Browse

Drawing on ten years of interviews and ethnographic and archival research, this book delves into the ways Filipinos in Hawaiʻi have balanced their pursuit of upward mobility and mainstream acceptance with a desire to keep their Filipino identity. In particular, the book speaks to the processes of identity making and the politics of representation among immigrant communities striving to resist marginalization in a globalized, transnational era. Critiquing the popular image of Hawaiʻi as a postracial paradise, the book reveals how Filipino immigrants talk about their relationships to the place(s) they left and the place(s) where they've settled, and how these discourses shape their identities. It also shows how struggles for community empowerment and identity territorialization continue to affect how minority groups construct the stories they tell about themselves, to themselves and others. The book follows the struggles of contemporary Filipino immigrants to build community, where they enact a politics of incorporation built on race, ethnicity, class, culture, and language. It focuses on two sites of building and representation, the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa and the Filipino Community Center in Waipahu.

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.

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.

This book, a dual biography and cultural history, traces the influence of two southern activist preachers, one black and one white, who used their ministry to organize the working class in the 1930s and 1940s across lines of gender, race, and geography. Owen Whitfield and Claude Williams, along with their wives, Zella Whitfield and Joyce Williams, drew on their bedrock religious beliefs to stir ordinary men and women to demand social and economic justice in the eras of the Great Depression, New Deal, and Second World War. In chronicling the shifting contexts of the actions of Whitfield and Williams, this book situates Christian theology within the struggles of some of America's most downtrodden workers, transforming the dominant narratives of the era and offering a fresh view of the promise and instability of religion and civil rights unionism.

As a leading dissident in the World War II concentration camps for Japanese Americans, Joseph Yoshisuke Kurihara stands out as an icon of Japanese American resistance. In this biography, Kurihara's life provides a window into the history of Japanese Americans during the first half of the twentieth century. Born in Hawaiʻi to Japanese parents who immigrated to work on the sugar plantations, Kurihara was transformed by the forced removal and incarceration of ethnic Japanese during World War II. As an inmate at Manzanar in California, Kurihara became one of the leaders of a dissident group within the camp and was implicated in “the Manzanar incident,” a serious civil disturbance that erupted on December 6, 1942. In 1945, after three years and seven months of incarceration, he renounced his U.S. citizenship and boarded a ship for Japan, never to return to the United States. Shedding light on the turmoil within the camps as well as the sensitive and formerly unspoken issue of citizenship renunciation among Japanese Americans, this book explores one man's struggles with the complexities of loyalty and dissent.

Both a history of an overlooked community and a well-rounded reassessment of prevailing assumptions about Chinese immigrants in the American West, this book brings to life the world of turn-of-the-century mining towns in the Northwest. The book meticulously recreates the lives of Chinese immigrants, miners, merchants, and others who populated these towns and interacted amicably with their white and Native American neighbors, defying the common perception of nineteenth-century Chinese communities as insular enclaves subject to increasing prejudice and violence. While most research has focused on Chinese miners in California, this book is the first extensive study of Chinese experiences in the towns of John Day in Oregon and Tuscarora, Island Mountain, and Gold Creek in Nevada. The book illustrates the relationships between miners and merchants within the communities and in the larger context of immigration, arguing that the leaders of the Chinese and non-Chinese communities worked together to create economic interdependence and to short-circuit many of the hostilities and tensions that plagued other mining towns. Peppered with fascinating details about these communities from the intricacies of Chinese gambling games to the techniques of hydraulic mining, the book draws on a wealth of historical materials, including immigration records, census manuscripts, legal documents, newspapers, memoirs, and manuscript collections. The book supplements this historical research with invaluable firsthand observations of artifacts that the author experienced in archaeological digs and restoration efforts at several of the sites of the former booming mining towns.

