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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.

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 is the first to document and analyze Hoyt Fuller’s profound influence on the Black Arts movement. Using historical snapshots of Fuller’s life and activism as a means to rethink the period, Building the Black Arts Movement provides a fresh take on the general trajectory of African American literary (and cultural) studies as the field developed over the course of two explosive decades in the mid-twentieth century. The book argues that the Black Arts movement can be understood as a pivotal and volatile moment in the long history of America’s culture wars. Moreover, by shifting our focus from creative artists and repositioning Fuller at the center of the movement--as one of its most underappreciated architects--the book grants new insights into the critical role of editorial work, the international dimensions of the movement, the complexities of sexuality, and the challenges of Black institution building during the 1960s and ’70s.

Labor studies scholars and working-class historians have long worked at the crossroads of academia and activism. This book brings together a collection of essays that explore long-standing themes in labor history and working-class studies as well as contemporary struggles over the relationship between engagement, teaching, and scholarship. The book examines the challenges and opportunities for engaged scholarship in the United States and abroad. The chapters discuss how scholars' participation in current labor and social struggles guides their campus and community organizing, public history initiatives, teaching, mentoring, and other activities. The chapters also explore the role of research and scholarship in social change, while acknowledging that intellectual labor complements but never replaces collective action and movement building. The book supports the argument that scholar activism and engaged teaching are and should be pursued. It demonstrates the many ways that scholars and teachers can be effective advocates when acting outside traditional definitions of their academic work.

In recognizing the relation between gender, race, and class oppression, American women of the postwar Progressive Party made the claim that peace required not merely the absence of violence, but also the presence of social and political equality. For progressive women, peace was the essential thread that connected the various aspects of their activist agendas. This study maps the routes taken by postwar popular-front women activists into peace and freedom movements of the 1960s and 1970s. The book tells the story of their decades-long effort to keep their intertwined social and political causes from unraveling and to maintain the connections among peace, feminism, and racial equality. It explains how the master narrative of U.S. history too often reduces the scope of leftist women's Cold War-era activism by containing it within women's, workers', or civil rights movements.

Drawing on powerful personal testimonies of the hazards of mountaintop removal in southern West Virginia, this book critically examines the fierce conflicts over this violent and increasingly prevalent form of strip mining. Focusing on the grassroots activist organization Coal River Mountain Watch (CRMW), the book reveals a turn away from once-strong traditional labor unions and the emergence of community-based activist organizations. By framing social and moral arguments in terms of the environment, these innovative hybrid movements take advantage of environmentalism's higher profile in contemporary politics. In investigating the local effects of globalization and global economics, the book tracks the profound reimagining of social and personal ideas such as identity, history, and landscape and considers their roles in organizing an agenda for progressive community activism.

At the end of World War II, the federal government announced plans to terminate its public child care programs that had been established during the war for working mothers. In response, women in California protested and lobbied to keep their centers open, even as these programs rapidly vanished in other states. Analyzing the informal networks of cross-class and cross-race reformers, policymakers, and educators, this book traces the rapidly changing alliances among these groups. During the early stages of the childcare movement, feminists, Communists, and labor activists banded together, only to have these alliances dissolve by the 1950s as the movement welcomed new leadership composed of working-class mothers and early childhood educators. In the 1960s, when federal policymakers earmarked child care funds for children of women on welfare and children described as culturally deprived, it expanded child care services available to these groups but eventually eliminated public child care for the working poor. Deftly exploring the structural forces impeding government support for broadly distributed child care as well as the possibilities for partnership and the limitations among key parties such as feminists, Communists, labor activists, working-class mothers, and early childhood educators, the book helps to explain the barriers to a publicly funded comprehensive child care program in the United States.

A century ago, governments buoyed by Progressive Era beliefs began to assume greater responsibility for protecting and rescuing citizens. Yet the aftermath of two disasters in the United States–Canada borderlands—the Salem fire of 1914 and the Halifax explosion of 1917—saw working-class survivors instead turn to friends, neighbors, coworkers, and family members for succor and aid. This book draws on histories of the Salem and Halifax events to explore the institutions—both formal and informal—that ordinary people relied upon in times of crisis. It explores patterns and traditions of self-help, informal order, and solidarity and details how people adapted these traditions when necessary. Yet, as the book shows, these methods—though often quick and effective—remained illegible to reformers. Indeed, soldiers, social workers, and reformers wielding extraordinary emergency powers challenged these grassroots practices to impose progressive “solutions” on what they wrongly imagined to be a fractured social landscape.

