front cover of The Half-Life of Deindustrialization
The Half-Life of Deindustrialization
Working-Class Writing about Economic Restructuring
Sherry Lee Linkon
University of Michigan Press, 2018
Starting in the late 1970s, tens of thousands of American industrial workers lost jobs in factories and mines. Deindustrialization had dramatic effects on those workers and their communities, but its longterm effects continue to ripple through working-class culture. Economic restructuring changed the experience of work, disrupted people’s sense of self, reshaped local landscapes, and redefined community identities and expectations. Through it all, working-class writers have told stories that reflect the importance of memory and the struggle to imagine a different future. These stories make clear that the social costs of deindustrialization affect not only those who lost their jobs but also their children, their communities, and American culture.

Through analysis of poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, film, and drama, The Half-Life of Deindustrialization shows why people and communities cannot simply “get over” the losses of economic restructuring. The past provides inspiration and strength for working-class people, even as the contrast between past and present highlights what has been lost in the service economy. The memory of productive labor and stable, proud working-class communities shapes how people respond to contemporary economic, social, and political issues. These stories can help us understand the resentment, frustration, pride, and persistence of the American working class.
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Hands
Physical Labor, Class, and Cultural Work
Zandy, Janet
Rutgers University Press, 2004
 What are two hands worth?

In linking forms of cultural expression to labor, occupational injuries, and deaths, Hands: Physical Labor, Class, and Cultural Work centers what is usually decentered--the complex culture of working-class people. Janet Zandy begins by examining the literal loss of lives to unsafe jobs and occupational hazards. She asks critical and timely questions about worker representation--who speaks for employees when the mills, mines, factories, and even white-collar cubicles shut down? She presents the voices of working-class writers and artists, and discusses their contribution to knowledge and culture.

This innovative study reveals the flesh and bone beneath the abstractions of labor, class, and culture. It is an essential contribution to the emerging field of working-class studies, offering a hybrid model for bridging communities and non-academic workers to scholars and institutions of knowledge.
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Hard at Work
Life in Singapore
Gerard Sasges and Ng Shi Wen
National University of Singapore Press, 2019
For most of us, work is a basic daily fact of life. But that simple fact encompasses an incredibly wide range of experiences. Hard at Work takes readers into the day-to-day work experiences of more than fifty working people in Singapore who hold jobs that run from the ordinary to the unusual: from ice cream vendors, baristas, police officers and funeral directors to academic ghostwriters, temple flower sellers, and Thai disco girl agents.

Through first-person narratives based on detailed interviews, vividly augmented with color photographs, Hard at Work reminds us of the everyday labor that continually goes on around us, and that every job can reveal something interesting if we just look closely enough. It shows us too the ways inequalities of status and income are felt and internalized in this highly globalized society.
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Hard Work
The Making of Labor History
Melvyn Dubofsky
University of Illinois Press, 2000

A career-spanning collection of writings by the legendary labor historian

One of American labor history's most prominent scholars, Melvyn Dubofsky curated an accessible style and historical reach that have long marked his work as required reading for students and scholars. 

This collection juxtaposes Dubofsky's early writings with scholarship from the 1990s. Selections include work on western working-class radicalism, U.S. labor history in transnational and comparative settings, and the impact of technological change on American worker’s movements. Throughout, the writings provide an invaluable eyewitness perspective on the academic and political climate of the 1960s and 1970s while tracing the development of labor history as a discipline. 

An exploration of important themes in labor history, Hard Work combines essential scholarship with the story of how past and present interact in the work of historians.

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Hard-Boiled
Erin A. Smith
Temple University Press, 2000
In the 1920s a distinctively American detective fiction emerged from the pages of pulp magazines. The “hard-boiled” stories published in Black Mask, Dime Detective, Detective Fiction Weekly, and Clues featured a new kind of hero and soon challenged the popularity of the British mysteries that held readers in thrall on both sides of the Atlantic. In Hard-Boiled Erin A. Smith examines the culture that produced and supported this form of detective story through the 1940s.

Relying on pulp magazine advertising, the memoirs of writers and publishers, Depression-era studies of adult reading habits, social and labor history, Smith offers an innovative account of how these popular stories were generated and read. She shows that although the work of pulp fiction authors like Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Erle Stanley Gardner have become “classics” of popular culture, the hard-boiled genre was dominated by hack writers paid by the word, not self-styled artists. Pulp magazine editors and writers emphasized a gritty realism in the new genre. Unlike the highly rational and respectable British protagonists (Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot, for instance), tough-talking American private eyes relied as much on their fists as their brains as they made their way through tangled plotlines.

