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Author: Charles Bergquist
Publisher: Verso
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 228
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Book Description
The American hemisphere is now more tightly interconnected than ever before, with the trend toward greater economic, social and cultural integration apparently certain to continue. In this landmark text, Charles Bergquist offers a fresh interpretation of the historical background to this integration from the unusual perspective of labor. Focusing on slices of US history, and built around critiques of a handful of classic and influential texts, his five essays form not a conventional narrative history but rather a study in the construction of historical meaning, and an invitation to make use of history in the forging of a new, more democratic understanding of politics in the Americas. The book opens with an illustration of how the different labor systems of colonial America best explain the great disparity in development and power between the US and Latin America today. It goes on to link the origins of US imperialism to labor’s democratic studies at home, and to explore labor’s role in the Latin American social revolutions, before presenting an analysis of popular culture in the Americas in which Donald Duck is revealed as the representative of all workers. Will Donald rewrite the history books and, in our post-Cold War era, realize his democratic potential? Or will he bungle the job and succumb to the postmodern confusions of the capitalists’ “New World Order?”
Author: Charles Bergquist
Publisher: Verso
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 228
Get Book Here
Book Description
The American hemisphere is now more tightly interconnected than ever before, with the trend toward greater economic, social and cultural integration apparently certain to continue. In this landmark text, Charles Bergquist offers a fresh interpretation of the historical background to this integration from the unusual perspective of labor. Focusing on slices of US history, and built around critiques of a handful of classic and influential texts, his five essays form not a conventional narrative history but rather a study in the construction of historical meaning, and an invitation to make use of history in the forging of a new, more democratic understanding of politics in the Americas. The book opens with an illustration of how the different labor systems of colonial America best explain the great disparity in development and power between the US and Latin America today. It goes on to link the origins of US imperialism to labor’s democratic studies at home, and to explore labor’s role in the Latin American social revolutions, before presenting an analysis of popular culture in the Americas in which Donald Duck is revealed as the representative of all workers. Will Donald rewrite the history books and, in our post-Cold War era, realize his democratic potential? Or will he bungle the job and succumb to the postmodern confusions of the capitalists’ “New World Order?”
Author: Clayton Sinyai
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801472992
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 310
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Book Description
In this new political history of the labor movement, Clayton Sinyai examines the relationship between labor activism and the American democratic tradition. Sinyai shows how America's working people and union leaders debated the first questions of democratic theory--and in the process educated themselves about the rights and responsibilities of democratic citizenship. In tracing the course of the American labor movement from the founding of the Knights of Labor in the 1870s to the 1968 presidential election and its aftermath, Sinyai explores the political dimensions of collective bargaining, the structures of unions and businesses, and labor's relationships with political parties and other social movements. Schools of Democracy analyzes how labor activists wrestled with fundamental aspects of political philosophy and the development of American democracy, including majority rule versus individual liberty, the rule of law, and the qualifications required of citizens of a democracy. Offering a balanced assessment of mainstream leaders of American labor, from Samuel Gompers to George Meany, and their radical critics, including the Socialists and the Industrial Workers of the World, Sinyai provides an unusual and refreshing perspective on American labor history.
Author: Joseph A. McCartin
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 146961703X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 324
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Book Description
Since World War I, says Joseph McCartin, the central problem of American labor relations has been the struggle among workers, managers, and state officials to reconcile democracy and authority in the workplace. In his comprehensive look at labor issues during the decade of the Great War, McCartin explores the political, economic, and social forces that gave rise to this conflict and shows how rising labor militancy and the sudden erosion of managerial control in wartime workplaces combined to create an industrial crisis. The search for a resolution to this crisis led to the formation of an influential coalition of labor Democrats, AFL unionists, and Progressive activists on the eve of U.S. entry into the war. Though the coalition's efforts in pursuit of industrial democracy were eventually frustrated by powerful forces in business and government and by internal rifts within the movement itself, McCartin shows how the shared quest helped cement the ties between unionists and the Democratic Party that would subsequently shape much New Deal legislation and would continue to influence the course of American political and labor history to the present day.
Author: Leon Fink
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252054466
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 276
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Book Description
Focusing on the operation and influence of the Knights of Labor—the leading labor organization of the nineteenth century—Workingmen's Democracy explores the dreams, achievements, and failures of a movement that sought to renew the democratic potential of American institutions. Runner-up in both the John H. Dunning Prize and Albert J. Beveridge Award competitions
Author: Rosanne Currarino
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252090101
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 234
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Book Description
In The Labor Question in America: Economic Democracy in the Gilded Age, Rosanne Currarino traces the struggle to define the nature of democratic life in an era of industrial strife. As Americans confronted the glaring disparity between democracy's promises of independence and prosperity and the grim realities of economic want and wage labor, they asked, "What should constitute full participation in American society? What standard of living should citizens expect and demand?" Currarino traces the diverse efforts to answer to these questions, from the fledgling trade union movement to contests over immigration, from economic theory to popular literature, from legal debates to social reform. The contradictory answers that emerged--one stressing economic participation in a consumer society, the other emphasizing property ownership and self-reliance--remain pressing today as contemporary scholars, journalists, and social critics grapple with the meaning of democracy in post-industrial America.
