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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.

All Our Trials: Prisons, Policing, and the Feminist Fight to End Violence is a history of grassroots activism by, for, and about incarcerated domestic violence survivors, criminalized rape resisters, and dissident women prisoners in the 1970s and early 1980s. Across the country, in and outside of prisons, radical women participated in collective actions that insisted on the interconnections between interpersonal violence against women and the racial and gender violence of policing and imprisonment. These organizing efforts generated an anticarceral feminist politics that was defined by a critique of state violence; an understanding of race, gender, class, and sexuality as mutually constructed systems of power and meaning; and a practice of coalition-based organizing. Drawing on an array of archival sources as well as first-person narratives, the book traces the political activities, ideas, and influence of this activist current. All Our Trials demonstrates how it shaped broader debates about the root causes of and remedies for violence against women as well as played a decisive role in the making of a prison abolition movement.

Almost all studies of the nation’s extreme inequality of income and wealth have overlooked a critical, overarching cause of the creation of The New Gilded Age. The permanent political class has driven and sustained economic and political inequality not only with the government policies it has crafted over the past four decades. It has created inequality by becoming a self-dealing, self-serving nepotistic oligarchy that is enabling the One Percent and the .01 Percent to create an American aristocracy of wealth. American Oligarchy describes a multifaceted culture of self-dealing and corruption reaching into every sector of American society. The political class’s direct creation of economic inequality by channeling the flow of income and wealth to elites, has been described extensively; less exposed has been how its self-aggrandizement indirectly—but hidden in plain sight—creates a culture of corruption that infects the entire society.

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.

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.

An essential African American artist of his era, Archibald Motley Jr. created paintings of black Chicago that aligned him with the revisionist aims of the New Negro Renaissance. Yet Motley’s approach to constructing a New Negro—a dignified figure both accomplished and worthy of respect—reflected the challenges faced by African American artists working on the project of racial reinvention and uplift. Phoebe Wolfskill demonstrates how Motley’s art embodied the tenuous nature of the Black Renaissance and the wide range of ideas that structured it. Focusing on key works in Motley’s oeuvre, Wolfskill reveals the artist’s complexity and the variety of influences that informed his work. Motley’s paintings suggest that the racist, problematic image of the Old Negro was not a relic of the past but an influence that pervaded the Black Renaissance. Exploring Motley in relation to works by notable black and non-black contemporaries, Wolfskill reinterprets Motley’s oeuvre as part of a broad effort to define American cultural identity through race, class, gender, religion, and regional affiliation. The book concludes by considering how racist images of the past continue to fuel conflicts over black representation.

Arousing Sense spotlights the senses and embodied knowledge for exploring the realm of creativity, experimentation, and knowledge making. The book is a collection of practiced-based explorations to arouse the senses, to “make sense” of how sensory experiences help to orient the body and self with others. No specialization needed! The purpose of the exercises is to stimulate creative activity by engaging with the senses, heighten sensory awareness, and deepen one’s understanding of what it is to be human. The exercises support workshop leaders and solo practitioners with straightforward instructions in cookbook recipe format, sometimes served with playfulness, performative drama, seriousness, or mystery to engage deeper, potentially sensitive issues. Heightening sensory awareness supports empathy and encourages compassion. Shifting one’s sensory point of view, communicating clearly, embracing open-mindedness, shedding assumptions, and inviting empathy and vulnerability into the explorations can enable revelations that what one experiences personally may not be the same as what others experience. The senses, as vehicles of transmission, serve as a means for understanding who we are in an embodied and situated sensibility. The recipes that can be delivered easily online are noted with an asterisk in the table of contents “Menu.”

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.

Autochthonomies is an intellectual project that engages readers in an interpretive journey: it engages and describes a process by which readers of texts created by artists and actors of African descent might engage such texts as legible within the context of African Diasporic historical and cultural discursive practices. It argues that there is a cultural and philosophical gain to understanding these texts not as products of, or responses only to, Western hegemonic dynamics or simply as products of discrete ethnic or national identities. By invoking a transnational African/Diasporic interpretive lens, negotiated through a virtual “lakou” or yard space in which such identities are transfigured, recognized, and exchanged, the study demonstrates how to best examine the salient features of the texts that underscore African/Diasporic sensibilities and renders them legible, thus offering a potential not only for richer readings of African Diasporic texts but also the possibility of rupturing the Manichean binary dynamics through which such texts have commonly been read. This produces an enriching interpretive capacity emphasizing the transnationalism of connections between subjects of African descent as the central pole for undertaking such investigations. Through the use of the neologism, autochthonomy, the study argues further that, despite colonial interruptions, critics of such works should seek to situate them as part of an intricate network of cultural and transnational exchanges.

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.

