Matthew E. Stanley
- Published in print:
- 2021
- Published Online:
- September 2021
- ISBN:
- 9780252043741
- eISBN:
- 9780252052644
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5622/illinois/9780252043741.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, American History: 19th Century
The politics and culture of organized labor during the age of industrial capitalism in the United States was refracted through the semantics, ideas, and personalities of sectional conflict. The ...
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The politics and culture of organized labor during the age of industrial capitalism in the United States was refracted through the semantics, ideas, and personalities of sectional conflict. The experience of war helped forge class consciousness, and the notion of a continued antislavery struggle was central to the identities of newly radicalized workers. This book explores the sweeping variety of Civil War memory within Gilded Age and Progressive Era labor unions, among political radicals, and in third-party movements. That memory evinced revolution and reform, as competing and sometimes coinciding narratives emerged between Reconstruction and World War I. The first worked largely in the service of industrial unionism and depicted the Civil War’s legacy as a precursor to a thorough--even global--liberation of all workers. The second emphasized the preservation of the Union, the imperatives of legalism and social order, and the fundamental loyalty of white workingmen to the reconstituted nation-state, tending to further conciliatory labor strategies, as well as the leadership prerogatives of exclusionary craft unions. The preeminence of reformist memory, which was predicated on compromise with capital and the sanctity of the state, came ultimately to supplement trade union bureaucratization, labor nationalism, and the propagation of antiradicalism on the American scene during and after the Great War.Less
The politics and culture of organized labor during the age of industrial capitalism in the United States was refracted through the semantics, ideas, and personalities of sectional conflict. The experience of war helped forge class consciousness, and the notion of a continued antislavery struggle was central to the identities of newly radicalized workers. This book explores the sweeping variety of Civil War memory within Gilded Age and Progressive Era labor unions, among political radicals, and in third-party movements. That memory evinced revolution and reform, as competing and sometimes coinciding narratives emerged between Reconstruction and World War I. The first worked largely in the service of industrial unionism and depicted the Civil War’s legacy as a precursor to a thorough--even global--liberation of all workers. The second emphasized the preservation of the Union, the imperatives of legalism and social order, and the fundamental loyalty of white workingmen to the reconstituted nation-state, tending to further conciliatory labor strategies, as well as the leadership prerogatives of exclusionary craft unions. The preeminence of reformist memory, which was predicated on compromise with capital and the sanctity of the state, came ultimately to supplement trade union bureaucratization, labor nationalism, and the propagation of antiradicalism on the American scene during and after the Great War.
Jenifer L. Barclay
- Published in print:
- 2021
- Published Online:
- September 2021
- ISBN:
- 9780252043727
- eISBN:
- 9780252052613
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5622/illinois/9780252043727.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, African-American History
This book makes disability legible in the histories of both slavery and race, arguing that disability is a critical category of historical analysis. Bondage complicated and contributed to enslaved ...
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This book makes disability legible in the histories of both slavery and race, arguing that disability is a critical category of historical analysis. Bondage complicated and contributed to enslaved people’s experiences of complexly embodied conditions that ranged across the physical, sensory, cognitive, and psychological. Ableist histories of racial slavery have long overlooked how the social relations of disability shaped people’s everyday lives, particularly within enslaved families, communities, and culture. At the same time, antebellum Americans persistently constructed and framed racial ideology through ideas about disability, producing and naturalizing links between blackness and disability on the one hand and whiteness and ability on the other. Disability was central to the larger relations of power that structured antebellum society and figured prominently in racial projects that unfolded in the laws of slavery, medical discourses of race, pro- and antislavery political rhetoric, and popular culture like blackface minstrelsy and freak shows. The disabling images of blackness created in these various registers of American life resounded long after slavery’s end, gradually fading into less specific notions of black inferiority and damage imagery. The Mark of Slavery simultaneously examines relations of power and the materiality of the body and makes clear that just as blackness and disability were not mutually exclusive categories, enslaved people’s lived experiences of disability were not entirely separate from and unrelated to representations of disability that fueled racial ideology.Less
This book makes disability legible in the histories of both slavery and race, arguing that disability is a critical category of historical analysis. Bondage complicated and contributed to enslaved people’s experiences of complexly embodied conditions that ranged across the physical, sensory, cognitive, and psychological. Ableist histories of racial slavery have long overlooked how the social relations of disability shaped people’s everyday lives, particularly within enslaved families, communities, and culture. At the same time, antebellum Americans persistently constructed and framed racial ideology through ideas about disability, producing and naturalizing links between blackness and disability on the one hand and whiteness and ability on the other. Disability was central to the larger relations of power that structured antebellum society and figured prominently in racial projects that unfolded in the laws of slavery, medical discourses of race, pro- and antislavery political rhetoric, and popular culture like blackface minstrelsy and freak shows. The disabling images of blackness created in these various registers of American life resounded long after slavery’s end, gradually fading into less specific notions of black inferiority and damage imagery. The Mark of Slavery simultaneously examines relations of power and the materiality of the body and makes clear that just as blackness and disability were not mutually exclusive categories, enslaved people’s lived experiences of disability were not entirely separate from and unrelated to representations of disability that fueled racial ideology.
