Steve Nelson, American Radical

Steve Nelson, American Radical PDF Author: Steve Nelson
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Pre
ISBN: 0822971526
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 479

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Book Description
As the immigrant teenage son of a Croatian miller, Steve Nelson arrived in the United States after World War I and entered a world of chronic unemployment, low wages, dangerous work, and discrimination. Following the path taken by many fellow immigrant workers, he joined the Communist Party. He became a full-time organizer and ultimately a major leader, only to resign in 1957 after unsuccessful attempts to democratize the American party. This remarkable oral biography, recounted in collaboration with two historians, describes day-to-day life in the party and traces Nelson's career from his beginnings in the Pennsylvania coalfields to his secret work as party courier in the Far East; form the battlefields of Civil War Spain to the jails of Cold War Pittsburgh; and from a small group of Communist autoworkers in Detroit to the upper reaches of a party leadership in New York. It is the frank and analytical account of a leading American working-class activist.

Steve Nelson, American Radical

Steve Nelson, American Radical PDF Author: Steve Nelson
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Pre
ISBN: 0822971526
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 479

Get Book Here

Book Description
As the immigrant teenage son of a Croatian miller, Steve Nelson arrived in the United States after World War I and entered a world of chronic unemployment, low wages, dangerous work, and discrimination. Following the path taken by many fellow immigrant workers, he joined the Communist Party. He became a full-time organizer and ultimately a major leader, only to resign in 1957 after unsuccessful attempts to democratize the American party. This remarkable oral biography, recounted in collaboration with two historians, describes day-to-day life in the party and traces Nelson's career from his beginnings in the Pennsylvania coalfields to his secret work as party courier in the Far East; form the battlefields of Civil War Spain to the jails of Cold War Pittsburgh; and from a small group of Communist autoworkers in Detroit to the upper reaches of a party leadership in New York. It is the frank and analytical account of a leading American working-class activist.

Shadow Network

Shadow Network PDF Author: Anne Nelson
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1635573203
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 449

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Book Description
“Reveals a political trend that threatens both our form of government and our species.” - Timothy Snyder, author of ON TYRANNY "Riveting.... Want to understand how so many Americans turned against truth? Read this book." Nancy Maclean, author of DEMOCRACY IN CHAINS In 1981, emboldened by Ronald Reagan's election, a group of some fifty Republican operatives, evangelicals, oil barons, and gun lobbyists met in a Washington suburb to coordinate their attack on civil liberties and the social safety net. These men and women called their coalition the Council for National Policy. Over four decades, this elite club has become a strategic nerve center for channeling money and mobilizing votes behind the scenes. Its secretive membership rolls represent a high-powered roster of fundamentalists, oligarchs, and their allies, from Oliver North, Ed Meese, and Tim LaHaye in the Council's early days to Kellyanne Conway, Ralph Reed, Tony Perkins, and the DeVos and Mercer families today. In Shadow Network, award-winning author and media analyst Anne Nelson chronicles this astonishing history and illuminates the coalition's key figures and their tactics. She traces how the collapse of American local journalism laid the foundation for the Council for National Policy's information war and listens in on the hardline broadcasting its members control. And she reveals how the group has collaborated with the Koch brothers to outfit Radical Right organizations with state-of-the-art apps and a shared pool of captured voter data - outmaneuvering the Democratic Party in a digital arms race whose result has yet to be decided. In a time of stark and growing threats to our most valued institutions and democratic freedoms, Shadow Network is essential reading.

A David Montgomery Reader

A David Montgomery Reader PDF Author: David W. Montgomery
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252056795
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 335

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Book Description
A foundational figure in modern labor history, David Montgomery both redefined and reoriented the field. This collection of Montgomery’s most important published and unpublished articles and essays draws from the historian’s entire five-decade career. Taken together, the writings trace the development of Montgomery’s distinct voice and approach while providing a crucial window into an era that changed the ways scholars and the public understood working people’s place in American history. Three overarching themes and methods emerge from these essays: that class provided a rich reservoir of ideas and strategies for workers to build movements aimed at claiming their democratic rights; that capital endured with the power to manage the contours of economic life and the capacities of the state but that workers repeatedly and creatively mounted challenges to the terms of life and work dictated by capital; and that Montgomery’s method grounded his gritty empiricism and the conceptual richness of his analysis in the intimate social relations of production and of community, neighborhood, and family life.

