Labor's Home Front

Labor's Home Front PDF Author: Andrew E. Kersten
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 0814747868
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
One of the oldest, strongest, and largest labor organizations in the U.S., the American Federation of Labor (AFL) had 4 million members in over 20,000 union locals during World War II. The AFL played a key role in wartime production and was a major actor in the contentious relationship between the state, organized labor, and the working class in the 1940s. The war years are pivotal in the history of American labor, but books on the AFL’s experiences are scant, with far more on the radical Congress of Industrial Unions (CIO). Andrew E. Kersten closes this gap with Labor’s Home Front, challenging us to reconsider the AFL and its influence on twentieth-century history. Kersten details the union's contributions to wartime labor relations, its opposition to the open shop movement, divided support for fair employment and equity for women and African American workers, its constant battles with the CIO, and its significant efforts to reshape American society, economics, and politics after the war. Throughout, Kersten frames his narrative with an original, central theme: that despite its conservative nature, the AFL was dramatically transformed during World War II, becoming a more powerful progressive force that pushed for liberal change.

Labor's Home Front

Labor's Home Front PDF Author: Andrew E. Kersten
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 0814747868
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 289

Get Book Here

Book Description
One of the oldest, strongest, and largest labor organizations in the U.S., the American Federation of Labor (AFL) had 4 million members in over 20,000 union locals during World War II. The AFL played a key role in wartime production and was a major actor in the contentious relationship between the state, organized labor, and the working class in the 1940s. The war years are pivotal in the history of American labor, but books on the AFL’s experiences are scant, with far more on the radical Congress of Industrial Unions (CIO). Andrew E. Kersten closes this gap with Labor’s Home Front, challenging us to reconsider the AFL and its influence on twentieth-century history. Kersten details the union's contributions to wartime labor relations, its opposition to the open shop movement, divided support for fair employment and equity for women and African American workers, its constant battles with the CIO, and its significant efforts to reshape American society, economics, and politics after the war. Throughout, Kersten frames his narrative with an original, central theme: that despite its conservative nature, the AFL was dramatically transformed during World War II, becoming a more powerful progressive force that pushed for liberal change.

Class Struggle on the Home Front

Class Struggle on the Home Front PDF Author: G. Cassano
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230246990
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 329

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Book Description
Home/Front examines the gendered exploitation of labor in the household from a postmodern Marxian perspective. The authors of this volume use the anti-foundationalist Marxian economic theories first formulated by Stephen Resnick and Richard Wolff to explore power, domination, and exploitation in the modern household.

Waging War on the Home Front

Waging War on the Home Front PDF Author: Chauncey Del French
Publisher: Oregon State University Press
ISBN: 9780870710483
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
The United States' entry into World War II necessitated rapid mobilization of the country's shipbuilding industry. A massive national effort was needed to build ships faster than they were being sunk by the enemy. This book recounts in intelligent and delightful detail how that need was met by the home-front workforce. Chauncey French and his wife, Jessie, were among the hundreds of thousands of workers recruited by Henry Kaiser for the nation's wartime emergency shipbuilding program. The memoir that French began while working as a pipe fitter in the Kaiser shipyard in Vancouver, Washington, is a compelling account of how the war changed the lives of those at home. His first-hand stories relate the sometimes tense and often humorous intermingling of people-including women and African Americans in unprecedented numbers-from different backgrounds who learned to work together for a common cause. The editors have selected and annotated more than 150 illustrations that capture the human drama, teamwork, and camaraderie that made the incredible level of production at the shipyards possible. Introductory essays, an appendix, notes, additional reading, and an index augment the author's lively narrative. Book jacket.

Home Front to Battlefront

Home Front to Battlefront PDF Author: Franklin L. Lavin
Publisher: War and Society in North Ameri
ISBN: 9780821422557
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Home Front to Battlefront contributes the rich details of one soldier's experience to the broader literature on World War II, offering insight into the wartime career of a Jewish Ohioan in the military from enlistment to training through overseas deployment via personal letters, recollections, official military history, and more.

Hitler's Home Front

Hitler's Home Front PDF Author: Jill Stephenson
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 9781852854423
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 548

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Book Description
This is a groundbreaking new study of an overlooked area of Second World War History.