Adam Crymble
- Published in print:
- 2021
- Published Online:
- September 2021
- ISBN:
- 9780252043710
- eISBN:
- 9780252052606
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5622/illinois/9780252043710.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, History of Science, Technology, and Medicine
After nearly a decade of scholars trying to define digital work, this book makes the case for a need instead to understand the history of technology’s relationship with historical studies. It does so ...
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After nearly a decade of scholars trying to define digital work, this book makes the case for a need instead to understand the history of technology’s relationship with historical studies. It does so through a series of case studies that show some of the many ways that technology and historians have come together around the world and over the decades. Often left out of the historiography, the digital age has been transformative for historians, touching on research agendas, approaches to teaching and learning, scholarly communication, and the nature of the archive itself. Bringing together histories and philosophies of the field, with a genre of works including private papers, Web archives, social media, and oral histories, this book lets the reader see the digital traces of the field as it developed. Importantly, it separates issues relevant to historians from activities under the purview of the much broader ‘digital humanities’ movement, in which historians’ voices are often drowned out by louder and more numerous literary scholars. To allow for flexible reading, each chapter tackles the history of a specific key theme, from research, to communication, to teaching. It argues that only by knowing their field’s own past can historians put technology to its best uses in the future.Less
After nearly a decade of scholars trying to define digital work, this book makes the case for a need instead to understand the history of technology’s relationship with historical studies. It does so through a series of case studies that show some of the many ways that technology and historians have come together around the world and over the decades. Often left out of the historiography, the digital age has been transformative for historians, touching on research agendas, approaches to teaching and learning, scholarly communication, and the nature of the archive itself. Bringing together histories and philosophies of the field, with a genre of works including private papers, Web archives, social media, and oral histories, this book lets the reader see the digital traces of the field as it developed. Importantly, it separates issues relevant to historians from activities under the purview of the much broader ‘digital humanities’ movement, in which historians’ voices are often drowned out by louder and more numerous literary scholars. To allow for flexible reading, each chapter tackles the history of a specific key theme, from research, to communication, to teaching. It argues that only by knowing their field’s own past can historians put technology to its best uses in the future.
Candace Bailey
- Published in print:
- 2021
- Published Online:
- September 2021
- ISBN:
- 9780252043758
- eISBN:
- 9780252052651
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5622/illinois/9780252043758.001.0001
- Subject:
- Music, History, American
This book is a history of women in the US South told through the medium of music, focusing on music’s social and cultural uses, and mapping the cultural geography across space and time. The subjects ...
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This book is a history of women in the US South told through the medium of music, focusing on music’s social and cultural uses, and mapping the cultural geography across space and time. The subjects represent a wide range of circumstances: enslaved women of color, white plantation daughters, both black and white daughters of middle-class families, women born on small farms, the daughters of mechanics. By recasting southern musical practices from the point of view of women’s history, it recovers silent voices and positions them within the social world of which they were so much a part. Significantly, it also introduces the existence and influence of professional women.