The Cold War at Home

The Cold War at Home PDF Author: Philip Jenkins
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469619652
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
One of the most significant industrial states in the country, with a powerful radical tradition, Pennsylvania was, by the early 1950s, the scene of some of the fiercest anti-Communist activism in the United States. Philip Jenkins examines the political and social impact of the Cold War across the state, tracing the Red Scare's reverberations in party politics, the labor movement, ethnic organizations, schools and universities, and religious organizations. Among Jenkins's most provocative findings is the revelation that, although their absolute numbers were not large, Communists were very well positioned in crucial Pennsylvania regions and constituencies, particularly in labor unions, the educational system, and major ethnic organizations. Instead of focusing on Pennsylvania's right-wing politicians (the sort represented nationally by Senator Joseph McCarthy), Jenkins emphasizes the anti-Communist activities of liberal politicians, labor leaders, and ethnic community figures who were terrified of Communist encroachments on their respective power bases. He also stresses the deep roots of the state's militant anti-Communism, which can be traced back at least into the 1930s.

Forgotten Radicals

Forgotten Radicals PDF Author: Walter T. Howard
Publisher: University Press of America
ISBN: 9780761830900
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
This detailed investigation of Communists and their Party in the hard coal fields of northeastern Pennsylvania, known as the Anthracite, draws on sources such as the central archives of the Communist Party of the United States to examine the origins, growth, and decline of the relatively small but active Marxist-Leninist organization that operated there during the first half of the 20th century. Anthracite. Just mentioning the name of the hard coal region of Pennsylvania conjures up classic images of labor violence and class conflict: Molly Maguires, Lattimer and the 1902 national coal strike. Yet this legendary tradition of labor and class discord has prompted no historian to chronicle the complete story of the region's largest and most active radical group in the 20th century: American Communists. They are forgotten radicals. Chronicling the story of these forgotten radicals allows us to examine American Communism in an important area of the highly industrialized state of Pennsylvania where a major capitalist enterprise, the hard coal industry, employed a large contingent of immigrant workers for about half of the 20th century. To be sure, studying these radicals permits us to explore the overall historical pattern of American Communism_the founding of the Party in 1919, the challenges of the 1920s, the heyday of the thirties, the turns of World War II, and the decline during the McCarthy period_in a regional context. Thus, Forgotten Radicals fills a niche in local studies of rank and file Communist activity.

War and Democracy: A Comparative Study of the Korean War and the Peloponnesian War

War and Democracy: A Comparative Study of the Korean War and the Peloponnesian War PDF Author: David R. McCann
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317452410
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 485

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Book Description
A comparison of the cultural and political/institutional dimensions of war's impact on Greece during the Peloponnesian War, and the United States and the two Koreas, North and South, during the Korean War. It demonstrates the many underlying similarities between the two wars.

The Face of Decline

The Face of Decline PDF Author: Thomas L. Dublin
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501707299
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
The anthracite coal region of Pennsylvania once prospered. Today, very little mining or industry remains, although residents have made valiant efforts to restore the fabric of their communities. In The Face of Decline, the noted historians Thomas Dublin and Walter Licht offer a sweeping history of this area over the course of the twentieth century. Combining business, labor, social, political, and environmental history, Dublin and Licht delve into coal communities to explore grassroots ethnic life and labor activism, economic revitalization, and the varied impact of economic decline across generations of mining families. The Face of Decline also features the responses to economic crisis of organized capital and labor, local business elites, redevelopment agencies, and state and federal governments. Dublin and Licht draw on a remarkable range of sources: oral histories and survey questionnaires; documentary photographs; the records of coal companies, local governments, and industrial development corporations; federal censuses; and community newspapers. The authors examine the impact of enduring economic decline across a wide region but focus especially on a small group of mining communities in the region's Panther Valley, from Jim Thorpe through Lansford to Tamaqua. The authors also place the anthracite region within a broader conceptual framework, comparing anthracite's decline to parallel developments in European coal basins and Appalachia and to deindustrialization in the United States more generally.

