Synopses & Reviews
This contributor volume brings the best work of such established historians as Morris Schappes, Nathan Godfried, and Eric Foner together with the newer voices of Elizabeth Sharpe and Jennifer Bosch. Its eleven essays challenge the boundary between the older, institutional labor history and the more recent social histories of working people. By combining a focus on culture, women's history, and race relations that is characteristic of the best of the latest working class history with an emphasis on formal protests, leadership, and power, the volume suggests that a truly new labor history will reflect a variety of concerns and draw on diverse inspirations.
In three chapters elucidating new features of labor biography and working-class politics, the volume's opening section considers George Edwin McNeill, the Socialist Party's efforts to free Eugene Debs, and the Socialist Party's left wing. Turning to women in labor history, the next section includes two chapters on Union W.A.G.E., an organization of mainly white, working class women, and Ellen Gates Starr, co-founder of Hull House. In a third section on African-American history, two scholars consider Black labor and African-American laborers in the Reconstruction era. The final section considers culture, education, and the working class. These chapters analyze the role of broadcasting and the Socialists' effort to establish an alternative radio station; labor education in the 1920s; the literary portrayal of sailors in Dana's Two Years Before the Mast, and the victims of the Rapp-Coudert Committee. By placing workers and their organizations convincingly within the context of their culture, this volume helps to demonstrate the ways the labor movement has remade this nation and how the nation has shaped the labor movement.
Review
. . . you might ask your local library to order a copy for their labor history section.AFSCME Public Employee
Synopsis
This contributor volume brings the best work of such established historians as Morris Schappes, Nathan Godfried, and Eric Foner together with the newer voices of Elizabeth Sharpe and Jennifer Bosch. Its eleven essays challenge the boundary between the older, institutional labor history and the more recent social histories of working people. By combining a focus on culture, women's history, and race relations that is characteristic of the best of the latest working-class history with an emphasis on formal protests, leadership, and power, the volume suggests that a truly new labor history will reflect a variety of concerns and draw on diverse inspirations. By placing workers and their organizations convincingly within the context of their culture, the book helps to demonstrate the ways the labor movement has remade this nation and how the nation has shaped the labor movement.
Synopsis
Combines the best aspects of the "old" institutional labor history and the "new" social history of working people.
Description
Includes bibliographical references (p. [189]-199) and index.
Table of Contents
Introduction
U.S. Labor History: Movements and Leaders
"To Fight This Thing Till I Die": The Career of George Edwin McNeill by Robert R. Montgomery
"This is a Crusade!" Socialist Party Amnesty Campaigns to Free Eugene V. Debs, 1919-1921 by John Sherman
A Path Not Taken: The Proletarian Party and the Early History of Communism in the United States by Allen Ruff
Women in Labor History
A "Society of Outsiders": Union W.A.G.E., Working-Class Feminism, and the Labor Movement by Rochelle Gatlin
Ellen Gates Starr: Hull House Labor Activist by Jennifer Bosch
African-American History
Black Labor Conventions during Reconstruction by Eric Foner
The History and Legacy of Mississippi Plantation Labor by Elizabeth Ann Sharpe
Culture, Education, and the Working Class
Legitimizing the Mass Media Structure: The Socialists and American Broadcasting, 1926-1932 by Nathan Godfried
"Education for a New Social Order": The Ideological Struggle Over Workers' Education in the 1920s by Gloria Garrett Samson
"A Voice From the Forecastle": R.H. Dana's Two Years Before the Mast by Horst Ihde
Philip S. Foner at City College--Victim of the Rapp-Coudert Committee by Morris U. Schappes
Selected Bibliography
Index