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Articles 1 - 23 of 23
Full-Text Articles in History
Introduction To Faith And The Historian: Catholic Perspectives, Nick Salvatore
Introduction To Faith And The Historian: Catholic Perspectives, Nick Salvatore
Nick Salvatore
[Excerpt] What follows are the essays by eight historians touched by Catholicism on the meaning of that experience and its effect on their professional work. The essays are presented in broad chronological order, organized more by generational cohort than by specific date of birth. The essays are reflections, in some cases even meditations, and were never intended to conform to the structure and methodology of the historical article for a professional journal. Still, we have tried to shed some light on the inner processes that create that very work.
Introduction To The Pullman Strike And The Crisis Of The 1890’S, Richard Schneirov, Shelton Stromquist, Nick Salvatore
Introduction To The Pullman Strike And The Crisis Of The 1890’S, Richard Schneirov, Shelton Stromquist, Nick Salvatore
Nick Salvatore
The strike of Pullman carshop employees and the subsequent boycott that disrupted rail traffic throughout the territory west of Chicago in June-July 1894 marked the culmination of nearly two decades of the most severe and sustained labor conflict in American history. Yet until very recently little new scholarship has focused on the meaning of the Pullman strike and its historical context. By offering a close reading of contemporary perceptions of the strike and by examining the organizational and political continuities and discontinuities the Pullman conflict reveals, these essays resituate the strike in its historical context. They demonstrate that Pullman played …
Introduction To We All Got History: The Memory Books Of Amos Webber, Nick Salvatore
Introduction To We All Got History: The Memory Books Of Amos Webber, Nick Salvatore
Nick Salvatore
[Excerpt] Who was this Amos Webber who assumed such a prominent role in this public, regional celebration of the black presence in American life? That he was a veteran was clear, but that alone did not account for his prominent position in that day's events. Certainly James Monroe Trotter, the eminent musician, author, and politician, William H. Carney, and William Dupree were all more widely known in the black North. How did a man such as Amos Webber, unknown beyond his own circle, the recipient of no awards or editorials in the local or national press, achieve such prominence in …
The Decline Of Labor: A Grim Picture, A Few Proposals, Nick Salvatore
The Decline Of Labor: A Grim Picture, A Few Proposals, Nick Salvatore
Nick Salvatore
[Excerpt] The social context of this four-decade decline challenges a central assumption of the cyclical theory. More than a third of the decline occurred during the 1950s and 1960s, decades of broad economic growth and, for the 1960s, of liberal Democratic ascendancy. Labor lost another 15 percent during the stagflation of the 1970s, despite the Democratic return to power in the wake of a discredited Republican administration. By the 1980s, when a structurally weakened labor movement faced Ronald Reagan, plant closings and demands for concessions accelerated the decline. Organized labor's absolute and proportional decline over decades in which the labor …
Preface To Singing In A Strange Land, Nick Salvatore
Preface To Singing In A Strange Land, Nick Salvatore
Nick Salvatore
Salvatore delves into the life of the one of the most influential clergyman in twentieth-century African-American religious life, from his 1915 origins as a poor Mississippi farmboy to his early years as a preacher in Tennessee to his 1950s rise to acclaim in Detroit. Along the way, Franklin's charismatic preaching style revolutionized the sermon yet he was no saint away from the pulpit. His encouragement to proclaim both faith and dignity in the black community helped bolster the civil rights movement.
[Review Of The Book Values And Assumptions In American Labor Law], Nick Salvatore
[Review Of The Book Values And Assumptions In American Labor Law], Nick Salvatore
Nick Salvatore
[Excerpt] Reading this book it is difficult not to think that the intent of the author was less to understand the origins and developments of the values and assumptions that gild the practice of labor law than it was to 'prove' that labor law in America is really capitalist law and thus it invalidates itself. This is not only circular reasoning, but it is unfortunate as well. For there is another book to be written that would analyze these questions through a serious and sustained reading in the history of industrial relations and then apply that knowledge to specific case …
[Review Of The Book William Johnson’S Natchez: The Ante-Bellum Diary Of A Free Negro], Nick Salvatore
[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 …
Teamster Democracy: A Moment Of Possibility, Nick Salvatore
Teamster Democracy: A Moment Of Possibility, Nick Salvatore
Nick Salvatore
[Excerpt] The association between the union and the underworld, a relationship that young Walter Lippmann simply could not envision, did not stem from an insidious criminal power that somehow proved impervious to FBI surveillance. Rather, criminal involvement in the trucking industry may actually be the most lasting contribution to modern America made by those who, in the name of fundamentalism, prohibition and creationism, fought that modernity so insistently. During prohibition, organized crime's interest in the trucking industry grew exponentially as urban criminal groups developed enormous fleets of trucks to transport illegal liquor. Following repeal in 1933, the industry remained attractive …
[Review Of The Book For Democracy, Workers, And God: Labor Song-Poems And Labor Protest, 1865-95], Nick Salvatore
[Review Of The Book For Democracy, Workers, And God: Labor Song-Poems And Labor Protest, 1865-95], Nick Salvatore
Nick Salvatore
