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143 books match the query 'Class' and 7 start with a

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A Question of Class

The Redneck Stereotype in Southern Fiction

Duane Carr

University of Wisconsin Press, 1997

“Rednecks” have long been subjects of scorn and ridicule, especially in the South. Carr probes the historical and sociological reasons for the descent of this social class into poverty, their inability to rise above it, and their continuing subjugation to a stereotype developed by others—and all too often accepted by themselves. Carr also records the progress in Southern fiction of this negative stereotype, from antebellum writers who saw rednecks as threats to the social order, to post-Civil War writers who lamented the lost potential of these people and urged sympathy and understanding, to contemporary writers who favor acceptance. Ultimately, this work is an evaluation of individual Southern fiction writers in their capacity to rise above stereotyping.

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A Taste for Language

Literacy, Class, and English Studies

James Ray Watkins Jr.

Southern Illinois University Press, 2009

“This is a book about the American Dream as it has become embodied in the university in general and in the English department in particular,” writes James Ray Watkins at the start of A Taste for Language: Literacy, Class, and English Studies. In it, Watkins argues that contemporary economic and political challenges require a clear understanding of the identity of English studies, making elementary questions about literacy, language, literature, education, and class once again imperative.

A personal history of university-level English studies in the twentieth century, A Taste for Language combines biography, autobiography, and critical analysis to explore the central role of freshman English and literary studies in the creation and maintenance of the middle class. It tells a multi-generational story of the author and his father, intertwined with close reading of texts and historical analysis. The story moves from depression-era Mississippi, where the author's father was born, to a contemporary English department, where the author now teaches.

Watkins looks at not only textbooks, scholars, and the academy but also at families and other social institutions. A rich combination of biography, autobiography, and critical analysis, A Taste for Language questions what purpose an education in English language and literature serves in the lives of the educated in a class-based society and whether English studies has become wholly irrelevant in the twenty-first century.

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Affirmative Advocacy

Race, Class, and Gender in Interest Group Politics

Dara Z. Strolovitch

University of Chicago Press, 2007

The United States boasts scores of organizations that offer crucial representation for groups that are marginalized in national politics, from women to racial minorities to the poor. Here, in the first systematic study of these organizations, Dara Z. Strolovitch explores the challenges and opportunities they face in the new millennium, as waning legal discrimination coincides with increasing political and economic inequalities within the populations they represent.

Drawing on rich new data from a survey of 286 organizations and interviews with forty officials, Strolovitch finds that groups too often prioritize the interests of their most advantaged members: male rather than female racial minorities, for example, or affluent rather than poor women. But Strolovitch also finds that many organizations try to remedy this inequity, and she concludes by distilling their best practices into a set of principles that she calls affirmative advocacy—a form of representation that aims to overcome the entrenched but often subtle biases against people at the intersection of more than one marginalized group. Intelligently combining political theory with sophisticated empirical methods, Affirmative Advocacy will be required reading for students and scholars of American politics.

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All That Glitters

Class, Conflict, and Community in Cripple Creek

Elizabeth Jameson

University of Illinois Press, 1998

At the turn of the century, Colorado's Cripple Creek District captured the national imagination with the extraordinary wealth of its gold mines and the unquestionable strength of the militant Western Federation of Miners.

Elizabeth Jameson tells the entertaining story of Cripple Creek, the scene in 1894 of one of radical labor's most stunning victories and, in 1903 and 1904, of one of its most crushing defeats. Jameson draws on working-class oral histories, the Victor and Cripple Creek Daily Press published by 34 of the local labor unions, and the 1900 manuscript census. She connects unions with lodges and fraternal associations, ethnic identity, families, households, and partisan politics. Through these ties, she probes the differences in age, skill, gender, marital status, and ethnicity that strained working-class unity and contributed to the fall of labor in Cripple Creek.

Jameson's book will be required reading for western, ethnic, and working-class historians seeking an alternative interpretation of western mining struggles that emphasizes class, gender, and multiple sources of social identity.

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Archaeology below the Cliff

Race, Class, and Redlegs in Barbadian Sugar Society

Matthew C. Reilly

University of Alabama Press, 2019

First book-length archaeological study of a nonelite white population on a Caribbean plantation

Archaeology below the Cliff: Race, Class, and Redlegs in Barbadian Sugar Society is the first archaeological study of the poor whites of Barbados, the descendants of seventeenth-century European indentured servants and small farmers. “Redlegs” is a pejorative to describe the marginalized group who remained after the island transitioned to a sugar monoculture economy dependent on the labor of enslaved Africans. A sizable portion of the “white” minority, the Redlegs largely existed on the peripheries of the plantation landscape in an area called “Below Cliff,” which was deemed unsuitable for profitable agricultural production. Just as the land on which they resided was cast as marginal, so too have the poor whites historically and contemporarily been derided as peripheral and isolated as well as idle, alcoholic, degenerate, inbred, and irrelevant to a functional island society and economy.

Using archaeological, historical, and oral sources, Matthew C. Reilly shows how the precarious existence of the Barbadian Redlegs challenged elite hypercapitalistic notions of economics, race, and class as they were developing in colonial society. Experiencing pronounced economic hardship, similar to that of the enslaved, albeit under very different circumstances, Barbadian Redlegs developed strategies to live in a harsh environment. Reilly’s investigations reveal that what developed in Below Cliff was a moral economy, based on community needs rather than free-market prices.

Reilly extensively excavated households from the tenantry area on the boundaries of the Clifton Hall Plantation, which was abandoned in the 1960s, to explore the daily lives of poor white tenants and investigate their relationships with island economic processes and networks. Despite misconceptions of strict racial isolation, evidence also highlights the importance of poor white encounters and relationships with Afro-Barbadians. Historical data are also incorporated to address how an underrepresented demographic experienced the plantation landscape. Ultimately, Reilly’s narrative situates the Redlegs within island history, privileging inclusion and embeddedness over exclusion and isolation.

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Arms, Country, and Class

The Philadelphia Militia and the Lower Sort during the American Revolution

Steve Rosswurm

Rutgers University Press, 1989

In 1949 and 1950, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) expelled many left-wing unions, representing 750,000 workers, because they were supposedly Communist-dominated. This collection of previously unpublished essays explores the history of those eleven left-led unions. Some essays consider specific aspects of several unions--the Longshoremen, the United Electricians (UE), the Fur Workers, and the Food and Tobacco Workers--while others take up the impact of the federal government's and the Catholic church's anticommunism upon the unions as a whole.

This collection also addresses central domestic issues of twentieth-century America: race and government policy in the shaping of trade unionism; the impact of anticommunism and the cold war on race relations and working conditions; and the short- and long-range impact of the expulsions upon the labor movement. With groundbreaking essays that also concern the post-World War II period, Southern workers and workers in non-basic industries, this book will appeal to students of radicalism, race relations, anticommunism, and labor history.

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