The concentration here is music read from notation. Spending the time and money to learn to read music implies a tangible appreciation for its undertaking, and it indicates that those who paid for the education saw a benefit in doing so. It conferred value, in this case cultural capital, on those musicking in all its facets. This value, in turn, served in the performance of gentility in the mid-nineteenth century. The source materials include binder’s volumes (bound volumes of sheet music or manuscripts), letters, diaries, the contents of newspapers, images, and other types of documentation. As an ethnographic reading of archival sources, this study crafts new and vital interpretations of music in southern culture.Less
This book is a history of women in the US South told through the medium of music, focusing on music’s social and cultural uses, and mapping the cultural geography across space and time. The subjects represent a wide range of circumstances: enslaved women of color, white plantation daughters, both black and white daughters of middle-class families, women born on small farms, the daughters of mechanics. By recasting southern musical practices from the point of view of women’s history, it recovers silent voices and positions them within the social world of which they were so much a part. Significantly, it also introduces the existence and influence of professional women.
The concentration here is music read from notation. Spending the time and money to learn to read music implies a tangible appreciation for its undertaking, and it indicates that those who paid for the education saw a benefit in doing so. It conferred value, in this case cultural capital, on those musicking in all its facets. This value, in turn, served in the performance of gentility in the mid-nineteenth century. The source materials include binder’s volumes (bound volumes of sheet music or manuscripts), letters, diaries, the contents of newspapers, images, and other types of documentation. As an ethnographic reading of archival sources, this study crafts new and vital interpretations of music in southern culture.
Jennifer McClearen
- Published in print:
- 2021
- Published Online:
- September 2021
- ISBN:
- 9780252043734
- eISBN:
- 9780252052637
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5622/illinois/9780252043734.001.0001
- Subject:
- Sociology, Sport and Leisure
Over the first twenty years of the Ultimate Fighting Championship’s (UFC) history, the mixed-martial arts (MMA) promotion adamantly excluded female athletes and upheld sports media’s time-honored ...
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Over the first twenty years of the Ultimate Fighting Championship’s (UFC) history, the mixed-martial arts (MMA) promotion adamantly excluded female athletes and upheld sports media’s time-honored tradition of ignoring and undervaluing sportswomen. Yet, in the early 2010s, Ronda Rousey burst onto the MMA stage and convinced the UFC to include women, which ushered in a new fervor for female athletes in a male-dominated cultural milieu. The popularity of women in the UFC might suggest that female athletes in combat sports are breaking the barriers of a notoriously stubborn glass ceiling. However, as the first academic book analyzing the UFC as a sports media brand, Fighting Visibility urges advocates of women’s sports to consider the limits of representation for cultural change and urges caution against the celebratory discourse of women’s inclusion. Part cultural history of the UFC as a media juggernaut and part cautionary tale for the future of women as sports laborers, Fighting Visibility argues that the UFC’s promotion of diverse female athletes actually serves as a seductive mirage of progress that enables the brand’s exploitative labor practices. The UFC’s labor model disproportionately taxes female athletes, particularly women of color and gender nonnormative women, despite also promoting them at unprecedented levels. Fighting Visibility complicates a prevalent notion among sports scholars, activists, and fans that the increased visibility of female athletes will lead to greater equity in sports media and instead urges us to question who ultimately benefits from that visibility in neoliberal brand culture.Less
Over the first twenty years of the Ultimate Fighting Championship’s (UFC) history, the mixed-martial arts (MMA) promotion adamantly excluded female athletes and upheld sports media’s time-honored tradition of ignoring and undervaluing sportswomen. Yet, in the early 2010s, Ronda Rousey burst onto the MMA stage and convinced the UFC to include women, which ushered in a new fervor for female athletes in a male-dominated cultural milieu. The popularity of women in the UFC might suggest that female athletes in combat sports are breaking the barriers of a notoriously stubborn glass ceiling. However, as the first academic book analyzing the UFC as a sports media brand, Fighting Visibility urges advocates of women’s sports to consider the limits of representation for cultural change and urges caution against the celebratory discourse of women’s inclusion. Part cultural history of the UFC as a media juggernaut and part cautionary tale for the future of women as sports laborers, Fighting Visibility argues that the UFC’s promotion of diverse female athletes actually serves as a seductive mirage of progress that enables the brand’s exploitative labor practices. The UFC’s labor model disproportionately taxes female athletes, particularly women of color and gender nonnormative women, despite also promoting them at unprecedented levels. Fighting Visibility complicates a prevalent notion among sports scholars, activists, and fans that the increased visibility of female athletes will lead to greater equity in sports media and instead urges us to question who ultimately benefits from that visibility in neoliberal brand culture.