[Excerpt] In this slim book, Clark D. Halker raises a series of complex and interrelated issues. Focusing on some 4,000 song-poems that appeared in the labour press in the late 19th century, Halker states that his purpose is to "expand knowledge of the musical and poetic history of the American working class;" to use these song-poems and their poets as "a lens into the larger world of Gilded-Age workers and labor protest;" and more specifically to examine the contours of a "movement culture" that, he acknowledges (14), was never coterminous with the whole of the working-class cultural experience. The result …
[Review Of The Book Perspectives On American Labor History: The Problems Of Synthesis], Nick Salvatore
[Review Of The Book Perspectives On American Labor History: The Problems Of Synthesis], Nick Salvatore
Nick Salvatore
[Excerpt] Over the past two decades many claims have been made for what was once called the "new" labor history. Deeply influenced by European scholarship (especially by the British historian, E. P. Thompson) and by writings in cultural anthropology and sociology, this new history seemed to sweep all before it. In a tumble of discrete community studies and precise examinations of individual strikes lay the foundation of the new history's critique of the work of John K Commons and his associates, who had stressed an institutional analysis of labor's growth and development within a liberal, democratic capitalist society. In studying …
[Review Of The Book The Cio, 1935-1955], Nick Salvatore
[Review Of The Book The Cio, 1935-1955], Nick Salvatore
Nick Salvatore
[Excerpt] Labor's upsurge in the 1930s remains for many even in our own time a source of inspiration and uplift. Those who are romantically inclined have long cherished the image of union militancy that attaches to that decade, a militancy that many have longed to see revived in recent years. Some contemporary union activists and their supporters, with more than a touch of a similar romanticism, frequently promote the claim that as the anti-union 1920s preceded the 1930s militancy, so too would the anti-union Reagan years give way to rekindled worker activism. Scholars as well have been influenced by this …
[Review Of The Book Meatpackers: An Oral History Of Black Packinghouse Workers And Their Struggle For Racial And Economic Equality], Nick Salvatore
[Review Of The Book Meatpackers: An Oral History Of Black Packinghouse Workers And Their Struggle For Racial And Economic Equality], Nick Salvatore
Nick Salvatore
[Excerpt] The Halpern and Horowitz volume, Meatpackers, follows creditably in this oral history tradition, even if it does not approach the power and complexity of Rosengarten's work. Instead of focusing on one individual, the book presents selections culled from a massive collection of oral interviews conducted by the authors with more than 125 former members of the United Packinghouse Workers of America (UPWA). The interviewees are black, white, and Hispanic, male and female, with records of activism in the union as far back as the 1930s and as recent as the 1980s. The events they recount occurred in five cities, …
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 …
[Review Of The Book Frederick W. Taylor And The Rise Of Scientific Management], Nick Salvatore
[Review Of The Book Frederick W. Taylor And The Rise Of Scientific Management], Nick Salvatore
Nick Salvatore
[Excerpt] Daniel Nelson has written an informative book that helps to explain important aspects of Taylor's life. But the analysis of the man, his influence, and the opposition both engendered is too narrowly cast to serve as a final rebuttal to Taylor's critics. By 1923, Nelson writes toward the end of his book, Taylor's reputation was secure and worker opposition to his approach was low: "The unionists had mellowed," Nelson comments. Yet the reader is never informed that this "mellowing" occurred in the midst of the most severe and pervasive anti-union campaign to that date in American history. This omission …
In The Jungle Of Cities [Review Of The Book Harold Washington And The Neighborhoods: Progressive City Reform In Chicago, 1983-1987], Nick Salvatore
In The Jungle Of Cities [Review Of The Book Harold Washington And The Neighborhoods: Progressive City Reform In Chicago, 1983-1987], Nick Salvatore
Nick Salvatore
[Excerpt] At first glance such a spatial transformation of work may seem positive, as indeed it was for the largely white work force that left the city and staffed these new positions. But left behind geographically, economically, and socially were the largely black (and to a lesser extent, Mexican) working-class residents. It was at this juncture, with jobs disappearing and the urban social structure fragmented, that black Chicago, symbolized in the person of Harold Washington, finally assumed political power. In Harold Washington and the Neighborhoods, editors Pierre Clavel and Wim Wiewel have collected a group of essays that examine the …
[Review Of The Book The Trials Of Anthony Burns: Freedom And Slavery In Emerson's Boston], Nick Salvatore
[Review Of The Book The Trials Of Anthony Burns: Freedom And Slavery In Emerson's Boston], Nick Salvatore
Nick Salvatore
[Excerpt] The intellectual core of The Trials of Anthony Burns explores the connection between Ralph Waldo Emerson and the New England Transcendentalists and the abolitionist cause. Ideas effect social life, von Frank insists, and he examines that point in a rich analysis that weaves intellectual, religious, political, and cultural perspectives into a sophisticated and detailed narrative. Emersonians came to embrace abolitionist activity as a central component of their philosophical idealism, particularly during the i850s. In an interesting way, the Burns case called upon many of New England's social and cultural elites to rethink their understanding of the relationship between idea …
[Review Of The Book ”Big Bill” Haywood], Nick Salvatore
[Review Of The Book ”Big Bill” Haywood], Nick Salvatore
Nick Salvatore
[Excerpt] This brief biography of William D. "Big Bill" Haywood, the charismatic leader of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) between 1905 and 1918, is an engaging introduction to Haywood's life. Although the volume was not intended to supplant Peter Carlson's Roughneck: The Life and Times of Big Bill Haywood (1983) or Melvyn Dubofsky's own impressive We Shall Be All: A History of the IWW (1969), this biography effectively sketches a number of the central juxtapositions that framed Haywood's life.
