Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men

The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War: With a New Introductory Essay

Eric Foner

Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men has been recognized as a classic, an indispensable contribution to our understanding of the causes of the American Civil War. A key work in establishing political ideology as a major concern of modern Americanhistorians, it remains the only full-scale evaluation of the ideas of the early Republican party. modern American historical writing.

Nickel and Dimed

On (Not) Getting By in America

Barbara Ehrenreich

Our sharpest and most original social critic goes "undercover" as an unskilled worker to reveal the dark side of American prosperity. Millions of Americans work full time, year round, for poverty-level wages. In 1998, Barbara Ehrenreich decided to join them. She was inspired in part by the rhetoric surrounding welfare reform, which promised that a job -- any job -- can be the ticket to a better life. But how does anyone survive, let alone prosper, on $6 an hour? To find out, Ehrenreich left her home, took the cheapest lodgings she could find, and accepted whatever jobs she was offered. Moving from Florida to Maine to Minnesota, she worked as a waitress, a hotel maid, a cleaning woman, a nursing-home aide, and a Wal-Mart sales clerk. She lived in trailer parks and crumbling residential motels. Very quickly, she discovered that no job is truly "unskilled," that even the lowliest occupations require exhausting mental and muscular effort. She also learned that one job is not enough; you need at least two if you int to live indoors. Nickel and Dimed reveals low-rent America in all its tenacity, anxiety, and surprising generosity -- a land of Big Boxes, fast food, and a thousand desperate stratagems for survival. Read it for the smoldering clarity of Ehrenreich's perspective and for a rare view of how "prosperity" looks from the bottom. You will never see anything -- from a motel bathroom to a restaurant meal -- in quite the same way again.

Chutes and Ladders

Navigating the Low-wage Labor Market

Katherine S. Newman

Now that the welfare system has been largely dismantled, the fate of America's poor depends on what happens to them in the low-wage labor market. In this timely volume, Katherine S. Newman explores whether the poorest families benefited from the tight labor markets and good economy in the late 1990s. More than a story of the shifting fortunes of the labor market, "Chutes and Ladders" asks probing questions about the motivations of low-wage workers, the dreams they have, and their understanding of the rules of the game.

Creative Union

The Professional Organization of Soviet Composers, 1939-1953

Kiril Tomoff

Central to Tomoff's argument is the institutional authority and prestige that the musical profession accrued and deployed within Soviet society, enabling musicians to withstand the postwar disciplinary campaigns that were so crippling in other artistic and literary spheres."--Jacket.

Poverty in America

A Handbook

John Iceland

Praise for the first edition: “Highly readable. Will very likely become a standard reference for students of poverty.”—William Julius Wilson, author of When Work Disappears “With succinct and engaging prose, Poverty in America covers the gamut —from theoretical issues to measurement to history to public policy—better than any other book out there right now.”—Dalton Conley, author of Honky

King Leopold's Ghost

A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa

Adam Hochschild

Documents the plundering of the territory.

Our Own Time

A History of American Labor and the Working Day

David R. Roediger, Philip S. Foner

Our Own Time retells the story of American labor by focusing on the politics of time and the movements for a shorter working day. It argues that the length of the working day has been the central issue for the American labor movement during its most vigorous periods of activity, uniting workers along lines of craft, gender and ethnicity. The authors hold that the workweek is likely again to take on increased significance as workers face the choice between a society based on free time and one based on alienated work and unemployment.

Mobsters, Unions, and Feds

The Mafia and the American Labor Movement

James B. Jacobs

The first book to document organized labor and the massive federal clean-up effort.

Going Down Jericho Road

The Memphis Strike Kings Last Campaign

Michael Honey

"With novelistic drama and rich scholarly detail, Michael Honey brings to life the magnetic characters who clashed on the Memphis battlefield: the resolute black workers; strike leaders like the impoverished, driven T. O. Jones; black ministers like Martin Luther King's longtime ally, the inspired and dedicated Reverend James Lawson, and his flamboyant colelague, Reverend Ralph Jackson; union men; the first black members of the Memphis city council; dynamic black women like civil rights leader Maxine Smith and community advocate Cornella Crenshaw; and volatile young Black Power advocates like Coby Smith and Charles Cabbage."--BOOK JACKET.

Why is There No Labor Party in the United States?

Robin Archer

Why is the United States the only advanced capitalist country with no labor party? This title puts forward an explanation for why there is no American labor party - an explanation that suggests that much of the conventional wisdom about 'American exceptionalism' is untenable.

