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A History of the Ozarks, Vol. 3: The Ozarkers is the final volume of a trilogy chronicling the history of this middle-American highland region. It picks up the story where volume 2 left off, at the end of the long Civil War era in the late nineteenth century, and carries it into the twenty-first century. Through a period of roughly 130 years, The Ozarkers charts the region’s major socioeconomic developments: the rise and decline of the timber boom, the peaks and valleys of the lead and zinc industries, the growth of commercial agriculture and the demise of the family farm, widespread poverty and massive post-World War II outmigration, the boom in cheap-labor manufacturing, and the emergence of massive corporations (Walmart, Tyson Foods, Bass Pro Shops) that have brought select parts of the region unprecedented levels of affluence and unexpected racial and ethnic diversity. Undergirding The Ozarkers is an analysis of the role that stereotypes of “hillbillies” and mountaineers has played in the evolution of a region and its inhabitants. The book explores this phenomenon through a close examination of the tourism and entertainment industry, from the mineral water spas of the late nineteenth century to the torrid growth of Branson in the late twentieth. Tying this volume to previous ones in the series is the connective thread interpreting the Ozarks as a colorful regional variation of the American story, not the forgotten and backward land apart so long chronicled by folklorists and travel writers.

Death to Fascism focuses on how social justice immigrant activist Louis Adamic went from being a Slovenian peasant to leading a coalition that included black intellectuals and journalists, working-class militants, ethnic community activists, novelists, and radicals who made antifascism the dominant US political culture from the mid-1930s through 1948. By championing racial and ethnic equality, workers’ rights, and anticolonialism, Adamic and his fellow antifascists helped to transform the US understanding of democracy. From the 1920s through his death in 1951, Adamic became a celebrity because his writings tapped into a larger US identity crisis. This conflict pitted those who associated being American with a static category informed by Anglo Protestant culture against those who understood identity in a constant state of flux defined and redefined by newcomers and new ideas. Adamic shaped the latter view. During his life, he saw himself—and those he identified with—as traversing through four states of being: exile, cultural pluralist, agent of diaspora, and dedicated anticolonialist advocating a new humanism. His legacy has been lost because his anticommunist enemies, who largely succeeded in misrepresenting his beliefs after his likely murder, engaged in a conscious effort to erase him from the historical record because of the threat his ideas posed to the procorporate, hypermilitaristic, and racist outlooks baked into the Cold War liberal order.

This book examines interracial labor and radical organizing in Los Angeles, California, and the United States/Mexico borderlands between 1900 and 1930. Domestic and transnational migration to Los Angeles—including from Europe, Asia, and Mexico—created one of the most racially diverse regions in the United States. Uneven regional economic development drove continued labor mobility for many working-class residents. The book documents a thread of working-class culture in which interracial solidarities formed to oppose capitalism, racism, and often the state itself. These solidarities flourished most frequently among workers with the most precarious employment and living situations, fueled by the ideals advanced in anarchism, socialist internationalism, the syndicalism of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and the Partido Liberal Mexicano (PLM). This book uses the anarchist notion of affinity to frame its understanding of interracial organizing as the mobility of workers often made coalitions and solidarities short lived. Affinity frames the individual cooperative actions that shaped the social practices of resistance often too unstructured or episodic for historians to capture. This approach maintains focus on the continuity of organizing practices while tracing changing solidarities, associations, and organizations that formed and dissolved through struggle, repression, and factionalism. The radical practices that germinated in and near Los Angeles produced some of the broadest examples of interracial cooperation in U.S. history.

This book explores the untold story of how three influential garment unions worked with the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in support of a new Jewish state. It reveals a coalition at work on multiple fronts. Sustained efforts convinced the AFL and CIO to support Jewish development in Palestine through land purchases for Jewish workers and encouraged the construction of trade schools and cultural centers. Other activists, meanwhile, directed massive economic aid to Histadrut, the General Federation of Jewish Workers in Palestine, or pressured the British and American governments to support the Jews in Palestine and later, recognize Israel’s independence. Ultimately, these efforts led American labor to forge its own foreign policy--and reshape both the postwar world and Jewish history.

