Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
- File Type
Articles 1 - 9 of 9
Full-Text Articles in History
Introduction To Eugene V. Debs: Citizen And Socialist, Nick Salvatore
Introduction To Eugene V. Debs: Citizen And Socialist, Nick Salvatore
Nick Salvatore
[Excerpt] This is a social biography of Eugene Victor Debs. It is a traditional biography in that it emphasizes this one individual's personal and public life as far as the evidence allows. But the book is also a piece of social history that assumes individuals do not stand outside the culture and society they grew in and from. I have stressed each aspect of Debs's story in order to present both the importance of the man and a more complete picture of the political and cultural struggles his society engaged in during his lifetime. Neither in his time nor in …
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 …
Workers, Racism And History: A Response, Nick Salvatore
Workers, Racism And History: A Response, Nick Salvatore
Nick Salvatore
[Excerpt] This intimate dependence of white egalitarianism upon black exclusion forms the central theme of Herbert Hill's essay. Arguing that this condition is neither episodic nor solely of historical interest, Hill asserts that these racist attitudes (and the action that flowed from them) were systemic across two centuries of working class development and actually provide the central continuous rational for understanding institutional trade union activity from the early nineteenth century into the present. America's labor unions. Hill writes, are "the institutional expression of white working class racism, and of policies and practices that resulted in unequal access, dependent on race, …
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 …
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 …
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.
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 …