In the early 1900s, workers from new U.S. colonies in the Philippines and Puerto Rico held unusual legal status. Denied citizenship, they nonetheless had the right to move freely in and out of U.S. jurisdiction. As a result, Filipinos and Puerto Ricans could seek jobs in the United States and its territories despite the anti-immigration policies in place at the time. This book takes an in-depth look at how the two groups fared in a third new colony, Hawaiʻi. Using plantation documents, missionary records, government documents, and oral histories, the book analyzes how the labor migrants interacted with Hawaiian government structures and businesses, how U.S. policies for colonial workers differed from those for citizens or foreigners, and how policies aided corporate and imperial interests. As the book shows, the workers' advantages came with significant drawbacks. Unlike foreign nationals, Filipinos and Puerto Ricans lacked access to consular and other officials with the power to intercede on labor and other issues. Instead, workers often had to rely on unofficial community mediators who also served employers in positions of authority. A rare tandem study of two groups at work on foreign soil, the book offers a new perspective on U.S. imperialism and labor issues of the era.

French-born and self-trained civil engineer Octave Chanute designed America's two largest stockyards, created innovative and influential structures such as the Kansas City Bridge over the previously “unbridgeable” Missouri River, and was a passionate aviation pioneer whose collaborative approach to aeronautical engineering problems helped the Wright brothers take flight. Drawing on a trove of archival material and exclusive family sources, this book is the first detailed examination of Chanute's life and his immeasurable contributions to the fields of engineering and transportation, from the ground transportation revolution of the mid-nineteenth century to the early days of aviation. This book brings to light many previously overlooked facets of Chanute's life, in both his professional accomplishments and his personal relationships. Through the reflections of other engineers, scientists and pioneers in various fields who knew him, the book characterizes Chanute as a man who believed in fostering and supporting people who were willing to learn. This biography cements Chanute's place as a preeminent engineer, pioneer, and mentor in the history of transportation in the United States and the development of the airplane.

This book offers the first comprehensive account of the politics of countersubversion in the United States prior to the McCarthy era. The book traces the course of American countersubversion over the first half of the twentieth century, culminating in the rise of McCarthyism and the Cold War. This sweeping study explores how anti-subversive fervor was dampened in the 1920s in response to the excesses of World War I, transformed by the politics of antifascism in the Depression era, and rekindled in opposition to Roosevelt's ambitious New Deal policies in the later 1930s and 1940s. Varied interest groups such as business tycoons, Christian denominations, and Southern Democrats as well as the federal government pursued their own courses, which alternately converged and diverged, eventually consolidating into the form they would keep during the Cold War. Rigorous in its scholarship yet accessible to a wide audience, this book shows how the opposition to radicalism became a defining ideological question of American life.

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.

This intellectually ambitious study explores the significance of Wilsonian internationalism for workers and the influence of American labor in both shaping and undermining the foreign policies and war mobilization efforts of Woodrow Wilson's Administration. The book highlights the major fault lines that emerged within labor circles as Wilson pursued his agenda in the context of Mexican and European revolutions, World War I, and the Versailles Peace Conference. The book's spotlight falls on the American Federation of Labor, whose leadership collaborated extensively with Wilson, assisting with propaganda, policy, and diplomacy. At the same time, other labor groups (and even sub-groups within the AFL) vehemently opposed Wilsonian internationalism. As the book shows, the choice to collaborate with or resist U.S. foreign policy remained an important one for labor throughout the twentieth century. In fact, it continues to resonate today in debates over the global economy, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the impact of U.S. policies on workers at home and abroad.

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.

From the slot machine trust of the early 1900s to the prolific Prohibition era bootleggers allied with Al Capone, and for decades beyond, organized crime in Chicago Heights, Illinois, represented a vital component of the Chicago Outfit. This book taps interviews, archives, government documents, and the author's own family history to tell the story of the Chicago Heights “boys” and their place in the city's Italian American community in the twentieth century. Debunking the popular idea of organized crime as a uniquely Italian enterprise, the book delves into the social and cultural forces that that created a vibrant Italian enclave while simultaneously contributing to illicit activities so pervasive the city's name became synonymous with vice. As it shows, discrimination blocked opportunities for Italians' social mobility. The close-knit Italian communities that arose in response to such limits produced a rich supply of social capital Italians used to pursue alternative routes to success that ranged from grocery stores and union organizing to, on occasion, crime. In particular the book offers invaluable insights into the ways established Outfit figures brought in new recruits and how social forces worked to guarantee a pool of potential soldiers. The book throws light on a little-known corner of the history of Chicagoland organized crime.