The Long Exception: Rethinking The Place Of The New Deal In American History, Jefferson Cowie, Nick Salvatore
The Long Exception: Rethinking The Place Of The New Deal In American History, Jefferson Cowie, Nick Salvatore
Nick Salvatore
"The Long Exception" examines the period from Franklin Roosevelt to the end of the twentieth century and argues that the New Deal was more of an historical aberration—a byproduct of the massive crisis of the Great Depression—than the linear triumph of the welfare state. The depth of the Depression undoubtedly forced the realignment of American politics and class relations for decades, but, it is argued, there is more continuity in American politics between the periods before the New Deal order and those after its decline than there is between the postwar era and the rest of American history. Indeed, by …
America Reborn? Conservatives, Liberals, And American Political Culture Since 1945, Nick Salvatore
America Reborn? Conservatives, Liberals, And American Political Culture Since 1945, Nick Salvatore
Nick Salvatore
[Excerpt] From the perspective of the early twenty‑first century, we can chide the good professor for not carefully considering the consequences of what he wished for half a century ago. For it is clear that the force of this conservative movement in America was in fact “stronger than most of us [knew]” or could have imagined in 1950, or, indeed, in 1968. This conservative “impulse”, those “irritable mental gestures”, has largely restructured American political thinking with a force and popular approval that remains stunning to consider. The growth of the conservative movement since 1945 was also accompanied by the slow …
American Labor History, Nick Salvatore
American Labor History, Nick Salvatore
Nick Salvatore
To account for the persistent struggles of a working people that only episodically (and even then with hut a small minority) sought to transform democratic capitalism, and to do so without exaggerating the reality of employer or governmental opposition, will not produce an heroic synthesis of this country's history, to be sure. But it could abet an even more serious appreciation of the highly complex social and political lives Americas working men and women.
Biography And Social History: An Intimate Relationship, Nick Salvatore
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 …
Response To Sean Wilentz, "Against Exceptionalism: Class Consciousness And The American Labor Movement, 1790-1920", Nick Salvatore
Response To Sean Wilentz, "Against Exceptionalism: Class Consciousness And The American Labor Movement, 1790-1920", Nick Salvatore
Nick Salvatore
[Excerpt] Wilentz's critique of the exceptionalist theme in American historiography is to the point. Whether one applauded the absence of feudalism, and therefore class conflict, in America with the historians of the 1950s or bemoaned that liberal democratic tradition as the "nail in the coffin of class consciousness" in the 1970s, either interpretative structure sacrifices empirical evidence for grand theory. In the former, the careers of Thomas Skidmore or Ira Stewart are all but incomprehensible; in the latter, men like Joseph R. Buchanan or Eugene V. Debs have little relevance. More importantly, the actual experience of the majority of American …
Faith, Politics, And American Culture [Review Of The Books Letter To A Christian Nation, Pity And Politics: The Right-Wing Assault On Religious Freedom, Faith And Politics: How The “Moral Values” Debate Divides America And How To Move Forward Together, The Compassionate Community: Ten Values To Unite America, Righteous: Dispatches From The Evangelical Youth Movement, And Believers: A Journey Into Evangelical America], Nick Salvatore
Nick Salvatore
[Excerpt] In January 2004, before a black church congregation in New Orleans, President George W. Bush commemorated Martin Luther King's birthday with a spirited promotion of his faith-based initiatives. Appropriating the slain Civil Rights leader's profession of faith, Bush proclaimed his ultimate purpose was to change "America one heart, one soul, one conscience at a time." He emphasized voluntary action by citizens (four times he extolled them as "the social entrepreneurs") and he consistency denigrated the role of government but for one critical function: providing "billions of dollars" to faith-based social-service groups. Proclaiming the values of the Christian Bible as …