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Full-Text Articles in History

Gray Dissertation Submission.Pdf, Audrey Gray Aug 2018

Gray Dissertation Submission.Pdf, Audrey Gray

Audrey Gray

How is a cultural identity created, defined, and used?  In this study, I have traced Bethnal Green’s cultural identity in the period between 1550 and1945.  It was a cultural identity defined by poverty, but also by hope; residents were poor but scrappy, able to make do with the worst of circumstances.  That cultural identity defined the area to outsiders; it was also embraced by the residents.   Following the area’s path from an idyllic and genteel area to an overcrowded slum, I have traced the experience of poverty, and the development and impact of poverty relief, from the perspective of both …

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Gray Dissertation Submission.Pdf, Audrey Gray Aug 2018

Gray Dissertation Submission.Pdf, Audrey Gray

Audrey Gray

How is a cultural identity created, defined, and used?  In this study, I have traced Bethnal Green’s cultural identity in the period between 1550 and1945.  It was a cultural identity defined by poverty, but also by hope; residents were poor but scrappy, able to make do with the worst of circumstances.  That cultural identity defined the area to outsiders; it was also embraced by the residents.   Following the area’s path from an idyllic and genteel area to an overcrowded slum, I have traced the experience of poverty, and the development and impact of poverty relief, from the perspective of both …

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Bicycle Messenger Boys And The Evolution Of American Labor Laws, Christopher A. Sweet Dec 2017

Bicycle Messenger Boys And The Evolution Of American Labor Laws, Christopher A. Sweet

Christopher A. Sweet

This article examines how bicycle messenger boys found themselves entwined in evolving American labor laws from 1890-1940. Anti-child labor organizations such as the National Child Labor Committee used exposés of the working conditions of messenger boys to help force passage of the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act. Beyond child labor laws, bicycle messenger boys also shaped workplace liability and worker’s compensation laws. Companies who employed bicycle messengers who were injured or killed on the job usually claimed the boys owned their own bicycles and worked as independent contractors rather than employees therefore absolving themselves of liability.

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[Review Of The Book William Johnson’S Natchez: The Ante-Bellum Diary Of A Free Negro], Nick Salvatore Jul 2012

[Review Of The Book William Johnson’S Natchez: The Ante-Bellum Diary Of A Free Negro], Nick Salvatore

Nick Salvatore

[Excerpt] To raise this issue of Johnson's silences and social isolation is not to engage in historical pity. He made choices from the options available to him and suffered the consequences as they developed. But his history underscores the fact that slavery generated a corresponding social system that was unforgiving to the individual caught in its contradictory currents. As Michael P. Johnson and James L. Roark suggest in Black Masters, their sensitive study of another slave owner and ex-slave, William Ellison of South Carolina, a purely personal solution to such volatile social relations proved impossible. What bound William Johnson to …

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You Say You Want A Revolution? [Review Of The Book The Other Side Of The Sixties: Young Americans For Freedom And The Rise Of Conservative Politics], Nick Salvatore Jun 2012

You Say You Want A Revolution? [Review Of The Book The Other Side Of The Sixties: Young Americans For Freedom And The Rise Of Conservative Politics], Nick Salvatore

Nick Salvatore

[Excerpt] Was the New Left a premature revolution, the fruits of which must await a future set of proper conditions to develop? Or was it more a victim of a giant government conspiracy that crushed a vibrant and growing oppositional tendency? Adherents of these and similar interpretations thus can explain the demise of the New Left while protecting its image as a tribune of a people in inevitable, if slow, political motion. But a perspective less protective of the New Left might reveal more. Perhaps treatments of that era have never fully captured either the complex turnings of America's political …

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Biography And Social History: An Intimate Relationship, Nick Salvatore Jun 2012

Biography And Social History: An Intimate Relationship, Nick Salvatore

Nick Salvatore

Biography has been considered as outside the discipline of history by many historians. Since the chronological framework of the study is pre-deter-mined, given the subject's life, it has been argued, it does not meet the fundamental historical test of analyzing historical change across time. Others, particularly literary critics, have suggested that the biographical emphasis on the personal is itself, at root, invalid. This comment instead suggests that the recent turn to biography in labor and social history is most welcome, for it creates the possibility of a broader understanding of the interplay between an individual and social forces beyond one's …

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