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A Hard Journey brings to life Don West: poet, ordained Congregationalist minister, labor organizer, educator, leftist activist, and one of the most important literary and political figures in the southern Appalachians during the middle years of the twentieth century. Initially motivated by religious conviction and driven by a vision of an open, democratic, and nonracist society, West was also a passionate advocate for the region's traditional values. This biography balances his literary work with political and educational activities, placing West's poetry in the context of his fight for social justice and racial equality. James J. Lorence uses previously unexamined sources to explore West's early involvement in organizing miners and other workers for the Socialist and Communist Parties during the 1930s. In documenting West's lifetime commitment to creating a nonracist, egalitarian South, A Hard Journey furnishes the spotlight he deserves as a pioneering figure in twentieth-century Southern radicalism.
Examines the organization of the unemployed during the Great Depression and demonstrates the linkage between their mobilization and automobile-industry organization.
In this remarkable study, David A. J. Richards combines an interpretive history of culture and law, political philosophy, and constitutional analysis to explain the background, development, and growing impact of two of the most important and challenging human rights movements of our time, feminism and gay rights. Richards argues that both movements are extensions of rights-based dissent, rooted in antebellum abolitionist feminism that condemned both American racism and sexism. He sees the progressive role of such radical dissent as an emancipated moral voice in the American constitutional tradition. He examines the role of dissident African Americans, Jews, women, and homosexuals in forging ...
This is the first book-length study of the triumph of the Reuther caucus over the Thomas-Addes-Leonard coalition in the United Auto Workers union. The dramatic defeat of the left-center coalition had far reaching significance. It helped to determine the shape of postwar labor relations, the direction of postwar liberalism, and the fate of the left. Based on manuscript sources, oral histories, and quantitative analyses of convention roll calls, UAW Politics in the Cold War Era places this union conflict in a national political context of postwar economic conflicts, the cold war, and the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act. Halpern offers a fresh point of view on the character of the two contending coalitions and the reasons for the Reuther triumph. His work is a valuable contribution to the current reassessment of the domestic politics of the early cold war years.
This illuminating biography of Margaret Sanger—the woman who fought for birth control in America—describes her childhood, her private life, her relationships with Emma Goldman and John Reed, her public role, and more. Margaret Sanger went to jail in 1917 for distributing contraceptives to immigrant women in a makeshift clinic in Brooklyn. She died a half-century later, just after the Supreme Court guaranteed constitutional protection for the use of contraceptives. Now, Ellen Chesler provides an authoritative and widely acclaimed biography of this great emancipator, whose lifelong struggle helped women gain control over their own bodies. An idealist who mastered practical politics, Sanger...
Winner of the National Book Award for Nonfiction An electrifying story of the sensational murder trial that divided a city and ignited the civil rights struggle In 1925, Detroit was a smoky swirl of jazz and speakeasies, assembly lines and fistfights. The advent of automobiles had brought workers from around the globe to compete for manufacturing jobs, and tensions often flared with the KKK in ascendance and violence rising. Ossian Sweet, a proud Negro doctor-grandson of a slave-had made the long climb from the ghetto to a home of his own in a previously all-white neighborhood. Yet just after his arrival, a mob gathered outside his house; suddenly, shots rang out: Sweet, or one of his defend...
In this book Mark Rupert argues that American global power was shaped by the ways in which mass production was institutionalized in the USA, and by the political and ideological struggles integral to this process. The production of an unprecedented volume of goods propelled the United States to the apex of the global division of labor, ensuring victory in World War II and enabling postwar reconstruction under American leadership. He describes an 'historic bloc' of American statesmen, capitalists and labor leaders who fostered a productivity-oriented political consensus within the USA, and sought to generalize their vision of liberal capitalism around the globe. He focuses on the incorporation of industrial labor as a junior partner in this hegemonic bloc, and argues that the recent erosion of its position under the pressures of transnational competition and the political forces of right wing reaction may open up new possibilities for transformative politics.
Interweaving nuanced discussions of politics, visuality, and gender, Gender and Activism in a Little Magazine uncovers the complex ways that gender figures into the graphic satire created by artists for the New York City-based socialist journal, the Masses. This exceptional magazine was published between 1911 and 1917, during an unusually radical decade in American history, and featured cartoons drawn by artists of the Ashcan School and others, addressing questions of politics, gender, labor and class. Rather than viewing art from the Masses primarily in terms of its critical social stances or aesthetic choices, however, this study uses these images to open up new ways of understanding the c...
Clarence Darrow was one of the most legendary and influential trial lawyers the world has ever seen. Famous for his ability to turn seemingly unwinnable cases his way through his oratory and his uncanny skill at reading the mood of a jury, he was a man whose work inspired impassioned campaigns against the death penalty as well as lavish Hollywood movies. But, despite his success, he also had a troubled life outside the court, and some of his most famous cases came after he himself had been put on trial. Now award-winning writer Donald McRae revisits the three greatest trials which secured Darrow's near-mythic reputation and brings them vividly to life. The public themes which Darrow confronted still resonate powerfully today: sex and murder, religion and science, racism, the media and the law. Written with great intimacy, drama and immediacy, this is a sweeping story which offers piercing insight into one of the most towering and controversial personalities of the twentieth century.