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In his first album, Darryl Holter serves up a musical stew of original songs. Spiced with country sounds, folk feelings, and blues undercurrents, this CD draws upon genuine experiences of life, love and the pursuit of intelligent music to create thirteen songs with Dylan-esque lyrics, Wilco-like arrangements, and intriguing musical blends that bring to mind Springsteen, Gram Parsons, and early Johnny Cash. His lyrics can be read as poems and the songs are built around Holters arresting vocals, including country-tinged narratives, insightful ballads, ironic pop sounds, and straight-ahead rock. The album features some of the most talented names in contemporary music, including electric guitar guru, Nels Cline, percussionist Nate Wood, and pedal and lap steel master Greg Leisz. It was recorded at Capitol Records in Hollywood. Arrangements by producer Ben Wendel give the album a deeply layered sense of timeliness and virtuosity. By taking Holters songs of love and life, hope and despair, and pushing them forward in a variety of musical directions, Wendel has produced an album and introduced an artist that will be listened to and talked about by many.
Farm and Factory illuminates the importance of the Midwest in U.S. labor history. America's heartland - often overlooked in studies focusing on other regions, or particular cities or industries - has a distinctive labor history characterized by the sustained, simultaneous growth of both agriculture and industry. Since the transfer of labor from farm to factory did not occur in the Midwest until after World War II, industrialists recruited workers elsewhere, especially from Europe and the American South. The region's relatively underdeveloped service sector - shaped by the presumption that goods were more desirable than service - ultimately led to agonizing problems of adjustment as agriculture and industry evolved in the late twentieth century.
Divisions of Labor positions the ideological and organizational evolution of the Japanese labor movement within the larger historical currents that shaped and organized labor globally in the twentieth century. Interspersing detailed narratives of Japanese labor history with analyses of parallel developments in Western European and international labor movements, Lonny Carlile shows how world views and labor movement strategies were shared across national boundaries and shaped in similar ways in the industrialized West and East. Beyond this, he highlights how in both Western Europe and Japan issues that had divided labor since the 1920s were central to the Cold War, which kept labor movements ...
Focusing on mid-century Milwaukee, Eric Fure-Slocum charts the remaking of political culture in the industrial city. Professor Fure-Slocum shows how two contending visions of the 1940s city - working-class politics and growth politics - fit together uneasily and were transformed amid a series of social and policy clashes. Contests that pitted the principles of democratic access and distribution against efficiency and productivity included the hard-fought politics of housing and redevelopment, controversies over petty gambling, questions about the role of organized labor in urban life, and battles over municipal fiscal policy and autonomy. These episodes occurred during a time of rapid change in the city's working class, as African-American workers arrived to seek jobs, women temporarily advanced in workplaces, and labor unions grew. At the same time, businesses and property owners sought to re-establish legitimacy in the changing landscape. This study examines these local conflicts, showing how they forged the postwar city and laid a foundation for the neoliberal city.
Alan S. Milward was a renowned historian of contemporary Europe. In addition to his books, as well as articles and chapters in edited books, he also wrote nearly 250 book reviews and review articles, some in French and German, which were published in journals world-wide. Taken together they reveal a remarkable degree of theoretical consistency in his approach to understanding the history of Europe since the French Revolution. This book brings together these previously unexamined pieces of historical analysis in order to trace and shed light on key intellectual debates taking place in the second half of the 20th century. Many of these discussions continue to influence us today, such as the ro...
This path-breaking book reveals how Hollywood became "Hollywood" and what that meant for the politics of America and American film. Working-Class Hollywood tells the story of filmmaking in the first three decades of the twentieth century, a time when going to the movies could transform lives and when the cinema was a battleground for control of American consciousness. Steven Ross documents the rise of a working-class film movement that challenged the dominant political ideas of the day. Between 1907 and 1930, worker filmmakers repeatedly clashed with censors, movie industry leaders, and federal agencies over the kinds of images and subjects audiences would be allowed to see. The outcome of t...
Examines the impact of business improvement districts on the quality of contemporary civic life.
Transnational Moments of Change offers a broad introduction to the methodology and practice of transnational history. To demonstrate the value of this approach, the work focuses on Europe since World War II, a period whose study particularly benefits from a transnational vantage point. Twelve distinguished contributors from around the globe offer a range of transnational approaches to three continent-wide moments of change. The work begins with a look at the close of World War Two, when liberation from Nazi occupation offered the opportunity for social and political experiment. Next, essays explore the late 1960s as generational change and political dissatisfaction rocked urban centers from Paris to Prague. Finally, the book turns to the fall of communism, a moment of revolutionary change that not only spread rapidly from country to country, but even affected and interacted with protest movements in Western Europe and elsewhere. Together, the essays provide both a new perspective on postwar Europe and a range of models for the historian interested in using the transnational approach.
Born in the summer of 1912, Woody Guthrie remains one of the most significant figures in American folk music to this day. While most Americans know his iconic anthem “This Land Is Your Land,” surprisingly few understand Guthrie’s place in the greater context of American radicalism and protest in the 1930s and beyond. In Searching for Woody Guthrie, Ron Briley embarks on a chronological exploration of Guthrie’s music in the vein of American radicalism and civil rights. Briley begins this journey with an overview of five key periods in Guthrie’s life and, in the chapters that follow, analyzes his political ideas through primary and secondary source materials. While numerous biographi...
Catholicism, once the protean monster, still functions as a complex component of French identity. No consideration of modern France would be complete without reference to the enduring impact and influence of Catholicism on the life of the nation. This volume sets out to capture some of the variety and significance of the Catholic phenomenon in twentieth-century secular France, and to express something of its extraordinary vitality and interest. Each contribution focuses on a specific theme or period crucial to an understanding of the role played by French Catholics and their Church. Collectively, these studies reveal that Catholics were involved in almost every event of consequence and voiced an opinion on almost every issue. Equally, the volume offers a collage of insights which reflects the fragmentation of Catholic activity and attitudes as the century progressed. Being Catholic in modern France no longer means the espousal of a particular political or social agenda. Nor does it necessarily mean regular and traditional religious observance, or even strict adherence to the dictates of the Church. Modern French Catholicism truly has many mansions.