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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.

Almost all studies of the nation’s extreme inequality of income and wealth have overlooked a critical, overarching cause of the creation of The New Gilded Age. The permanent political class has driven and sustained economic and political inequality not only with the government policies it has crafted over the past four decades. It has created inequality by becoming a self-dealing, self-serving nepotistic oligarchy that is enabling the One Percent and the .01 Percent to create an American aristocracy of wealth. American Oligarchy describes a multifaceted culture of self-dealing and corruption reaching into every sector of American society. The political class’s direct creation of economic inequality by channeling the flow of income and wealth to elites, has been described extensively; less exposed has been how its self-aggrandizement indirectly—but hidden in plain sight—creates a culture of corruption that infects the entire society.

From 1868 through 1939, anarchists' migrations from Spain to Argentina and back again created a transnational ideology and influenced the movement's growth in each country. This book follows the lives, careers, and travels of Diego Abad de Santillán, Manuel Villar, and other migrating anarchists to highlight the ideological and interpersonal relationships that defined a vital era in anarchist history. Drawing on extensive interviews with Abad de Santillán, José Grunfeld, and Jacobo Maguid, along with unusual access to anarchist records and networks, the book uncovers the ways anarchist migrants in pursuit of jobs and political goals formed a critical nucleus of militants, binding the two countries in an ideological relationship that profoundly affected the history of both. It also considers the impact of reverse migration and discusses political decisions that had a hitherto unknown influence on the course of the Spanish Civil War. Personal in perspective and transnational in scope, the book offers an enlightening history of a movement and an era.

An essential African American artist of his era, Archibald Motley Jr. created paintings of black Chicago that aligned him with the revisionist aims of the New Negro Renaissance. Yet Motley’s approach to constructing a New Negro—a dignified figure both accomplished and worthy of respect—reflected the challenges faced by African American artists working on the project of racial reinvention and uplift. Phoebe Wolfskill demonstrates how Motley’s art embodied the tenuous nature of the Black Renaissance and the wide range of ideas that structured it. Focusing on key works in Motley’s oeuvre, Wolfskill reveals the artist’s complexity and the variety of influences that informed his work. Motley’s paintings suggest that the racist, problematic image of the Old Negro was not a relic of the past but an influence that pervaded the Black Renaissance. Exploring Motley in relation to works by notable black and non-black contemporaries, Wolfskill reinterprets Motley’s oeuvre as part of a broad effort to define American cultural identity through race, class, gender, religion, and regional affiliation. The book concludes by considering how racist images of the past continue to fuel conflicts over black representation.

Asianfail examines literary and filmic works by contemporary Asian Americans and Asian Canadians that deal with failure and unhappiness. While the hashtag #Asianfail pokes fun at cultural stereotypes of Asians on social media, the myth of the model minority has serious negative consequences for many young people who feel pressure and anxiety when they do not succeed in professional careers. This book looks at how novelists, such as Ruth Ozeki, Madeleine Thien, Alex Gilvarry, and lê thi diem thúy reveal the "cruel optimism" that characterizes ordinary existence for many people in the 21st century. Films such as The Debut, Red Doors,and Saving Face query immigrant aspirations of the older generation and the feasibility of the American dream. The protagonists in the graphic novels of Mariko and Jillian Tamaki, Keshni Kashyap and Mari Araki express their ugly and painful feelings as they grow up, while Jan Wong and Catherine Hernandez grapple with work and stress-related depression. In Linda Ohama's Obaachan's Garden and Catherine Hernandez' performance, even the aged feel precarity and are burdened with secrets of the past. These works interrogate and expose the limits of our neoliberal notions of the good life and happiness.

This book is about the Hundred Years War of food business, how a mid-nineteenth century American invention, baking powder, replaced yeast as a leavening agent and created a culinary revolution as profound as the use of yeast thousands of years ago. Before government regulation, the force controlling the market was not a visible or invisible hand, but advertising sleight of hand. Four companies—Rumford, Royal, Calumet, and Clabber Girl—fought advertising, trade, legislative, scientific, and judicial wars with proprietary cookbooks, lawsuits, trade cards, and bribes. In the process, they altered or created cake, cupcakes, cookies, biscuits, pancakes, quick breads, waffles, doughnuts, and other foods, and forged a distinct American culinary identity. This new American chemical leavening shortcut also changed the breadstuffs of Native Americans and every immigrant group and was a force for assimilation. The wars continued in spite of scandals exposed by muckraking journalists and investigation by President Theodore Roosevelt, through WWI, the 1920s, the Depression, and WWII in every state, territory, and kitchen in the United States until standardization finally occurred at the end of the twentieth century. Now, global businesses such as McDonald’s and Kentucky Fried Chicken depend on baking powder for their baked goods, and baking powder is in home and commercial kitchens around the world.