The Fall of the House of Labor

The Fall of the House of Labor PDF Author: David Montgomery
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521379823
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 510

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Book Description
This book studies the changing ways in which American industrial workers mobilised concerted action in their own interests between the abolition of slavery and the end of open immigration from Europe and Asia. Sustained class conflict between 1916 and 1922 reshaped governmental and business policies, but left labour largely unorganised and in retreat. The House of Labor, so arduously erected by working-class activists during the preceeding generation, did not collapse, but ossified, so that when labour activism was reinvigorated after 1933, the movement split in two. These developments are analysed here in ways which stress the links between migration, neighbourhood life, racial subjugation, business reform, the state, and the daily experience of work itself.

Concentration Camps on the Home Front

Concentration Camps on the Home Front PDF Author: John Howard
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226354776
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 357

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Book Description
Without trial and without due process, the United States government locked up nearly all of those citizens and longtime residents who were of Japanese descent during World War II. Ten concentration camps were set up across the country to confine over 120,000 inmates. Almost 20,000 of them were shipped to the only two camps in the segregated South—Jerome and Rohwer in Arkansas—locations that put them right in the heart of a much older, long-festering system of racist oppression. The first history of these Arkansas camps, Concentration Camps on the Home Front is an eye-opening account of the inmates’ experiences and a searing examination of American imperialism and racist hysteria. While the basic facts of Japanese-American incarceration are well known, John Howard’s extensive research gives voice to those whose stories have been forgotten or ignored. He highlights the roles of women, first-generation immigrants, and those who forcefully resisted their incarceration by speaking out against dangerous working conditions and white racism. In addition to this overlooked history of dissent, Howard also exposes the government’s aggressive campaign to Americanize the inmates and even convert them to Christianity. After the war ended, this movement culminated in the dispersal of the prisoners across the nation in a calculated effort to break up ethnic enclaves. Howard’s re-creation of life in the camps is powerful, provocative, and disturbing. Concentration Camps on the Home Front rewrites a notorious chapter in American history—a shameful story that nonetheless speaks to the strength of human resilience in the face of even the most grievous injustices.

Home Fronts

Home Fronts PDF Author: Lora Romero
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822320425
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 164

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Book Description
Book on domesticity in literature

Design for Victory

Design for Victory PDF Author: William L. Bird
Publisher: Princeton Architectural Press
ISBN: 9781568981406
Category : Antiques & Collectibles
Languages : en
Pages : 132

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Book Description
The poster - inexpensive, colorful, and immediate - was an ideal medium for delivering messages about Americans' duties on the home front during World War II. Design for Victory presents more than 150 of these stunning images - many never reproduced since their first issue - culled from the collections of the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution. William L. Bird, Jr. and Harry R. Rubenstein delve beneath the surface of these colorful graphics, telling the stories behind their production and revealing how posters fulfilled the goals and needs of their creators. The authors describe the history of how specific posters were conceived and received, focusing on the workings of the wartime advertising profession and demonstrating how posters often reflected uneasy relations between labor and management.

Meet Joe Copper

Meet Joe Copper PDF Author: Matthew L. Basso
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226038866
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 375

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Book Description
“I realize that I am a soldier of production whose duties are as important in this war as those of the man behind the gun.” So began the pledge that many home front men took at the outset of World War II when they went to work in the factories, fields, and mines while their compatriots fought in the battlefields of Europe and on the bloody beaches of the Pacific. The male experience of working and living in wartime America is rarely examined, but the story of men like these provides a crucial counter-narrative to the national story of Rosie the Riveter and GI Joe that dominates scholarly and popular discussions of World War II. In Meet Joe Copper, Matthew L. Basso describes the formation of a powerful, white, working-class masculine ideology in the decades prior to the war, and shows how it thrived—on the job, in the community, and through union politics. Basso recalls for us the practices and beliefs of the first- and second-generation immigrant copper workers of Montana while advancing the historical conversation on gender, class, and the formation of a white ethnic racial identity. Meet Joe Copper provides a context for our ideas of postwar masculinity and whiteness and finally returns the men of the home front to our reckoning of the Greatest Generation and the New Deal era.