Fred Bartenstein and Curtis W. Ellison (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2021
- Published Online:
- September 2021
- ISBN:
- 9780252043642
- eISBN:
- 9780252052538
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5622/illinois/9780252043642.001.0001
- Subject:
- Music, History, American
In the twentieth century, hundreds of thousands of migrants seeking economic opportunities relocated from the Appalachian region to southwestern Ohio. They brought mountain and gospel music with ...
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In the twentieth century, hundreds of thousands of migrants seeking economic opportunities relocated from the Appalachian region to southwestern Ohio. They brought mountain and gospel music with them, as well as an openness to new sounds that were emerging in mid-century. Without access to capital, formal instruction, or mainstream media attention, a core of devoted musicians and entrepreneurs built an unrivaled radio, recording, and performance infrastructure for bluegrass music. Between 1947 and 1989, important careers were launched and the distinct artistry of bluegrass made during those years in Cincinnati, Dayton, Middletown, Hamilton, Springfield and environs—an area of approximately 250 square miles—had a permanent influence on American roots music. This work explores the history of southwestern Ohio’s Appalachian migration and the subsequent proliferation of bluegrass musicians, radio broadcasters, recording studios, record labels, bars, festivals, and sacred music. It also explores how following generations built upon that base, how bluegrass reached non-Appalachian participants, how bluegrass was used in public education and community development, and how distinctive musical qualities of bluegrass that flourished in the southwestern Ohio region influenced the worldwide development of the genre. First-person narratives of key figures are included as well as analytical essays by academic and independent scholars, along with suggestions for further reading and listening.Less
In the twentieth century, hundreds of thousands of migrants seeking economic opportunities relocated from the Appalachian region to southwestern Ohio. They brought mountain and gospel music with them, as well as an openness to new sounds that were emerging in mid-century. Without access to capital, formal instruction, or mainstream media attention, a core of devoted musicians and entrepreneurs built an unrivaled radio, recording, and performance infrastructure for bluegrass music. Between 1947 and 1989, important careers were launched and the distinct artistry of bluegrass made during those years in Cincinnati, Dayton, Middletown, Hamilton, Springfield and environs—an area of approximately 250 square miles—had a permanent influence on American roots music. This work explores the history of southwestern Ohio’s Appalachian migration and the subsequent proliferation of bluegrass musicians, radio broadcasters, recording studios, record labels, bars, festivals, and sacred music. It also explores how following generations built upon that base, how bluegrass reached non-Appalachian participants, how bluegrass was used in public education and community development, and how distinctive musical qualities of bluegrass that flourished in the southwestern Ohio region influenced the worldwide development of the genre. First-person narratives of key figures are included as well as analytical essays by academic and independent scholars, along with suggestions for further reading and listening.
Marcelo J. Borges, Sonia Cancian, and Linda Reeder (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- September 2021
- ISBN:
- 9780252043499
- eISBN:
- 9780252052378
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5622/illinois/9780252043499.001.0001
- Subject:
- Sociology, Migration Studies (including Refugee Studies)
Emotional Landscapes: Love, Gender, and Migration explores how emotions in general, and love in particular, shape individual and collective experiences of migration, and the formation of mobile and ...
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Emotional Landscapes: Love, Gender, and Migration explores how emotions in general, and love in particular, shape individual and collective experiences of migration, and the formation of mobile and transnational communities. The essays examine how varieties of love, including sentimental, sexual, and political, redefined meanings of family, community, and national belonging, altering ideas of gender and social formation. Framed by the works of scholars of emotion, gender, and migration, these articles illustrate the complicated ways that love shapes the intimate decisions to migrate, familial expectations surrounding separations, wider cultural and political perceptions of mobility, reconfiguring the meaning of love itself. The contributors investigate the changing meanings of intimacy in a world marked by urban, transnational migrations and expanding circulations of capital and goods, and the ways in which these new meanings altered gender norms. The book’s historical framework makes visible how the sentimental and material landscapes of mobility changed over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, the volume offers new evidence culled from archives, interviews, letters, and surveys for the study of emotion and mobility in Europe, the Americas, and Australia, and opens up new avenues for future research.Less
Emotional Landscapes: Love, Gender, and Migration explores how emotions in general, and love in particular, shape individual and collective experiences of migration, and the formation of mobile and transnational communities. The essays examine how varieties of love, including sentimental, sexual, and political, redefined meanings of family, community, and national belonging, altering ideas of gender and social formation. Framed by the works of scholars of emotion, gender, and migration, these articles illustrate the complicated ways that love shapes the intimate decisions to migrate, familial expectations surrounding separations, wider cultural and political perceptions of mobility, reconfiguring the meaning of love itself. The contributors investigate the changing meanings of intimacy in a world marked by urban, transnational migrations and expanding circulations of capital and goods, and the ways in which these new meanings altered gender norms. The book’s historical framework makes visible how the sentimental and material landscapes of mobility changed over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, the volume offers new evidence culled from archives, interviews, letters, and surveys for the study of emotion and mobility in Europe, the Americas, and Australia, and opens up new avenues for future research.
