You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
This book tells the story of the rise and decline of the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America (UE) from 1933 to 1990. Once the third-largest industrial union in the United States, the UE was the most powerful left-wing institution in U.S. history and arguably the most significant victim of the anti-communist purges that marked post-World War II America. This is an institutional study of the formation of the UE and the struggle for its control by left-wing and right-wing factions. Unlike most books on unions during the Cold War, this study carries the story up to the present, showing the long-term effects of the ideological battles.
Centered around mostly ordinary people, Harry, Tom, and Father Rice relates the story of the author’s uncle Harry Davenport, union leader Tom Quinn, and Father Charles Owen Rice to the great conflict between anti-Communist and Communist forces in the American labor movement.
Find a pool of cheap, pliable workers and give them jobs—and soon they cease to be as cheap or as pliable. What is an employer to do then? Why, find another poor community desperate for work. This route—one taken time and again by major American manufacturers—is vividly chronicled in this fascinating account of RCA's half century-long search for desirable sources of labor. Capital Moves introduces us to the people most affected by the migration of industry and, most importantly, recounts how they came to fight against the idea that they were simply "cheap labor." Jefferson Cowie tells the dramatic story of four communities, each irrevocably transformed by the opening of an industrial p...
The American labor movement seemed poised on the threshold of unparalleled success at the beginning of the post-World War II era. Fourteen million strong in 1946, unions represented thirty five percent of non-agricultural workers. Why then did the gains made between the 1930s and the end of the war produce so few results by the 1960s? This collection addresses the history of labor in the postwar years by exploring the impact of the global contest between the United States and the Soviet Union on American workers and labor unions. The essays focus on the actual behavior of Americans in their diverse workplaces and communities during the Cold War. Where previous scholarship on labor and the Cold War has overemphasized the importance of the Communist Party, the automobile industry, and Hollywood, this book focuses on politically moderate, conservative workers and union leaders, the medium-sized cities that housed the majority of the population, and the Roman Catholic Church. These are all original essays that draw upon extensive archival research and some upon oral history sources.
Breaks new ground in the study of an industry and region crucial to the history of American industrial capitalism.
In this nuanced look at white working-class life and politics in twentieth-century America, Kenneth Durr takes readers into the neighborhoods, workplaces, and community institutions of blue-collar Baltimore in the decades after World War II. Challenging notions that the "white backlash" of the 1960s and 1970s was driven by increasing race resentment, Durr details the rise of a working-class populism shaped by mistrust of the means and ends of postwar liberalism in the face of urban decline. Exploring the effects of desegregation, deindustrialization, recession, and the rise of urban crime, Durr shows how legitimate economic, social, and political grievances convinced white working-class Baltimoreans that they were threatened more by the actions of liberal policymakers than by the incursions of urban blacks. While acknowledging the parochialism and racial exclusivity of white working-class life, Durr adopts an empathetic view of workers and their institutions. Behind the Backlash melds ethnic, labor, and political history to paint a rich portrait of urban life--and the sweeping social and economic changes that reshaped America's cities and politics in the late twentieth century.
Includes appendices.
None