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This book shows that full employment has been rare in the United States in the last 150 years; excessive unemployment has been the norm. Against prominent economists who argue that unemployment is voluntary choice, it shows by analysis and many stories that being unemployed is painful and not something people choose lightly. It argues that hidden unemployment and a continuing labor surplus help explain why average real wages in 2019 are not much above their level of the early 1970s. The book locates consequential ideas about unemployment on a continuum between two opposing views. The free-market view holds that except for external shocks or government mistakes, significant unemployment is rare. People can always find jobs. But the historical record tells another story. For example, with mostly laissez-faire conditions, there were six major depressions from 1873 through 1933.The opposing view is that the business system naturally generates excessive unemployment, and at times depressions with catastrophic levels of joblessness. The book shows how the second model fits past and present facts. It also argues that the official unemployment rate, whose creation in the 1940s was an advance for economic policy, underestimates real unemployment and lessens the impetus for job-creation programs. And that’s a problem. Because many employers are happy with a labor surplus, and because tax cuts for the rich do not create many good jobs, this book argues that only direct job creation by the federal government—financed partly by taxes on the rich—will bring high-wage full employment.

Degrees of Difference: Reflections of Women of Color on Graduate School uses personal narrative supported by scholarly research to identify the struggles faced by women of color in graduate school and the methods deployed by women to mitigate the academic and emotional struggles they face. Contributors represent a diverse group of women from different ethnic, racial, and national origin backgrounds in fields ranging from the humanities to sciences. The essays engage common themes that recur in many women of color’s narratives: racial microaggressions, alienation, disillusionment, a lack of departmental and institutional support, imposter syndrome, a lack of self-care, and limited support from family and partners. The authors then discuss the specific steps taken to resist the roadblocks that stop many women of color from completing their degrees. Focusing on self-care, the creation of supportive communities, finding like-minded mentors, and strategies on resisting racism and unsupportive faculty and graduate students, the contrubtors offer solutions and possible avenues to support other women of color’s success in academia.

Fighting Fascist Spain pieces together the story of Spanish immigrants in the United States in their fight against fascism, as reflected in the periodical España Libre and the grassroots activism of the organization that sustained that publication, the Sociedades Hispanas Confederadas, or the Confederadas. Although Espana Libre was run by Spanish immigrants and exiles and published in Brooklyn and New York City, the organization had a clear transnational consciousness: old migrants and new exiles coalesced in overlapping communities across the United States that were linked to similar antifascist networks in other countries. Fighting Fascist Spain identifies the web of anarchist, anarcho-syndicalist, and socialist connections that facilitated the political engagement of local activists and organizations and enlarged the global reach of the Confederadas during the dictatorship of Francisco Franco (1939–1975) and until democratic elections were held again in Spain (1977). Using extensive and previously ignored literary, visual, and archival sources, the manuscript explores anarchist literature and antifascist humor. The broad objective of Fighting Fascist Spain is not merely to recover evidence of migrant activism and literature but to articulate how workers’ culture and politics shaped their antifascism.

Imagining the Mulatta: Blackness in U.S. and Brazilian Media demonstrates how mixed-race women of African and European descent are harnessed in popular media as a tool to uphold white supremacy and discipline people of African descent to uphold state policies of antiblackness. Uncovering the racialized and gendered paradigms of U.S. and Brazilian media, the book uses case studies of texts from a broad range of popular culture media—film, telenovelas, television shows, music videos, magazines, newspapers, and Olympic ceremonies—to elucidate how the U.S. mulatta and Brazilian mulata figures operates within and across the United States and Brazil as a response to racial anxieties and notions of white superiority. These shared concepts of race, gender, and sexuality crystallize in the mulatta/mulata figure as representative of interlinked racial projects in Brazil and the United States. Focusing on popular culture and political events of the 2000s, the book demonstrates how the mulatta and mulata figures facilitated multicultural and postracial discourses. Exploring representations, definitions, and meanings of blackness in the context of the Americas, the book traverses the cultural conditions of racializations in the United States alongside Brazil to unveil the workings of pervasive racial and gender inequalities.