Robert Miklitsch
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- September 2021
- ISBN:
- 9780252043611
- eISBN:
- 9780252052491
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5622/illinois/9780252043611.001.0001
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
The Age of Affluence. Ike and Mamie. The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. In the United States, the 1950s have been memorialized as the Pax Americana. A similar stereotypical view has characterized the ...
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The Age of Affluence. Ike and Mamie. The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. In the United States, the 1950s have been memorialized as the Pax Americana. A similar stereotypical view has characterized the 1950s crime film. While the big-shot gangster dominated the headlines in the 1930s and the private eye graced the 1940s, both the gangster picture and film noir were declared DOA in the 1950s. There is, of course, another, less than perfect picture of the ’50s in which the tropes associated with the decade are rather darker. Commies. Aliens from outer space. The bomb. I Died a Million Times argues that the crime film is alive and well in the 1950s in the generic guise of gangster noir. The corpus delicti is a trio of subgenres that crystallized in the period and that correlates with the above symptomatic events: the syndicate picture, the rogue cop film, and the heist movie. These subgenres and the issues associated with them--the “combo” as capitalism incarnate, the letter of the law versus the lure of vigilantism, and the heist as a “left-handed form of human endeavor”--may appear black and white in the rearview mirror of history, but from another perspective, one that’s attentive to issues such as race (The Phenix City Story), class (The Prowler), gender (The Big Heat), sexuality (The Big Combo), the nation (The Asphalt Jungle), and the border (Touch of Evil), these signal, not-so-generic films are as vibrant and colorful as the decade itself.Less
The Age of Affluence. Ike and Mamie. The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. In the United States, the 1950s have been memorialized as the Pax Americana. A similar stereotypical view has characterized the 1950s crime film. While the big-shot gangster dominated the headlines in the 1930s and the private eye graced the 1940s, both the gangster picture and film noir were declared DOA in the 1950s. There is, of course, another, less than perfect picture of the ’50s in which the tropes associated with the decade are rather darker. Commies. Aliens from outer space. The bomb. I Died a Million Times argues that the crime film is alive and well in the 1950s in the generic guise of gangster noir. The corpus delicti is a trio of subgenres that crystallized in the period and that correlates with the above symptomatic events: the syndicate picture, the rogue cop film, and the heist movie. These subgenres and the issues associated with them--the “combo” as capitalism incarnate, the letter of the law versus the lure of vigilantism, and the heist as a “left-handed form of human endeavor”--may appear black and white in the rearview mirror of history, but from another perspective, one that’s attentive to issues such as race (The Phenix City Story), class (The Prowler), gender (The Big Heat), sexuality (The Big Combo), the nation (The Asphalt Jungle), and the border (Touch of Evil), these signal, not-so-generic films are as vibrant and colorful as the decade itself.
Ronald W. Schatz
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- September 2021
- ISBN:
- 9780252043628
- eISBN:
- 9780252052507
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5622/illinois/9780252043628.001.0001
- Subject:
- Sociology, Occupations, Professions, and Work
Ronald W. Schatz tells the story of the team of young economists and lawyers recruited to the National War Labor Board to resolve union-management conflicts during the Second World War. The crew ...
