Death and Dying in the Working Class, 1865-1920

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael K. Rosenow
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Cultural Transmission ◽  
Death And Dying ◽  
The United States ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Attitudes Toward Death ◽  
Industrial Age ◽  
Working People ◽  
Grave Markers ◽  
People’S Attitudes

The post-Civil War Industrial Age brought fundamental changes to the economy and its workers, forcing Americans to reassess the meaning of life and death. This illuminating study of working-class rituals of dying and the politics of death explores how Americans struggled to understand the broader forces transforming their worlds. The book investigates working people's beliefs, rituals of death and dying, and the politics of death by honing in on three overarching questions: How did workers, their families, and their communities experience death? Did various identities of class, race, gender, and religion coalesce to form distinct cultures of death for working people? And how did people's attitudes toward death reflect notions of who mattered in U.S. society? Drawing from an eclectic array of sources ranging from Andrew Carnegie to grave markers in Chicago's potter's field, the book portrays the complex political, social, and cultural relationships that fueled the United States' industrial ascent. The result is an undertaking that adds emotional depth to existing history while challenging our understanding of modes of cultural transmission.

Death and Dying in the Working Class

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael K. Rosenow
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Private Property ◽  
Death And Dying ◽  
The United States ◽  
Shop Floor ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Work Related ◽  
Attitudes Toward Death ◽  
Working People ◽  
And Gender

In the broader field of thanatology, scholars investigate rituals of dying, attitudes toward death, evolving trajectories of life expectancy, and more. Applying a lens of social class means studying similar themes but focusing on the men, women, and children who worked for wages in the United States. Working people were more likely to die from workplace accidents, occupational diseases, or episodes of work-related violence. In most periods of American history, it was more dangerous to be a wage worker than it was to be a soldier. Battlegrounds were not just the shop floor but also the terrain of labor relations. American labor history has been filled with violent encounters between workers asserting their views of economic justice and employers defending their private property rights. These clashes frequently turned deadly. Labor unions and working-class communities extended an ethos of mutualism and solidarity from the union halls and picket lines to memorial services and gravesites. They lauded martyrs to movements for human dignity and erected monuments to honor the fallen. Aspects of ethnicity, race, and gender added layers of meaning that intersected with and refracted through individuals’ economic positions. Workers’ encounters with death and the way they made sense of loss and sacrifice in some ways overlapped with Americans from other social classes in terms of religious custom, ritual practice, and material consumption. Their experiences were not entirely unique but diverged in significant ways.

Working-Class Anti-Unionism

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dana M. Caldemeyer
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Working Class ◽  
The United States ◽  
Industrial Age ◽  
Insight Into

Unlike the anti-unionism that runs through the ranks of employers, worker anti-unionism describes the workers who are opposed to or who work against unionization. Anti-union actions can be seen throughout the United States from the early industrial age forward and include anything from refusing to join the union or follow union orders, to fighting against the union, such as with strikebreaking. Workers’ reasons for acting against the union, however, are far more complex, including the economic gains that come from remaining outside the union, moral opposition to unionism, and spite against the union. The variations between workers’ reasons for rejecting the union, then, provide insight into how workers define their place in society as well as their relationship with the union.

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.

Horror and Death: Rethinking Coco's Border Politics

2020 ◽  
Vol 73 (4) ◽  
pp. 41-49
Author(s):  
Orquidea Morales
Keyword(s):  
The United States ◽  
Horror Film ◽  
Walt Disney Company ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Walt Disney ◽  
Day Of The Dead ◽  
Animated Film ◽  
Border Politics ◽  
The Dead ◽  
The U.S

In 2013, the Walt Disney Company submitted an application to trademark “Día de los muertos” (Day of the Dead) as they prepared to launch a holiday themed movie. Almost immediately after this became public Disney faced such strong criticism and backlash they withdrew their petition. By October of 2017 Disney/Pixar released the animated film Coco. Audiences in Mexico and the U.S. praised it's accurate and authentic representation of the celebration of Day of the Dead. In this essay, I argue that despite its generic framing, Coco mobilizes many elements of horror in its account of Miguel's trespassing into the forbidden space of the dead and his transformation into a liminal figure, both dead and alive. Specifically, with its horror so deftly deployed through tropes and images of borders, whether between life and death or the United States and Mexico, Coco falls within a new genre, the border horror film.

Working-Class Fictions

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicola Wilson
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Social Realism ◽  
Cultural Significance ◽  
Reading Public ◽  
Industrial Community ◽  
Working People ◽  
History Of ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Exciting Wave

This chapter explores why working-class fictions flourished in the period from the late 1950s through to the early 1970s and the distinctive contributions that they made to the post-war British and Irish novel. These writers of working-class fiction were celebrated for their bold, socially realistic, and often candid depictions of the lives and desires of ordinary working people. Their works were seen to herald a new and exciting wave of gritty social realism. The narrative focus on the individual signalled a shift in the history of working-class writing away from the plot staples of strikes and the industrial community, striking a chord with a post-war reading public keen to see ordinary lives represented in books in a complex and realistic manner. The cultural significance of such novels was enhanced as they were adapted in quick succession for a mass cinema audience by a group of radical film-makers.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document