Casting working-class readers of pulp fiction as “poachers,” Smith argues that they understood these stories as parables about Taylorism, work, and manhood; as guides to navigating consumer culture; as sites for managing anxieties about working women. Engaged in re-creating white, male privilege for the modern, heterosocial world, pulp detective fiction shaped readers into consumers by selling them what they wanted to hear – stories about manly artisan-heroes who resisted encroaching commodity culture and the female consumers who came with it. Commenting on the genre’s staying power, Smith considers contemporary detective fiction by women, minority, and gay and lesbian writers.
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Highlander
No Ordinary School Second Edition
John M. Glen
University of Tennessee Press, 1996
When John M. Glen's Highlander: No Ordinary School, 1932-1962 first appeared in 1988, it was hailed as a full and authoritative study of one of the South's most extraordinary and controversial institutions. Now, in this second edition, Glen updates Highlander's story through the 1990s. He incorporates newly available materials and the latest scholarship to detail the school's recent work in Appalachia, its efforts to bring international grassroots groups together on common issues, and its support of emerging economic and environmental justice campaigns.
First named the Highlander Folk School and established in 1932 by Myles Horton and Don West near Monteagle, Tennessee, this adult education center has been both a vital resource for southern and Appalachian activists and a catalyst for several major movements for social change. During its first thirty years, Highlander served as a community folk school, as a training center for southern labor and Farmer's Union members, and as a meeting place for black and white civil rights workers. Its advocacy of racial equality ultimately prompted the state of Tennessee to revoke the charter of the original institution in 1962. Undaunted, the school's officers reorganized the institution as the Highlander Research and Education Center in Knoxville, where it gave ongoing support to the civil rights movement and promoted a multiracial poor people's coalition. Today, operating in New Market, Tennessee, it continues to devise new strategies of progressive change from the experiences of ordinary people.
This comprehensive history offers a unique perspective on the movements, institutions, organizations, and individuals that permanently reshaped our understanding of the South and Appalachia in the twentieth century. It also suggests the range of problems and possibilities of using education to achieve economic, political, and racial justice.
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History from the Bottom Up and the Inside Out
Ethnicity, Race, and Identity in Working-Class History
James R. Barrett
Duke University Press, 2017
In History from the Bottom Up and the Inside Out James R. Barrett rethinks the boundaries of American social and labor history by investigating the ways in which working-class, radical, and immigrant people's personal lives intersected with their activism and religious, racial, ethnic, and class identities. Concerned with carving out space for individuals in the story of the working class, Barrett examines all aspects of individuals' subjective experiences, from their personalities, relationships, and emotions to their health and intellectual pursuits. Barrett's subjects include American communists, "blue-collar cosmopolitans"—such as well-read and well-traveled porters, sailors, and hoboes—and figures in early twentieth-century anarchist subculture. He also details the process of the Americanization of immigrant workers via popular culture and their development of class and racial identities, asking how immigrants learned to think of themselves as white. Throughout, Barrett enriches our understanding of working people’s lives, making it harder to objectify them as nameless cogs operating within social and political movements. In so doing, he works to redefine conceptions of work, migration, and radical politics.
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The History of Capitalism in Mexico
Its Origins, 1521–1763
By Enrique Semo
University of Texas Press, 1992

What lies at the center of the Mexican colonial experience? Should Mexican colonial society be construed as a theoretical monolith, capitalist from its inception, or was it essentially feudal, as traditional historiography viewed it? In this pathfinding study, Enrique Semo offers a fresh vision: that the conflicting social formations of capitalism, feudalism, and tributary despotism provided the basic dynamic of Mexico's social and economic development.

Responding to questions raised by contemporary Mexican society, Semo sees the origin of both backwardness and development not in climate, race, or a heterogeneous set of unrelated traits, but rather in the historical interaction of each social formation. In his analysis, Mexico's history is conceived as a succession of socioeconomic formations, each growing within the "womb" of its predecessor. Semo sees the task of economic history to analyze each of these formations and to construct models that will help us understand the laws of its evolution. His premise is that economic history contributes to our understanding of the present not by formulating universal laws, but by studying the laws of development and progression of concrete economic systems.

The History of Capitalism in Mexico opens with the Conquest and concludes with the onset of the profound socioeconomic transformation of the last fifty years of the colony, a period clearly representing the precapitalist phase of Mexican development. In the course of his discussion, Semo addresses the role of dependency—an important theoretical innovation—and introduces the concept of tributary despotism, relating it to the problems of Indian society and economy. He also provides a novel examination of the changing role of the church throughout Mexican colonial history. The result is a comprehensive picture, which offers a provocative alternative to the increasingly detailed and monographic approach that currently dominates the writing of history.

Originally published as Historia del capitalismo en México in 1973, this classic work is now available for the first time in English. It will be of interest to specialists in Mexican colonial history, as well as to general readers.

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Housing Design and Society in Amsterdam
Reconfiguring Urban Order and Identity, 1900-1920
Nancy Stieber
University of Chicago Press, 1998
Winner of the 1999 Spiro Kostof Book Award from the Society of Architectural
Historians.

During the early 1900s, Amsterdam developed an international reputation as an urban mecca when invigorating reforms gave rise to new residential neighborhoods encircling the city's dispirited nineteenth-century districts. This new housing, built primarily with government subsidy, not only was affordable but also met rigorous standards of urban planning and architectural design. Nancy Stieber explores the social and political developments that fostered this innovation in public housing.

Drawing on government records, professional journals, and polemical writings, Stieber examines how government supported large-scale housing projects, how architects like Berlage redefined their role as architects in service to society, and how the housing occupants were affected by public debates about working-class life, the cultural value of housing, and the role of art in society.

Stieber emphasizes the tensions involved in making architectural design a social practice while she demonstrates the success of this collective enterprise in bringing about effective social policy and aesthetic progress.



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