyle's originals. The shift occurs through attributing middle-class origins to the leaders of the Irregulars, through raising the class of the Irregulars in general, and through giving the children life environments more comfortable, safe, and financially secure than would have been possible for late-Victorian street children. Because of the variety in texts and writers, it is argued that this shift is not a result of the conscious political or ideological positions of individual writers, but rather reflects common unconscious narrative choices. The class-shift is examined in relation to the various pressures of conventions in children's literature, concepts of audience, and common concepts of class in society.

Rights Discourse and Assisted Suicide

2001 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-99
Author(s):  
Penney Lewis
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Assisted Suicide ◽  
Public Awareness ◽  
The United States ◽  
Medical Professionals ◽  
Physician Assisted Suicide ◽  
Criminal Trials ◽  
Supreme Courts ◽  
Rights Discourse ◽  
Law Professors

The debate surrounding the legalization of assisted suicide has been galvanized in recent years by reports of specific cases of assisted suicide, primarily involving physicians such as Kevorkian and Quill, and by impassioned pleas for legalization and assistance in suicide from individuals suffering in the throes of terminal or agonizing diseases, such as Sue Rodriguez. Media attention on criminal trials of individuals accused of assisting in a suicide has heightened public awareness of the issue. The constitutionality of criminal prohibitions on assisted suicide has been tested in various jurisdictions, and has recently been considered by the Supreme Courts of both the United States and Canada. Following two narrowly unsuccessful attempts to enact dignified death provisions by referenda in Washington and California, Oregon voters passed the first of such proposed laws in November 1994, providing for physician-assisted suicide under certain specified conditions. Attempts to introduce legislation to legalize assisted suicide in other jurisdictions have been galvanized by the success in Oregon. A model statute has been drafted by a group of law professors, philosophers and medical professionals.

The Other America

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harris Beider ◽  
Kusminder Chahal
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Ethnic Diversity ◽  
The United States ◽  
Race Identity ◽  
2016 Election ◽  
White Working Class ◽  
Mainstream Society ◽  
The Right

Widely stereotyped as anti-immigrant, against civil-rights, or supporters of Trump and the right, can the white working class of the United States really be reduced to a singular group with similar views? This book begins with an overview of how the term “white working class” became weaponized and used as a vessel to describe people who were seen to be “deplorable.” The national narrative appears to credit (or blame) white working-class mobilization across the country for the success of Donald Trump in the 2016 US elections. Those who take this position see the white working class as being problematic in different ways: grounded in norms and behaviors that seem out of step with mainstream society; at odds with the reality of increased ethnic diversity across the country and especially in cities; blaming others for their economic plight; and disengaged from politics. Challenging populist views about the white working class in the United States, the book showcases what they really think about the defining issues in today's America—from race, identity, and change to the crucial on-the-ground debates occurring at the time of the 2016 U.S. election. As the 2020 presidential elections draw near, this is an invaluable insight into the complex views on 2016 election candidates, race, identity and cross-racial connections.

The Lebanese Civil War 1975–90

2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 105-124
Author(s):  
Jamal Wakim
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Working Class ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Elites ◽  
Economic Role ◽  
Lebanese Civil War ◽  
Organized Violence ◽  
State And Society ◽  
Leftist Parties

This article argues that the Lebanese Civil War (1975–90) was in essence a terror of state directed by mercantile economic and political elites (the comprador class) controlling the Lebanese state and society against the middle and poorer classes (the working class). The aim of this terror or organized violence was to subdue the subordinate classes, which in the late 1960s and early 1970s rebelled against the confessional system that operated for the benefit of the comprador class. The rebellion was expressed by members of the working-class joining cross-confessional nationalist and leftist parties. Hence, violence was aimed at reestablishing the confessional order as a means to restore a hegemonic system that served the interests of the comprador class at a time when this class was rehabilitating its economic role by resurrecting the financial system, which had received a severe blow in the late 1960s. It effected this rehabilitation through the Taif Agreement signed between Lebanese parliamentarians in 1989, under the auspices of Syria, Saudi Arabia, and the United States, to favor the new mercantile elite led by Rafiq Hariri.

Comment

1980 ◽  
Vol 2 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 108-109
Author(s):  
Mark Kesselman
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Local Government ◽  
Federal Government ◽  
The United States ◽  
State Governments ◽  
Local Autonomy ◽  
Fundamental Change ◽  
Local Expenditures

Acentral ingredient of democracy in the United States, according to Tocqueville, was local autonomy – yet the data presented by Professor Austin suggests a fundamental change in the United States since Tocquevilles time. Most local expenditures are now provided by the federal and state governments, most “local” programs are not local at all, for many (if not most) purposes the local government has become an extension of the federal government, and it is often replaced altogether by federally created field agencies (what the French call deconcentrated administration).

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