To ’Joy My Freedom

Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors After the Civil War

Tera W. Hunter

As the Civil War drew to a close, newly emancipated black women workers made their way to Atlanta—the economic hub of the newly emerging urban and industrial south—in order to build an independent and free life on the rubble of their enslaved past. In an original and dramatic work of scholarship, Tera Hunter traces their lives in the postbellum era and reveals the centrality of their labors to the African-American struggle for freedom and justice. Household laborers and washerwomen were constrained by their employers’ domestic worlds but constructed their own world of work, play, negotiation, resistance, and community organization. Hunter follows African-American working women from their newfound optimism and hope at the end of the Civil War to their struggles as free domestic laborers in the homes of their former masters. We witness their drive as they build neighborhoods and networks and their energy as they enjoy leisure hours in dance halls and clubs. We learn of their militance and the way they resisted efforts to keep them economically depressed and medically victimized. Finally, we understand the despair and defeat provoked by Jim Crow laws and segregation and how they spurred large numbers of black laboring women to migrate north. Hunter weaves a rich and diverse tapestry of the culture and experience of black women workers in the post–Civil War south. Through anecdote and data, analysis and interpretation, she manages to penetrate African-American life and labor and to reveal the centrality of women at the inception—and at the heart—of the new south.

Socialist Cities

Municipal Politics and the Grass Roots of American Socialism

Richard William Judd

Socialist Cities is a comparative treatment of grass-roots Socialist successes. It marks the first comprehensive look at the urban working-class base of the American Socialist movement in the early part of the century, and reveals the importance of municipal politics as an organizing strategy. The author assesses the reactions of both workers and non-workers to the party, and provides a fresh perspective on the perennial question of why socialism 'failed' in America. He demonstrates that the subtle and ongoing dialogue between the party's own internal theoretical and tactical weaknesses and the broader class and structural obstacles against which it struggled, contributed to its failure.

Labor'S War At Home

The Cio In World War Ii

Nelson Lichtenstein

Annotation A new edition of a classic book on how World War II changed the face of labor in the US.

Death in the Haymarket

A Story of Chicago, the First Labor Movement, and the Bombing that Divided Gilded Age America

James R. Green

Brimming with fascinating characters, this riveting history explores the infamous 1886 Haymarket bombing that shocked the nation and led to America's first Red Scare. Illustrations throughout.

Economy and Society

An Outline of Interpretive Sociology

Max Weber

Max Weber's Economy and Society is the greatest sociological treatise written in this century. Published posthumously in Germany in the early 1920's, it has become a constitutive part of the modern sociological imagination. Economy and Society was the first strictly empirical comparison of social structures and normative orders in world-historical depth, containing the famous chapters on social action, religion, law, bureaucracy, charisma, the city, and the political community with its dimensions of class, status and power. Economy and Status is Weber's only major treatise for an educated general public. It was meant to be a broad introduction, but in its own way it is the most demanding textbook yet written by a sociologist. The precision of its definitions, the complexity of its typologies and the wealth of its historical content make the work a continuos challenge at several levels of comprehension: for the advanced undergraduate who gropes for his sense of society, for the graduate student who must develop his own analytical skills, and for the scholar who must match wits with Weber. When the long-awaited first complete English edition of Economy and Society was published in 1968, Arthur Stinchcombe wrote in the American Journal of Sociology: "My answer to the question of whether people should still start their sociological intellectual biographies with Economy and Society is yes." Reinhard Bendix noted in the American Sociological Review that the "publication of a compete English edition of Weber's most systematic work [represents] the culmination of a cultural transmission to the American setting...It will be a study-guide and compendium for years to come for all those interested in historical sociology and comparative study." In a lengthy introduction, Guenther Roth traces the intellectual prehistory of Economy and Society, the gradual emergence of its dominant themes and the nature of its internal logic. Mr. Roth is a Professor of Sociology at Columbia University. Mr. Wittich heads an economic research group at the United Nations.

Created Unequal

The Crisis in American Pay

James K. Galbraith

The strong U.S. economy in the late 1990s has validated the bold thesis of this book. Created Unequal shows that America's historically high inequality of pay and incomes is not the result of impersonal market forces such as technology or trade, but of bad economic policies over several decades and the poor performance they created. Featuring a new preface on the improvements since 1994, Created Unequal is a rousing book that reminds us we can reclaim our country through economic understanding, commonsense policy, and political action.

Hard Work

Remaking the American Labor Movement

Rick Fantasia, Kim Voss

Publisher Description

Office Ladies and Salaried Men

Power, Gender, and Work in Japanese Companies

Yuko Ogasawara

In large corporations in Japan, much of the clerical work is carried out by young women known as "office ladies" (OLs) or "flowers of the workplace". This study shows how OLs frustrated by demanding dead-end jobs thwart their managers and subvert the power stucture to their advantage.

Immigrant Women in the U.S. Workforce

Who Struggles? who Succeeds?

Georges Vernez

This book represents a first effort to systematically describe the experience of immigrant women in the U.S. labor market over the past thirty years. It may come as a surprise that the United States is currently home to more immigrant women than immigrant men. However, until this study was conducted, the attention of analysts and policymakers has focused solely on the labor performance of immigrant men. Georges Vernez's analysis of immigrant women's experience is the first to break this trend, revealing a complex story that resists easy interpretation. Some immigrant women succeed beyond all expectations, while others struggle all their lives and have little to show for it. In examining the myriad factors that contribute to the success and failure of immigrant women in the U.S. workforce, this book provides a profile of their changing origin and characteristics; describes what they do, where they work, and how they fare in the U.S. labor market; and looks at the use they make of public services to support themselves.

Mill & Mine

The CF&I in the Twentieth Century

Howard Lee Scamehorn

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