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Employers have enjoyed a tremendous amount of power throughout American history. This nine-chapter collection examines that power as it relates to the so-called “labor question” or “labor problem,” defined in the late nineteenth century by academics, clergymen, journalists, lawyers, politicians and employers to describe strikes, boycott campaigns, and union organization campaigns. Employers asserted their power in numerous ways; they organized with one another, busted unions, broke strikes, and blacklisted labor activists. They enjoyed largely favorable political climates; judges regularly granted them injunctions against protesting workers, politicians passed laws making union organizing difficult, and armed forces—police forces and National Guardsman--assisted them during strikes and boycott campaigns staged by workers. These chapters examine class conflicts on the local and national levels, demonstrating how employers contested labor in many different contexts—and usually won. The chapters explore how employers used race to divide the working class, how they sought to deflect attention away from their own privileged class positions, how they used the law to their advantages, and how they settled internal disagreements. Taken together, the chapters reveal a rich history of employer organizing, lobbying politicians, and creating new forms of public relations while enriching themselves at the expense of ordinary people.

Labor studies scholars and working-class historians have long worked at the crossroads of academia and activism. This book brings together a collection of essays that explore long-standing themes in labor history and working-class studies as well as contemporary struggles over the relationship between engagement, teaching, and scholarship. The book examines the challenges and opportunities for engaged scholarship in the United States and abroad. The chapters discuss how scholars' participation in current labor and social struggles guides their campus and community organizing, public history initiatives, teaching, mentoring, and other activities. The chapters also explore the role of research and scholarship in social change, while acknowledging that intellectual labor complements but never replaces collective action and movement building. The book supports the argument that scholar activism and engaged teaching are and should be pursued. It demonstrates the many ways that scholars and teachers can be effective advocates when acting outside traditional definitions of their academic work.

In recognizing the relation between gender, race, and class oppression, American women of the postwar Progressive Party made the claim that peace required not merely the absence of violence, but also the presence of social and political equality. For progressive women, peace was the essential thread that connected the various aspects of their activist agendas. This study maps the routes taken by postwar popular-front women activists into peace and freedom movements of the 1960s and 1970s. The book tells the story of their decades-long effort to keep their intertwined social and political causes from unraveling and to maintain the connections among peace, feminism, and racial equality. It explains how the master narrative of U.S. history too often reduces the scope of leftist women's Cold War-era activism by containing it within women's, workers', or civil rights movements.

Drawing on powerful personal testimonies of the hazards of mountaintop removal in southern West Virginia, this book critically examines the fierce conflicts over this violent and increasingly prevalent form of strip mining. Focusing on the grassroots activist organization Coal River Mountain Watch (CRMW), the book reveals a turn away from once-strong traditional labor unions and the emergence of community-based activist organizations. By framing social and moral arguments in terms of the environment, these innovative hybrid movements take advantage of environmentalism's higher profile in contemporary politics. In investigating the local effects of globalization and global economics, the book tracks the profound reimagining of social and personal ideas such as identity, history, and landscape and considers their roles in organizing an agenda for progressive community activism.

At the end of World War II, the federal government announced plans to terminate its public child care programs that had been established during the war for working mothers. In response, women in California protested and lobbied to keep their centers open, even as these programs rapidly vanished in other states. Analyzing the informal networks of cross-class and cross-race reformers, policymakers, and educators, this book traces the rapidly changing alliances among these groups. During the early stages of the childcare movement, feminists, Communists, and labor activists banded together, only to have these alliances dissolve by the 1950s as the movement welcomed new leadership composed of working-class mothers and early childhood educators. In the 1960s, when federal policymakers earmarked child care funds for children of women on welfare and children described as culturally deprived, it expanded child care services available to these groups but eventually eliminated public child care for the working poor. Deftly exploring the structural forces impeding government support for broadly distributed child care as well as the possibilities for partnership and the limitations among key parties such as feminists, Communists, labor activists, working-class mothers, and early childhood educators, the book helps to explain the barriers to a publicly funded comprehensive child care program in the United States.