Blood on Steel

Blood on Steel PDF Author: Michael Dennis
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421410176
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 153

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Book Description
A pivotal moment in the history of the movement for working-class democracy, the “Memorial Day Massacre” vividly captured the conflicting ideals of workers’ rights and the sanctity of private property. On Memorial Day 1937, thousands of steelworkers, middle-class supporters, and working-class activists gathered at Sam's Place on the Southeast Side of Chicago to protest Republic Steel’s virulent opposition to union recognition and collective bargaining. By the end of the day, ten marchers had been mortally wounded and more than one hundred badly injured, victims of a terrifying police riot. Sam's Place, the headquarters for the steelworkers, was transformed into a bloody and frantic triage unit for treating heads split open by police batons, flesh torn by bullets, and limbs mangled badly enough to require amputation. While no one doubts the importance of the Memorial Day Massacre, Michael Dennis identifies it as a focal point in the larger effort to revitalize American equality during the New Deal. In Blood on Steel, Dennis shows how the incident—captured on film by Paramount newsreels—validated the claims of labor activists and catalyzed public opinion in their favor. In the aftermath of the massacre, Senate hearings laid bare patterns of anti-union aggression among management, ranging from blacklists to harassment and vigilante violence. Companies were determined to subvert the right to form a union, which Congress had finally recognized in 1935. Only in the following year would Congress pass the Fair Labor Standards Act, which established a minimum wage and a maximum work week, outlawed child labor, and regulated hazardous work. Like the Wagner Act that protected collective bargaining, this law aimed to protect workers who had suffered the worst of what the Great Depression had inflicted. Dennis‘s wide-angle perspective reveals the Memorial Day Massacre as not simply another bloody incident in the long story of labor-management tension in American history but as an illustration of the broad-based movement for social democracy which developed in the New Deal era.

American Exceptionalism?

American Exceptionalism? PDF Author: Rick Halpern
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 134925584X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
The idea that American historical development is different from that of other nations is an old one, yet it shows no sign of losing its emotive power. 'Exceptionalism' continues to excite, beguile, and frustrate students of the American past. The essays in this volume explore the ways in which the process of class formation in the United States can be said to be distinctive. Focusing upon the impact of liberal political thought, race and immigration, and the role of the war-time state, they challenge particularist and nation-centred modes of explanation. Comparing American historical development with Italian, South African, and Australian examples, the essays reinvigorate a tired debate.

Forging American Communism

Forging American Communism PDF Author: Edward P. Johanningsmeier
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400863678
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 458

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Book Description
A major figure in the history of twentieth-century American radicalism, William Z. Foster (1881-1961) fought his way out of the slums of turn-of-the-century Philadelphia to become a professional revolutionary as well as a notorious and feared labor agitator. Drawing on private family papers, FBI files, and recently opened Russian archives, this first full-scale biography traces Foster's early life as a world traveler, railroad worker, seaman, hobo, union activist, and radical journalist, and also probes the origins and implications of his ill-fated career as a top-echelon Communist official and three-time presidential candidate. Even though Foster's long and eventful life ended in Moscow, where he was given a state funeral in Red Square, he was, as portrayed here, a thoroughly American radical. The book not only reveals the circumstances of Foster's poverty-stricken childhood in Philadelphia, but also vividly describes his work and travels in the American West. Also included are fascinating accounts of his early political career as a Socialist, "Wobbly," and anarcho-syndicalist, and of his activities as the architect of giant organizing campaigns by the American Federation of Labor, involving hundreds of thousands of workers in the meatpacking and steel industries. The author views Foster's influence in the American Communist movement from the perspective of the history of American labor and unionism, but he also offers a realistic assessment of Foster's career in light of factional intrigues at the highest levels of the Communist International. Originally published in 1994. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.