Labor History Commons^™

Positioning The 1913 Paterson Silk Workers’ Strike Within A Dialectical Framework, Raymond Adam Ciafarone Jr.

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis places the 1913 Paterson Silk Strike within a dialectical framework by historically surveying the constant motion of industry in Paterson, New Jersey. It follows the dialectical method by examining the 1913 Paterson Silk Strike not as a singular event but as one part of a continuous historical process. In the late 18th century, a group of investors introduced capitalism to Paterson and completely transformed the social relations of production from a mostly self-sufficient agrarian existence to a center of capitalist manufacturing. From that moment forward, production in Paterson was in a constant state of flux as mills, shops, …

Red Sea, White Tides, And Blue Horizons, John P. Devine

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Eric Hobsbawm, in his effort to explain the fundamental divide which produced the Second World War, convincingly argues that “the crucial lines in this civil war were not drawn between capitalism as such and communist social revolution, but between ideological families: on the one hand the descendants of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and the great revolutions including, obviously the Russian revolution’, on the other hand, its opponents.” This thesis argues that the American Civil War was a “great revolution” that represented a crucial transformative point in the formation of these two waring factions. The struggle was especially influential on the theory …

In Her Own Hands: How Girls And Women Used The Piano To Chart Their Futures, Expand Women's Roles, And Shape Music In America, 1880–1920, Sarah F. Litvin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

American girls and women used the parlor piano to reshape their lives between 1880 and 1920, the years when the instrument reached the height of its commercial and cultural popularity. Newspapers, memoirs, biographies, women’s magazines, personal papers, and trade publications show that female pianists engaged in public-facing piano play and work in pursuit of artistic expression, economic gain, self-actualization, social mobility, and social change. These motivations drove many to use their piano skills to play beyond the parlor, by studying in conservatory, working as classical and popular music performers and composers, founding and teaching at schools, working as department store …

Runaway: A History Of Postwar New York In Four Factories, Andy Battle

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

At midcentury, New York City was among the preeminent manufacturing centers in the United States. Within a generation, this manufacturing economy suffered an extraordinary collapse. Beginning in the 1950s, workers and their unions began to use the term “runaway” to describe factories that pulled up stakes in New York and set them back down in other climes. This dissertation explores the deindustrialization of New York City through case studies of “runaway” plants, or factories that left New York for the American South or abroad between the years 1945 and 1975.

In general, the manufacturers that remained in New York at …

Merchant Seamen, Sailortowns, And The Shaping Of U.S. Citizenship, 1843-1945, Johnathan Thayer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation argues that merchant seamen, because of their inherent transience, diversity, and the unique nature of their work, occupied a marginal position in U.S. society, and that that marginalization produced a series of confrontations with shoreside people, communities, institutions, and the state, most specifically over the nature and definition of citizenship. This argument is developed through examination of a series of encounters and negotiations that merchant seamen provoked from the piers, back alleys, and boardinghouses of the nation’s “sailortowns” from the 1830s through World War II, including: 1) nineteenth century maritime ministry projects in the Port of New York …

Final Call: Rank-And-File Rebellion In New York City, 1965-1975, Glenn D. Dyer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Between 1965 and 1975, New York City’s workers fomented a powerful yet inchoate movement that challenged the entrenched power of employers, union officials, and politicians. In the words of Central Labor Council head Harry Van Arsdale Jr., “strike fever” gripped the city; workers refused to follow their leaders, rejecting contracts, wildcatting, and organizing insurgent electoral campaigns. While historians have explored the rebellion as a national phenomenon, New York City’s wave of upheaval was a locally bound movement with its own unique dynamics, culture, and timeline, both powerfully shaping and shaped by the local political and social environment. Significantly, workers’ rebellious …

The Politics Of Shorter Hours And Corporate-Centered Society: A History Of Work-Time Regulation In The United States And Japan, Keisuke Jinno

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Shorter working hours drew much attention as a means of fighting unemployment and crisis in capitalism during the first half of the twentieth century. Nowadays, shorter work-time is rarely considered a policy option to fix economic or social issues in the United States and Japan. This dissertation presents a history of work-time regulation in the United States and Japan to examine how and why its developments and stalemate took place.

In the big picture, developments of work-time regulation during the first half of the twentieth century were a part of concessional modifications of class relations, a common phenomenon in many …

Capitalism And Unfreedom: Louis D. Brandeis And A Liberty Of The Left, Eric L. Apar

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The American Right features a well-developed—and well-heeled—infrastructure for promoting a conception of freedom as inextricable from capitalism. The American Left, by contrast, has seemed content to cede the territory, abandoning the ground of freedom for the terrain of “equality,” “justice,” “fairness,” and “prosperity.” This paper is an effort to address this asymmetry in the public discourse over the meaning of freedom. Its principal objective is to capture the vision of freedom embodied in the political and economic thought of Louis D. Brandeis, one of the American Left’s ablest expositors of freedom.

In addition, the paper has three subsidiary objectives. The …

A Reformers' Union: Land Reform, Labor, And The Evolution Of Antislavery Politics, 1790–1860, Sean G. Griffin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“A Reformers’ Union: Land Reform, Labor, and the Evolution of Antislavery Politics, 1790–1860” offers a critical revision of the existing literature on both the early labor and antislavery movements by examining the ideologies and organizational approaches that labor reformers and abolitionists used to challenge both the expansion of slavery and the spread of market relationships. Extending the timeframe of the antislavery and labor movements backwards to the 1790s, this dissertation situates the origins of the pre-Civil War labor movement in republican ideology and currents of transatlantic radical thought, and traces the rise of agrarian and communitarian labor reform against the …