This book explores the complicated history of the suffrage movement in New York State by delving into the stories of women who opposed the expansion of voting rights to women. The book makes the case that, contrary to popular thought, women who opposed suffrage were not against women's rights. Instead, conservative women who fought against suffrage encouraged women to retain their distinctive feminine identities as protectors of their homes and families, a role they felt was threatened by the imposition of masculine political responsibilities. The book details the victories and defeats on both sides of the movement from its start in the 1890s to its end in the 1930s, analyzing not only how local and state suffrage and anti-suffrage campaigns impacted the national suffrage movement, but also how both sides refined their appeals to the public based on their counterparts' arguments. Rather than condemning the women of the anti-suffragist movement for accepting or even trying to preserve the status quo, the book acknowledges the powerful activism of this often overlooked and misunderstood political force in the history of women's equality.

This book provides a comprehensive sociological explanation for the emergence and continuation of organized crime in Chicago. Tracing the roots of political corruption that afforded protection to gambling, prostitution, and other vice activity in Chicago and other large American cities, the book challenges the dominant belief that organized crime in America is a descendent of the Sicilian Mafia. According to this widespread “alien conspiracy” theory, organized crime evolved in a linear fashion beginning with the Mafia in Sicily, emerging in the form of the Black Hand in America's immigrant colonies, and culminating in the development of the Cosa Nostra in America's urban centers. Looking beyond this Mafia paradigm, this volume argues that the development of organized crime in Chicago and other large American cities was rooted in the social structure of American society. Specifically, the book ties organized crime to the emergence of machine politics in America's urban centers. It contends that Chicago's criminal underworld could not have existed without the blessing of those who controlled municipal, county, and state government. These practices were not imported from Sicily, the book contends, but were bred in the socially disorganized slums of America where elected officials routinely franchised vice and crime in exchange for money and votes. The book also traces the history of the African American community's participation in traditional organized crime in Chicago and offers new perspectives on the organizational structure of the Chicago Outfit, the traditional organized crime group in Chicago.

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.

Dedicated to organizing workers from diverse racial, ethnic, and religious backgrounds, many of whom were considered “unorganizable” by other unions, the progressive New York City-based labor union District 65 counted among its 30,000 members retail clerks, office workers, warehouse workers, and wholesale workers. This book presents a distinctive study of District 65 and its efforts to secure economic equality for minority workers in sales and processing jobs in small, low-end shops and warehouses throughout the city. The book shows how organizers fought tirelessly to achieve better hours and higher wages for “unskilled,” unrepresented workers and to re-value their work, the result of an economy inclining toward fewer manufacturing jobs and more low-wage service and processing jobs.

This book examines the making of the Chicago Police Department at a time when the city was roiling with political and economic conflict, much of it rooted in class tensions, and its lawmakers and business elite fostered the growth of a professional municipal police force to protect capitalism, its assets, and their own positions in society. Together with city policymakers, the business elite united behind an ideology of order that would simultaneously justify the police force's existence and dictate its functions. Tracing the Chicago Police Department's growth through events such as the 1855 Lager Beer Riot, the Civil War, the May Day strikes, the 1877 railroad workers strike and riot, and the Haymarket violence in 1886, the book demonstrates that this ideology of order both succeeded and failed in its aims. Recasting late nineteenth-century Chicago in terms of the struggle over order, this insightful history uncovers the modern police department's role in reconciling democracy with industrial capitalism.

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.