Author: W. E. B. Du Bois
Publisher: Transaction Publishers
ISBN: 1412846676
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 686
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Book Description
After four centuries of bondage, the nineteenth century marked the long-awaited release of millions of black slaves. Subsequently, these former slaves attempted to reconstruct the basis of American democracy. W. E. B. Du Bois, one of the greatest intellectual leaders in United States history, evaluates the twenty years of fateful history that followed the Civil War, with special reference to the efforts and experiences of African Americans. Du Bois’s words best indicate the broader parameters of his work: "the attitude of any person toward this book will be distinctly influenced by his theories of the Negro race. If he believes that the Negro in America and in general is an average and ordinary human being, who under given environment develops like other human beings, then he will read this story and judge it by the facts adduced." The plight of the white working class throughout the world is directly traceable to American slavery, on which modern commerce and industry was founded, Du Bois argues. Moreover, the resulting color caste was adopted, forwarded, and approved by white labor, and resulted in the subordination of colored labor throughout the world. As a result, the majority of the world’s laborers became part of a system of industry that destroyed democracy and led to World War I and the Great Depression. This book tells that story.
Author: Stephen M. Feldman
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226240746
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 596
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Book Description
From the 1798 Sedition Act to the war on terror, numerous presidents, members of Congress, Supreme Court justices, and local officials have endorsed the silencing of free expression. If the connection between democracy and the freedom of speech is such a vital one, why would so many governmental leaders seek to quiet their citizens? Free Expression and Democracy in America traces two rival traditions in American culture—suppression of speech and dissent as a form of speech—to provide an unparalleled overview of the law, history, and politics of individual rights in the United States. Charting the course of free expression alongside the nation’s political evolution, from the birth of the Constitution to the quagmire of the Vietnam War, Stephen M. Feldman argues that our level of freedom is determined not only by the Supreme Court, but also by cultural, social, and economic forces. Along the way, he pinpoints the struggles of excluded groups—women, African Americans, and laborers—to participate in democratic government as pivotal to the development of free expression. In an age when our freedom of speech is once again at risk, this momentous book will be essential reading for legal historians, political scientists, and history buffs alike.
Author: Michael J. Sandel
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674287444
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 449
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Book Description
A renowned political philosopher updates his classic book on the American political tradition to address the perils democracy confronts today. The 1990s were a heady time. The Cold War had ended, and America’s version of liberal capitalism seemed triumphant. And yet, amid the peace and prosperity, anxieties about the project of self-government could be glimpsed beneath the surface. So argued Michael Sandel, in his influential and widely debated book Democracy’s Discontent, published in 1996. The market faith was eroding the common life. A rising sense of disempowerment was likely to provoke backlash, he wrote, from those who would “shore up borders, harden the distinction between insiders and outsiders, and promise a politics to ‘take back our culture and take back our country,’ to ‘restore our sovereignty’ with a vengeance.” Now, a quarter century later, Sandel updates his classic work for an age when democracy’s discontent has hardened into a country divided against itself. In this new edition, he extends his account of America’s civic struggles from the 1990s to the present. He shows how Democrats and Republicans alike embraced a version of finance-driven globalization that created a society of winners and losers and fueled the toxic politics of our time. In a work celebrated when first published as “a remarkable fusion of philosophical and historical scholarship” (Alan Brinkley), Sandel recalls moments in the American past when the country found ways to hold economic power to democratic account. To reinvigorate democracy, Sandel argues in a stirring new epilogue, we need to reconfigure the economy and empower citizens as participants in a shared public life.
Author: William H. Thomas
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 478
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Book Description
During the First World War it was the task of the U.S. Department of Justice, using the newly passed Espionage Act and its later Sedition Act amendment, to prosecute and convict those who opposed America’s entry into the conflict. In Unsafe for Democracy, historian William H. Thomas Jr. shows that the Justice Department did not stop at this official charge but went much further—paying cautionary visits to suspected dissenters, pressuring them to express support of the war effort, or intimidating them into silence. At times going undercover, investigators tried to elicit the unguarded comments of individuals believed to be a threat to the prevailing social order. In this massive yet largely secret campaign, agents cast their net wide, targeting isolationists, pacifists, immigrants, socialists, labor organizers, African Americans, and clergymen. The unemployed, the mentally ill, college students, schoolteachers, even schoolchildren, all might come under scrutiny, often in the context of the most trivial and benign activities of daily life. Delving into numerous reports by Justice Department detectives, Thomas documents how, in case after case, they used threats and warnings to frighten war critics and silence dissent. This early government crusade for wartime ideological conformity, Thomas argues, marks one of the more dubious achievements of the Progressive Era—and a development that resonates in the present day. Best Books for Special Interests, selected by the American Association of School Librarians “Recommended for all libraries.”—Frederic Krome, Library Journal
Author: Cedric de Leon
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801455871
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 185
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Book Description
"Right to work" states weaken collective bargaining rights and limit the ability of unions to effectively advocate on behalf of workers. As more and more states consider enacting right-to-work laws, observers trace the contemporary attack on organized labor to the 1980s and the Reagan era. In The Origins of Right to Work, however, Cedric de Leon contends that this antagonism began a century earlier with the Northern victory in the U.S. Civil War, when the political establishment revised the English common-law doctrine of conspiracy to equate collective bargaining with the enslavement of free white men. In doing so, de Leon connects past and present, raising critical questions that address pressing social issues. Drawing on the changing relationship between political parties and workers in nineteenth-century Chicago, de Leon concludes that if workers’ collective rights are to be preserved in a global economy, workers must chart a course of political independence and overcome long-standing racial and ethnic divisions.