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Ronald W. Schatz tells the story of the team of young economists and lawyers recruited to the National War Labor Board to resolve union-management conflicts during the Second World War. The crew (including Clark Kerr, John Dunlop, Jean McKelvey, and Marvin Miller) exerted broad influence on the U.S. economy and society for the next forty years. They handled thousands of grievances and strikes. They founded academic industrial relations programs. When the 1960s student movement erupted, universities appointed them as top administrators charged with quelling the conflicts. In the 1970s, they developed systems that advanced public sector unionization and revolutionized employment conditions in Major League Baseball.
Schatz argues that the Labor Board vets, who saw themselves as disinterested technocrats, were in truth utopian reformers aiming to transform the world. Beginning in the 1970s stagflation era, they faced unforeseen opposition, and the cooperative relationships they had fostered withered. Yet their protégé George Shultz used mediation techniques learned from his mentors to assist in the integration of Southern public schools, institute affirmative action in industry, and conduct Cold War negotiations with Mikhail Gorbachev.Less
Ronald W. Schatz tells the story of the team of young economists and lawyers recruited to the National War Labor Board to resolve union-management conflicts during the Second World War. The crew (including Clark Kerr, John Dunlop, Jean McKelvey, and Marvin Miller) exerted broad influence on the U.S. economy and society for the next forty years. They handled thousands of grievances and strikes. They founded academic industrial relations programs. When the 1960s student movement erupted, universities appointed them as top administrators charged with quelling the conflicts. In the 1970s, they developed systems that advanced public sector unionization and revolutionized employment conditions in Major League Baseball.
Schatz argues that the Labor Board vets, who saw themselves as disinterested technocrats, were in truth utopian reformers aiming to transform the world. Beginning in the 1970s stagflation era, they faced unforeseen opposition, and the cooperative relationships they had fostered withered. Yet their protégé George Shultz used mediation techniques learned from his mentors to assist in the integration of Southern public schools, institute affirmative action in industry, and conduct Cold War negotiations with Mikhail Gorbachev.
Dana M. Caldemeyer
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- September 2021
- ISBN:
- 9780252043505
- eISBN:
- 9780252052385
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5622/illinois/9780252043505.001.0001
- Subject:
- Sociology, Occupations, Professions, and Work
Union Renegades follows the individuals who did not see the value of following union orders in the Gilded Age. As unions grew more centralized to combat worker grievances in the workplace, leaders ...
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Union Renegades follows the individuals who did not see the value of following union orders in the Gilded Age. As unions grew more centralized to combat worker grievances in the workplace, leaders were shocked to find that workers were often reluctant to fully follow labor organizations. Although union leaders were quick to cast these individuals as nonunion workers who were “indifferent to their own interests,” this book argues that workers’ decisions to follow or reject unions was based on their own assessment of what course would be most beneficial to them and their families. As corporations sought to increase capitalist gain, rural workers applied these same capitalist mindsets to their own economic needs. It looks closely at the seasonal work patters of rural industries like farming and coal mining to show how workers moved between occupations, causing many to see themselves as business-minded investors rather than as wage earners. This continuous effort to increase income caused farmers and laborers to form their own understandings of unionism that did not always fit with what union leaders envisioned. Workers’ decisions to break away from formal unions, then, did not come from an inability to look after their own interests as some union leaders claimed. Instead, it came from the belief that the union did not offer the surest means to secure their economic, social, and political needs.Less
Union Renegades follows the individuals who did not see the value of following union orders in the Gilded Age. As unions grew more centralized to combat worker grievances in the workplace, leaders were shocked to find that workers were often reluctant to fully follow labor organizations. Although union leaders were quick to cast these individuals as nonunion workers who were “indifferent to their own interests,” this book argues that workers’ decisions to follow or reject unions was based on their own assessment of what course would be most beneficial to them and their families. As corporations sought to increase capitalist gain, rural workers applied these same capitalist mindsets to their own economic needs. It looks closely at the seasonal work patters of rural industries like farming and coal mining to show how workers moved between occupations, causing many to see themselves as business-minded investors rather than as wage earners. This continuous effort to increase income caused farmers and laborers to form their own understandings of unionism that did not always fit with what union leaders envisioned. Workers’ decisions to break away from formal unions, then, did not come from an inability to look after their own interests as some union leaders claimed. Instead, it came from the belief that the union did not offer the surest means to secure their economic, social, and political needs.
Film and the Anarchist Imagination
Passing the Baton
When Sunday Comes
Black Queer Freedom