Religion has played a protean role in the lives of America's workers. This innovative volume focuses on Detroit to examine the religious consciousness constructed by the city's working-class Catholics, African American Protestants, and southern-born white evangelicals and Pentecostals between 1910 and 1969. The book embarks on an integrative view of working-class faith that ranges across boundaries of class, race, denomination, and time. As the book shows, workers in the 1910s and 1920s practiced beliefs characterized by emotional expressiveness, alliance with supernatural forces, and incorporation of mass culture's secular diversions into the sacred. That gave way to the more pragmatic class-conscious religion cultures of the New Deal era and, from the late 1930s on, a quilt of secular working-class cultures that coexisted in competitive, though creative, tension. Finally, the book shows how the ideology of race eclipsed class in the 1950s and 1960s, and in so doing replaced the class-conscious with the race-conscious in religious cultures throughout the city.

The McCarthy-era witch hunts marked the culmination of an anticommunist crusade launched after the First World War. With Bolshevism triumphant in Russia and public discontent shaking the United States, conservatives at every level of government and business created a network dedicated to sweeping away the “spider web” of radicalism they saw threatening the nation. This book shines a light on right-wing activities during the interwar period. Conservatives, eager to dispel communism's appeal to the working class, railed against a supposed Soviet-directed conspiracy composed of socialists, trade unions, peace and civil liberties groups, feminists, liberals, aliens, and Jews. The rhetoric and power of anticommunism made for devastating weapons in a systematic war for control of the country against progressive causes. But, as the book shows, the term “spider web” far more accurately described the anticommunist movement than it did the makeup and operations of international communism. The book details how anticommunist myths and propaganda influenced mainstream politics in America, and how its ongoing efforts paved the way for the McCarthyite Fifties—and augured the conservative backlash that would one day transform American politics.

This book charts the complex vagaries of men reinventing manhood in twentieth-century America. Their ideas of masculinity destroyed by principles of mass production, workers created a white-dominated culture that defended its turf against other racial groups and revived a crude, hypersexualized treatment of women that went far beyond the shop floor. At the same time, they recast unionization battles as manly struggles against a system killing their very selves. Drawing on a wealth of archival material, the book recreates a social milieu in detail—the mean labor and stolen pleasures, the battles on the street and in the soul, and a masculinity that not only expressed itself in violence and sexism but also as a wellspring of the fortitude necessary to maintain one's dignity while doing hard work in a hard world. The book examines the evolution of working-class manhood. It shows how working-class masculine identity had many roots. The relations of social class, gender, race, and ethnicity influenced and shaped male attitudes, values, and behaviors. The book states that the workplace was central to the forming, nurturing, widening, and deepening of this masculine culture.

This book collects works from a new generation of scholars working at the nexus where religious history and working-class history converge. Focusing on Christianity and its unique purchase in America, the book uses in-depth local histories to illustrate how Americans male and female, rural and urban, and from a range of ethnic backgrounds dwelt in a space between the Church and the shop floor. The vivid chapters show Pentecostal miners preaching prosperity while seeking miracles in the depths of the earth, while aboveground black sharecroppers and white Protestants establish credit unions to pursue a joint vision of cooperative capitalism. Innovative, the book reframes venerable debates as it maps the dynamic contours of a landscape sculpted by the powerful forces of Christianity and capitalism.

During the 1950s and 1960s, labor leaders Harold Gibbons and Ernest Calloway championed a new kind of labor movement that regarded workers as “total persons” interested in both workplace affairs and the exercise of effective citizenship in their communities. Working through Teamsters Local 688 and viewing the city of St. Louis as their laboratory, this remarkable interracial duo forged a dynamic political alliance that placed their “citizen members” on the front lines of epic battles for urban revitalization, improved public services, and the advancement of racial and economic justice. Parallel to their political partnership, Gibbons functioned as a top Teamsters Union leader and Calloway as an influential figure in St. Louis's civil rights movement. Their pioneering efforts not only altered St. Louis's social and political landscape but also raised fundamental questions about the fate of the post-industrial city, the meaning of citizenship, and the role of unions in shaping American democracy.

From 1870 until after World War I, reformers led an effort to place children from orphanages, asylums, and children's homes with farming families. The farmers received free labor in return for providing room and board. Reformers, meanwhile, believed children learned lessons in family life, citizenry, and work habits that institutions simply could not provide. Drawing on institution records, correspondence from children and placement families, and state reports, this book scrutinizes how the farm system developed—and how the children involved may have become some of America's last indentured laborers. Between 1850 and 1900, up to one-third of farm homes contained children from outside the family. The book reveals how the nostalgia attached to misplaced perceptions about healthy, family-based labor masked the realities of abuse, overwork, and loveless upbringings endemic in the system. It also considers how rural people cared for their own children while being bombarded with dependents from elsewhere. Finally, the book traces how the ills associated with rural placement eventually forced reformers to transition to a system of paid foster care, adoptions, and family preservation.