Before March Madness examines the power dynamics of mid-century college sports when their meaning in higher education was still uncertain, when their future in American culture was still undetermined, and when the ascendance, indeed the very survival, of the NCAA was not yet assured. The book identifies the institutional struggles of college athletics from the late 1930s to the late 1950s and the multiple stakeholders and varied interests contained therein, showing a complex, and often conflicting, view of both college sports and higher education. The NCAA’s insistence on defining college athletics solely within the big-time commercialized model opened itself to severe criticism from within the organization in the form of small liberal arts colleges, medium-size regional and state universities, and historically black colleges, as well as outside it with the creation of the NAIA. The organization, however, successfully used college basketball to both placate internal critics and stave off its external competitor. In doing so, the NCAA managed to create in the public’s mind a singular vision of college sports, often represented by college football, representing only the big-time commercialized model by creating a peace that was purchased through college basketball. The success of NCAA elites to co-opt, divide, and placate its insurgent critics mirrored the larger response of mid-twentieth-century political and economic elites in the face of unprecedented challenges resulting from the civil rights movement, second-wave feminism, and opposition to the war in Vietnam.

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.

Through its analysis of film, drama, fiction, visual culture, poetry, and other cultural -artifacts, Black Cultural Production after Civil Rights offers a fresh examination of how the historical paradox by which unprecedented civil rights gains coexist with novel impediments to collectivist black liberation projects. At the beginning of the 1970s, the ethos animating the juridical achievements of the civil rights movement began to wane, and the rise of neoliberalism, a powerful conservative backlash, the co-optation of “race-blind” rhetoric, and the pathologization and criminalization of poverty helped to retrench black inequality in the post-civil rights era. This book uncovers the intricate ways that black cultural production kept imagining how black people could achieve their dreams for freedom, despite abject social and political conditions. While black writers, artists, historians, and critics have taken renewed interest in the historical roots of black un-freedom, Black Cultural Production insists that the 1970s anchors the philosophical, aesthetic, and political debates that animate contemporary debates in African American studies. Black cultural production and producers help us think about how black people might achieve freedom by centralizing the roles black art and artists have had in expanding notions of freedom, democracy, equity, and gender equality. Black cultural production continues to engage in social critique and transformation and remains an important site for the (re)making of black politics.

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.

From 1900 to the present, people of African descent living in the United States have created a Black intellectual tradition engaged with ideas on race, racial oppression, and the world. This interdisciplinary volume explores the diverse thought behind the fight for racial justice as developed by four groups of African Americans: artists and intellectuals; performers and protest activists; institutions and organizations; and educators and religious leaders. By including both women’s and diasporic perspectives, the essays explore the full landscape of the Black intellectual tradition. Contributors engage with important ideas ranging from the consideration of gender within the tradition, to intellectual products generated outside the intelligentsia, to the ongoing relationship between thought and concrete effort in the quest for liberation.

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.

In this book, GerShun Avilez argues that queerness, here meaning same-sex desire and gender nonconformity, introduces the threat of injury and that artists throughout the Black diaspora use queer desire to negotiate spaces of injury. The space of injury does not necessarily pertain to a particular architecture or location; it concerns the perception and engagement of a body. Black queer bodies are perceived as social threats, and this perception results in threats (physical, psychological, socioeconomic) against these bodies. The space of injury describes the potential threat to queer bodies that lingers throughout the social world. Attending to such threats and challenging them constitute defining elements in Black queer artists’ work. In each of the two parts to the book, the author examines how perceptions of the Black queer body in different environments create uncertainty for that body and make it a contested space because of racial and sexual meaning. Part 1 focuses on movement through public space (through streets and across borders) and on how state-backed interruptions seek to inhibit queer bodies. Part 2 explores movement through institutional spaces (prisons and hospitals), which seek to expose the queer body to make it vulnerable to control. Ultimately, the book insists that desire and artistic production function as means to queer freedom when actual policies and legislation fail to ensure civic rights and social mobility.

This book is a compilation of contemporary and previously unpublished scholarship on Black sexualities. The sixteen essays work to untangle the complex mechanisms of dominance and subordination as they are attached to political and socioeconomic forces, cultural productions, and academic lenses that assess sexuality as it intersects with race. Some of the essays trace the historical and contemporary markets for sexual labor and systems of erotic capital. Other essays illuminate how forces of commodification, exploitation, and appropriation, which render black sexualities both desirable and deviant, also provide the spaces, networks, and relationships that have allowed black people to revise, recuperate, and re-articulate their sexual identities, erotic capital, and gender and sexual expressions and relations. The collection focuses on three themes linked by the major theory of black sexual economy: sex labor and race play; drag and hypersexual performance; and the erotics of life and death.

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.