It is conventional wisdom that because of lucrative contracts negotiated by the United Auto Workers (UAW) under Walter Reuther's leadership, most autoworkers in the U.S. enjoyed steady work, increasing wages, and improved benefits in the postwar boom following World War II. In short, autoworkers entered the middle class. In contrast, this book argues that for Detroit autoworkers there was no postwar boom. Instead, the years from 1945 to 1960 were dominated by job instability and economic insecurity. This argument is based largely on oral history interviews and research in local newspapers, which covered the auto industry extensively. Conditions were worse for African Americans and white women, but almost all autoworkers experienced precarious, often dire circumstances. Recessions, automation, decentralization, and the collapse of independent automakers in Detroit are part of the story, but materials shortages, steel, coal, and copper strikes, parts supplier strikes, wildcat strikes, overproduction (especially in 1955), hot weather, cold weather, plant explosions, age, race, and gender workplace discrimination, and the inability of autoworkers to afford new cars contributed to instability and insecurity. Hardly anyone in the 1950s—whether ordinary autoworkers, union leaders, auto company executives, business analysts, or local shopkeepers—thought that the decade was marked by steady work, improving wages, or anything resembling predictable income for autoworkers.

During World War II, a group of American liberal Protestants set out to defend the constitutional rights of Japanese Americans interned without trial. The root of their wartime activism can be traced to the late nineteenth century when American imperial expansion and a surge in new immigration from Asia led to heated debates over the meaning of racial difference and the limits of American immigration inclusion. From the early 1900s through World War II, American liberal Protestants stood on the frontlines of these debates. This book explores the myriad religious, social, and political forces that shaped liberal Protestant activism over the first half of the twentieth century and the legacies their initiatives left in the post-World War II era.

While homophobia is commonly characterized as individual and personal prejudice, this book instead explores homophobia as a transnational political phenomenon. The book theorizes homophobia as a distinct configuration of repressive state-sponsored policies and practices with their own causes, explanations, and effects on how sexualities are understood and experienced in a variety of national contexts. The chapters cover a broad range of geographic cases, including France, Ecuador, Iran, Lebanon, Poland, Singapore, and the United States. Combining empirical analysis with theoretical synthesis, the chapters examine how homophobia travels across complex and ambiguous transnational networks, how it achieves and exerts decisive power, and how it shapes the collective identities and strategies of those groups it targets. The first comparative volume to focus specifically on the global diffusion of homophobia and its implications for an emerging worldwide LGBT movement, this book opens new avenues of debate and dialogue for scholars, students, and activists.

This book traces the evolution of revolutionary anarchist ideas in Europe and their migration to the United States in the 1880s. A new history of the transatlantic origins of American anarchism, this study thoroughly debunks the dominant narrative through which most historians interpret the Haymarket Bombing and Trial of 1886–87. Challenging the view that there was no evidence connecting the eight convicted workers to the bomb throwing at the Haymarket rally, this book examines police investigations and trial proceedings that reveal the hidden transatlantic networks, the violent subculture, and the misunderstood beliefs of Gilded Age anarchists. The book documents how, in the 1880s, radicals on both sides of the Atlantic came to celebrate armed struggle as the one true way forward and began to prepare seriously for conflict. Within this milieu, the book suggests the possibility of a “Haymarket conspiracy:” a coordinated plan of attack in which the oft-martyred Haymarket radicals in fact posed a real threat to public order and safety. Drawing on new, never-before published historical evidence, the book provides a new means of understanding the revolutionary anarchist movement on its own terms rather than in the romantic ways in which its agents have been eulogized.

“Lost in the USA: American Identity from the Promise Keepers to the Million Mom March” is a book about Americans’ search for personal tranquility at the turn of the twenty-first century. It argues that beneath the surface of prosperity and peace, ordinary Americans were struggling to adjust and adapt to the forces of postmodernity – immigration, multiculturalism, feminism, globalization, deindustrialization – which were radically changing the way Americans understood themselves and each other. Using the Promise Keepers (1991-2000), the Million Man March (1995), the Million Woman March (1997), the LGBT Marches (1993 and 2000), and the Million Mom March (2000) as a prism through which to analyze the era, “Lost in the USA” reveals the massive shifts occurring in American culture, shows how these shifts troubled many Americans, what they resolved to do about them, and how the forces of postmodernity transformed the identities of some Americans. It reveals that the mass gatherings of the 1990s were therapeutic places where people did not just express their identity but where they sought new identities. It shows that the mass gatherings reveal much about coalition building, interracial worship, parenting, and marriage and family relationships. Because its approach is historical it also addresses the continuing processes of millennialism, modernism and American identity formation.

Carved out of century-old farmland near Chicago, the Prairie Crossing development is a novel experiment in urban public policy that preserves 69 percent of the land as open space. The for-profit project has set out to do nothing less than use access to nature as a means to challenge America's failed culture of suburban sprawl. The first comprehensive look at an American conservation community, this book examines an effort to connect adults to the land while creating a healthy and humane setting for raising a new generation attuned to nature. The book is placed within the wider context of suburban planning, revealing how two first-time developers implemented a visionary new land ethic that saved green space by building on it. The remarkable achievements include a high rate of resident civic participation, the reestablishment of a thriving prairie ecosystem, the reintroduction of endangered and threatened species, and improved air and water quality. Yet, as the book shows, considerations like economic uncertainty, lack of racial and class diversity, and politics have challenged, and continue to challenge, Prairie Crossing and its residents.

