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Our Own Time retells the story of American labor by focusing on the politics of time and the movements for a shorter working day. It argues that the length of the working day has been the central issue for the American labor movement during its most vigorous periods of activity, uniting workers along lines of craft, gender and ethnicity. The authors hold that the workweek is likely again to take on increased significance as workers face the choice between a society based on free time and one based on alienated work and unemployment.
The Punished Self describes enslavement in the American South during the eighteenth century as a systematic assault on Blacks' sense of self. Alex Bontemps focuses on slavery's effects on the slaves' framework of self-awareness and understanding. Whites wanted Blacks to act out the role "Negro" and Blacks faced a basic dilemma of identity: how to retain an individualized sense of self under the incredible pressure to be Negro? Bontemps addresses this dynamic in The Punished Self. The first part of The Punished Self reveals how patterns of objectification were reinforced by written and visual representations of enslavement. The second examines how captive Africans were forced to accept a new identity and the expectations and behavioral requirements it symbolized. Part 3 defines and illustrates the tensions inherent in slaves' being Negro in order to survive. Bontemps offers fresh interpretations of runaway slave ads and portraits. Such views of black people expressing themselves are missing entirely from other historical sources. This book's revelations include many such original examples of the survival of the individual in the face of enslavement.
In the early twentieth century, an era characterized by unprecedented industrial strife and violence, thousands of employers across the United States pioneered a new policy of labor relations called welfare work. The results of the policy were paternalistic practices and forms of compensation designed not only to control workers, but also to advertise the humanity of corporate capitalism to thwart the advance of legislated reform. In a burgeoning literature on the development of the U.S. welfare state, Andrea Tone offers a new interpretation of the importance of welfare capitalism in shaping its development.
America between the Revolution and the Civil War was a society in full adolescence. Vibrant, cocky, feeling its own strength, and ready to take on the world, America was driven by an upstart economy and a capitalist bravado. The early republic, argues Paul Gilje in his cogent introduction, was the crucial period in the development of that trademark characteristic of American society--modern capitalism. In this collection of essays, eight social and economic historians consider the rise of capitalism in the early American republic. Expanding upon traditional interpretations of economic development--encouraged and controlled by merchants and financiers--these essays demonstrate the centrality ...
In 1852 Hannah Rebecca Crowell married sea captain William Burgess and set sail. Within three years, Rebecca Burgess had crossed the equator eleven times and learned to navigate a vessel. This title examines how Burgess constructed her own legend and how the town of Sandwich embraced that history as its own.
In the first half of the nineteenth century, rural New England society underwent a radical transformation as the traditional household economy gave way to an encroaching market culture. Drawing on a wide array of diaries, letters, and published writings by women in this society, Catherine E. Kelly describes their attempts to make sense of the changes in their world by elaborating values connected to rural life. In her hands, the narratives reveal the dramatic ways female lives were reshaped during the antebellum period and the women's own contribution to those developments. Equally important, she demonstrates how these writings afford a fuller understanding of the capitalist transformation o...
Margaret Meuse Clay, who barely escaped a public whipping in the 1760s for preaching without a license; "Old Elizabeth," an ex-slave who courageously traveled to the South to preach against slavery in the early nineteenth century; Harriet Livermore, who spoke in front of Congress four times between 1827 and 1844--these are just a few of the extraordinary women profiled in this, the first comprehensive history of female preaching in early America. Drawing on a wide range of sources, Catherine Brekus examines the lives of more than a hundred female preachers--both white and African American--who crisscrossed the country between 1740 and 1845. Outspoken, visionary, and sometimes contentious, these women stepped into the pulpit long before twentieth-century battles over female ordination began. They were charismatic, popular preachers, who spoke to hundreds and even thousands of people at camp and revival meetings, and yet with but a few notable exceptions--such as Sojourner Truth--these women have essentially vanished from our history. Recovering their stories, Brekus shows, forces us to rethink many of our common assumptions about eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American culture.
At the time of its original publication, Working-Class America represented the new labor history par excellence. A roster of noteworthy scholars in the field contribute original essays written during a pivotal time in the nation's history and within the discipline. Moving beyond historical-sociological analyses, the authors take readers inside the lives of the real men and women behind the statistics. The result is a classic collection focused on the human dimensions of the field, one valuable not only as a resource for historiography but as a snapshot of workers and their concerns in the 1980s.
Examining the claim that an emerging underclass reveals an unprecedented crisis in American society, this collection of essays studies a complex set of processes that has been at work for a long period, degrading inner cities and the nation as a whole.