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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.

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.

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.