The 1922 Federal Baseball Supreme Court ruling held that the “business of base ball” was not subject to the Sherman Antitrust Act because it did not constitute interstate commerce. This book explains why the unanimous Supreme Court opinion authored by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, which gave rise to Major League Baseball's exemption from antitrust law, was correct given the circumstances of the time. Currently a billion-dollar enterprise, professional baseball teams crisscross the country while the games are broadcast via radio, television, and Internet coast to coast. The sheer scope of this activity would seem to embody the phrase “interstate commerce.” Yet baseball is the only professional sport—indeed the sole industry—in the United States that currently benefits from a judicially constructed antitrust immunity. Using recently released documents from the National Baseball Hall of Fame, the book analyzes how the Supreme Court reached this seemingly peculiar result by tracing the Federal Baseball litigation from its roots in 1914 to its resolution in 1922, in the process uncovering significant new details about the proceedings. The book observes that while interstate commerce was measured at the time by the exchange of tangible goods, baseball teams in the 1910s merely provided live entertainment to their fans, while radio was a fledgling technology that had little impact on the sport. The book concludes that, despite the frequent criticism of the opinion, the Supreme Court's decision was consistent with the conditions and legal climate of the early twentieth century.

Between 1951 and 1989, Congress held a series of hearings to investigate the antitrust aspects of professional sports leagues. Among the concerns: ownership control of players, restrictions on new franchises, territorial protection, and other cartel-like behaviors. This book chronicles the key issues that arose during the Congressional hearings and the ways by which opposing sides used economic data and theory to define what was right, what was feasible, and what was advantageous to one party or another. As the book shows, the hearings affected matters as fundamental to the modern game as broadcast rights, drafts and players' associations, league mergers, and the dominance of the New York Yankees. It also charts how lawmakers from the West and South pressed for the relocation of ailing franchises to their states and the ways by which savvy owners dodged congressional interference when they could and adapted to it when necessary.

This book examines the radical Left in Puerto Rico from the final years of Spanish colonial rule into the 1920s. Positioning Puerto Rico within the context of a regional anarchist network that stretched from Puerto Rico and Cuba to Tampa, Florida, and New York City, the book illustrates how anarchists linked their struggle to the broader international anarchist struggles against religion, governments, and industrial capitalism. Their groups, plays, fiction, speeches, and press accounts—as well as the newspapers that they published—were central in helping to develop an anarchist vision for Puerto Ricans at a time when the island was a political no-man's-land, neither an official U.S. colony or state nor an independent country. Anarchism in Puerto Rico was a unique entity in the movement's history. The anarchists expressed their concerns and visions through their own brand of cultural politics, which was directed against Puerto Rican and U.S. colonial rulers in order to promote an antiauthoritarian spirit and countercultural struggle over how the island was being run and the future directions that it should pursue. Alongside this was anticlericalism against the Roman Catholic Church.

Black Post-Blackness compares the black avant-garde of the 1960s and 1970s Black Arts Movement with the most innovative spins of twenty-first century black aesthetics. Crawford zooms in on the 1970s second wave of the Black Arts Movement and shows the connections between this final wave of the Black Arts movement and the early years of 21^st century black aesthetics. She uncovers the circle of black post-blackness that pivots on the power of anticipation, abstraction, mixed media, the global South, satire, public interiority, and the fantastic. Black Post-Blackness argues that the full innovativeness of the BAM only emerges when we recognize the movement’s full anticipation of the “beyond black art” waves of 21^st century black aesthetics. The BAM has much more in common with 21^st century African American literature and visual art than we often realize. The push to the mixed media, abstraction, satire, and sheer experimentation in 21^st century African American literature and visual art is often framed as a push away from the narrowness of the category “black art” but it is, often, a push back to the mixed media, abstraction, satire, and experimentation in the BAM.

This book is the first to document the transformation of America’s national pastime from a gender-neutral sport into a highly-gendered “man’s game.” For decades, most modern scholars of sport have assumed that baseball was, and always has been, a man’s game. Yet baseball began as a gender-neutral “blank slate” upon which adult men and women wrote their gendered narratives and then taught those narratives to their children. Baseball’s gendered future was never inevitable nor was it quickly solidified or uncontested. Every decade of the nineteenth century saw more girls and women playing and watching baseball than in previous decades. Yet the narrative of baseball as a man’s game gained momentum in each successive decade well into the twentieth century. The book describes the process through which the history of women baseball players became distorted by myth and misperception even as girls and women played on the same types of teams that boys and men did, including scholastic/collegiate, civic/pick-up, amateur/professional and factory teams. The book places the evolution of baseball’s gendered characterization into the broader context of American sport and culture, and describes how professional interests wrested control of the game’s institutional structures, culture, and social interactions from amateur interests.