A century ago, governments buoyed by Progressive Era beliefs began to assume greater responsibility for protecting and rescuing citizens. Yet the aftermath of two disasters in the United States–Canada borderlands—the Salem fire of 1914 and the Halifax explosion of 1917—saw working-class survivors instead turn to friends, neighbors, coworkers, and family members for succor and aid. This book draws on histories of the Salem and Halifax events to explore the institutions—both formal and informal—that ordinary people relied upon in times of crisis. It explores patterns and traditions of self-help, informal order, and solidarity and details how people adapted these traditions when necessary. Yet, as the book shows, these methods—though often quick and effective—remained illegible to reformers. Indeed, soldiers, social workers, and reformers wielding extraordinary emergency powers challenged these grassroots practices to impose progressive “solutions” on what they wrongly imagined to be a fractured social landscape.

During World War II, a group of American liberal Protestants set out to defend the constitutional rights of Japanese Americans interned without trial. The root of their wartime activism can be traced to the late nineteenth century when American imperial expansion and a surge in new immigration from Asia led to heated debates over the meaning of racial difference and the limits of American immigration inclusion. From the early 1900s through World War II, American liberal Protestants stood on the frontlines of these debates. This book explores the myriad religious, social, and political forces that shaped liberal Protestant activism over the first half of the twentieth century and the legacies their initiatives left in the post-World War II era.

While homophobia is commonly characterized as individual and personal prejudice, this book instead explores homophobia as a transnational political phenomenon. The book theorizes homophobia as a distinct configuration of repressive state-sponsored policies and practices with their own causes, explanations, and effects on how sexualities are understood and experienced in a variety of national contexts. The chapters cover a broad range of geographic cases, including France, Ecuador, Iran, Lebanon, Poland, Singapore, and the United States. Combining empirical analysis with theoretical synthesis, the chapters examine how homophobia travels across complex and ambiguous transnational networks, how it achieves and exerts decisive power, and how it shapes the collective identities and strategies of those groups it targets. The first comparative volume to focus specifically on the global diffusion of homophobia and its implications for an emerging worldwide LGBT movement, this book opens new avenues of debate and dialogue for scholars, students, and activists.

This book traces the evolution of revolutionary anarchist ideas in Europe and their migration to the United States in the 1880s. A new history of the transatlantic origins of American anarchism, this study thoroughly debunks the dominant narrative through which most historians interpret the Haymarket Bombing and Trial of 1886–87. Challenging the view that there was no evidence connecting the eight convicted workers to the bomb throwing at the Haymarket rally, this book examines police investigations and trial proceedings that reveal the hidden transatlantic networks, the violent subculture, and the misunderstood beliefs of Gilded Age anarchists. The book documents how, in the 1880s, radicals on both sides of the Atlantic came to celebrate armed struggle as the one true way forward and began to prepare seriously for conflict. Within this milieu, the book suggests the possibility of a “Haymarket conspiracy:” a coordinated plan of attack in which the oft-martyred Haymarket radicals in fact posed a real threat to public order and safety. Drawing on new, never-before published historical evidence, the book provides a new means of understanding the revolutionary anarchist movement on its own terms rather than in the romantic ways in which its agents have been eulogized.

“Lost in the USA: American Identity from the Promise Keepers to the Million Mom March” is a book about Americans’ search for personal tranquility at the turn of the twenty-first century. It argues that beneath the surface of prosperity and peace, ordinary Americans were struggling to adjust and adapt to the forces of postmodernity – immigration, multiculturalism, feminism, globalization, deindustrialization – which were radically changing the way Americans understood themselves and each other. Using the Promise Keepers (1991-2000), the Million Man March (1995), the Million Woman March (1997), the LGBT Marches (1993 and 2000), and the Million Mom March (2000) as a prism through which to analyze the era, “Lost in the USA” reveals the massive shifts occurring in American culture, shows how these shifts troubled many Americans, what they resolved to do about them, and how the forces of postmodernity transformed the identities of some Americans. It reveals that the mass gatherings of the 1990s were therapeutic places where people did not just express their identity but where they sought new identities. It shows that the mass gatherings reveal much about coalition building, interracial worship, parenting, and marriage and family relationships. Because its approach is historical it also addresses the continuing processes of millennialism, modernism and American identity formation.