Entering the 1960s, the University of Illinois typified “Middle America,” with its midwestern campus, middle-class enrollment, and midcentury quiescence—the unlikeliest of settings for protest, rebellion, and riots in the streets. But all of that came to pass. Born of free-speech issues in the Red Scare era and nourished by anger with an unpopular war, protests grew into a general antiestablishment frustration, climaxing in a student strike and days-long violent disturbances that shut down one of the nation’s largest land-grant universities. How could this happen, here? The story is one of self-important legislators, well-intentioned administrators, a conservative citizenry, and “outside agitators,” but mostly of a minority of confident, determined, somewhat naïve students. Virtually all white, relatively privileged, raised in a postwar economic boom, believers in and embodiment of American exceptionalism, they would confront moral questions around race, justice, war, life, and death that became existential as the body count rose in Vietnam. This is the story of how those Illini students responded. No one could have predicted rebellion would happen here. But it did. These young people helped bring down one president, shamed a second, and helped lead the nation to end a wretched war. By their agency they changed history. And if such a movement could happen in such an unlikely place, who is to say that another, equally unlikely, might not happen again?

Drawing on the pioneering works of Daniel Lerner, Everett Rogers, and Wilbur Schramm as well as the author's own personal experiences in the field, this book builds a new, historically cognizant paradigm of communication for development and social change for the future that supplements technology with social entrepreneurship. Summarizing the history of the field of communication for development from Harry S. Truman's Marshall Plan for the Third World to the United Nations' Millennium Development Goals, the book argues that the communication field can renew its role in development by recognizing that large donors of development aid have a difficult time promoting genuine transformation. The book ultimately suggests an agenda for improving and strengthening the work of academics, policy makers, development funders, and others who use communication in all of its forms to foster social change.

Drawing upon deep ethnographic fieldwork, and written in lively prose that weaves together story and evidence, the book explores contemporary homesteading in Appalachia as a means of resistance to capitalist modernity. It is framed around two questions: Why are people still pursuing rural subsistence? And why are they often divided into two main groups, known to each other--not always kindly--as “hicks” and “hippies”? These turn out to be urgent questions, considering that the cultural divide between these two groups is one instance of the dangerous and growing schism between “liberal” and “conservative” in the contemporary United States. Because the answer turns upon the distribution of literacy and literate education, these also turn out to be profound questions that cannot be answered without exploring the inner workings of class and capitalism. Thus, the narrative begins by telling the complex and often misunderstood histories of both groups of back-to-the-landers, but turns in the middle chapters to an analysis of the ways in which working-class people are rendered educationally dispossessed through schooling and jobs, as well as discussion of the often devastating consequences of that dispossession. In the final chapter, the book returns to homesteading as a form of resistance, to address the question of whether it provides, as practitioners hope, a measure of shelter from the machine.

This book engages union reformers at Boeing in Wichita and Seattle to reveal how ordinary workers attempted to take command of their futures by chipping away at the cozy partnership between union leadership and corporate management. Focusing on the 1995 strike at Boeing, the book renders a multi-layered account of the battles between the company and the union and within the union led by Unionists for Democratic Change and two other dissident groups. The book gives voice to the company's claims of the hardships of competitiveness the entrenched union leaders' calls for concessions in the name of job security, alongside the democratic union reformers' fight for a rank-and-file upsurge against both the company and the union leaders. Incorporating theory and methods from the fields of organizational communication as well as labor studies, the book methodically uncovers and analyzes the goals, strategies, and dilemmas of the dissidents who, while wanting to uphold the ideas and ideals of the union, took up the gauntlet to make it more responsive to workers and less conciliatory toward management, especially in times of economic stress or crisis.

This book eschews the generalities of other temperance histories to provide a close-grained story about the connections between alcohol consumption and identity in the upper Midwest. The book examines the ever-shifting ways that ethnicity, gender, class, religion, and place interacted with each other during the long temperance battle in Minnesota. The book's deconstruction of Irish and German ethnic positioning with respect to temperance activism provides a rare interethnic history of the movement. At the same time, it shows how women engaged in temperance work as a way to form public identities and reforges the largely neglected, yet vital link between female temperance and suffrage activism. Relatedly, the book reflects on the continuities and changes between how the movement functioned to construct identity in the heartland versus the movement's more often studied roles in the East. It also gives a nuanced portrait of the culture clash between a comparatively reform-minded Minneapolis and dynamic anti-temperance forces in whiskey-soaked St. Paul—forces supported by government, community, and business institutions heavily invested in keeping the city wet.