The burgeoning literature on immigrant transnationalism is one of the academic success stories of our times. Yet having reminded scholars that migrants, in leaving home for a new life abroad, inevitably tie place of origin and destination together, scholars of transnationalism have also insisted that today's cross-border connections are unprecedented. This collection of articles by sociologically minded historians and historically minded sociologists highlights both the long-term persistence and the continuing instability of home country connections. Encompassing societies of origin and destination from around the world, the book shows that while population movements across states recurrently produce homeland ties, those connections have varied across contexts and from one historical period to another, changing in unpredictable ways. Any number of factors can shape the linkages between home and destination, including conditions in the society of immigration, policies of the state of emigration, and geopolitics worldwide.

This book delves into the background and what-ifs surrounding seven defining moments that redefined college sports. These changes involved fundamental issues—race and gender, profit and power—that reflected societal tensions and, in many cases, remain pertinent today: the failed 1950 effort to pass a Sanity Code regulating payments to football players; the thorny racial integration of university sports programs; the boom in television money; the 1984 Supreme Court decision that settled who could control skyrocketing media revenues; Title IX's transformation of women's athletics; the cheating, eligibility, and recruitment scandals that tarnished college sports in the 1980s and 1990s; the ongoing controversy over paying student athletes a share of the enormous moneys harvested by schools and athletic departments. A thought-provoking journey into the whos and whys of college sports history, the book reveals how the turning points of yesterday and today will impact tomorrow.

Delving into the history of gambling and corruption in intercollegiate sports, this book recounts all of the major gambling scandals in college football and basketball. The book finds that game rigging has been pervasive and nationwide throughout most of the sports' history. Naming the players, coaches, gamblers, and go-betweens involved, the book discusses numerous college basketball and football games reported to have been fixed and describes the various methods used to gain unfair advantage, inside information, or undue profit. The book's survey of college football includes early years of gambling on games between established schools such as Yale, Princeton, and Harvard; Notre Dame's All-American halfback and skilled gambler George Gipp; and the 1962 allegations of insider information between Alabama coach Paul “Bear” Bryant and former Georgia coach James Wallace “Wally” Butts; and many other recent incidents. Notable events in basketball include the 1951 scandal involving City College of New York and six other schools throughout the East Coast and the Midwest; the 1961 point-shaving incident that put a permanent end to the Dixie Classic tournament; the 1994–95 Northwestern scandal in which players bet against their own team; and other recent examples of compromised game play and gambling.

This book, a sweeping interpretive history of mid-nineteenth-century Chicago, traces the evolution of a modern social order. Combining historical and political detail with a theoretical frame, the book examines the dramatic capitalist transition in Chicago during the critical decades from the 1850s through the 1870s, a period that saw the rise of a permanent wage worker class and the formation of an industrial upper class. The book demonstrates how a new political economy, based on wage labor and capital accumulation in manufacturing, superseded an older mercantile economy that relied on speculative trading and artisan production. The new social movements that arose in this era—labor, socialism, urban populism, businessmen's municipal reform, Protestant revivalism, and women's activism—constituted the substance of a new post-bellum democratic politics that took shape in the 1860s and 1970s. When the Depression of 1873 brought increased crime and financial panic, Chicago's new upper class developed municipal reform in an attempt to reassert its leadership. Setting local detail against a national canvas of partisan ideology and the seismic structural shifts of Reconstruction, this book vividly depicts the upheavals integral to building capitalism.

Although media coverage often portrays young people in urban areas as politically apathetic or disruptive, this book provides an antidote to such views through narratives of dedicated youth civic engagement and leadership in Chicago, Mexico City, and Rio de Janeiro. This innovative comparative study provides nuanced accounts of the personal experiences of young people who care deeply about their communities and are actively engaged in a variety of public issues. Drawing from extensive interviews and personal narratives from the youth activists themselves, this book provides a vibrant portrait of a new, politically involved generation. The book examines youth civic engagement in Chicago, with particular emphasis on young people's attitudes regarding democracy. It considers the context of young people's civic engagement in Brazil, and the demographics of youth activists in Rio, the activities and organizations they are involved in, and their motivations for engagement. It also examines new paradigms of civic participation among Mexico City's youth.

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.

It is the early Cold War. The Soviet Union appears to be in irresistible ascendance and moves to exploit the Olympic Games as a vehicle for promoting international communism. In response, the United States conceives a subtle, far-reaching psychological warfare campaign to blunt the Soviet advance. Drawing on newly declassified materials and archives, this book chronicles how the U.S. government used the Olympics to promote democracy and its own policy aims during the tense early phase of the Cold War. The book shows how the government, though constrained by traditions against interference in the Games, eluded detection by cooperating with private groups, including secretly funded émigré organizations bent on liberating their home countries from Soviet control. At the same time, the United States appropriated Olympic host cities to hype the American economic and political system while, behind the scenes, the government attempted clandestine manipulation of the International Olympic Committee. The book also details the campaigns that sent propaganda materials around the globe as the United States mobilized culture in general, and sports in particular, to fight the communist threat.

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.