History Commons^™

More Austerity Coming? Lessons From New York City's 1970s Fiscal Crisis, Marc Kagan

Publications and Research

Crises can be moments of opportunity, but it is not foreordained who will seize the ring. The Great Depression ultimately led to the New Deal/Great Society state and increasing equality. 1975 New York City fiscal crisis, on the other hand, laid the groundwork for decades of neoliberal austerity. Despite political vulnerabilities, bankers and their Washington allies acted boldly to protect imperiled assets and remake a city in which the working class wielded some power as a bastion of finance capital. Seemingly powerful unions abandoned the public they served, and followed a risk-averse strategy of concessions in exchange for junior-partner corporatism, …

Free Labor: The Civil War And The Making Of An American Working Class By Mark A. Lause (Review), Joanne Pope Melish

History Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Single, Unwed, And Pregnant In Victorian London: Narratives Of Working Class Agency And Negotiation, Virginia L. Grimaldi

Madison Historical Review

Unmarried working women who got pregnant in Victorian London and were abandoned by the fathers were in a sticky situation. If a woman kept the baby, she would unlikely be able to provide for it, especially under the ‘Bastardly Act’ of the 1834 Poor Law, which deemed all illegitimate children under the sole responsibility of the mother. If she concealed her pregnancy and abandoned the child, or risked her life by having an illegal abortion, she would at best be held liable for infanticide, at worst, dead. One institutional option available to these vulnerable mothers was the London Foundling Hospital …

"Pray For The People Who Feed You": Voices Of Pauper Children In The Industrial Age, Rebecca S. Duffy, Jill Ogline Titus

Schmucker Art Catalogs

Following the Industrial Revolution in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, countries such as the United States and England experienced a widening gap between the rich industrialists and the impoverished working class. As a result, poverty quickly shifted from a localized problem to a national epidemic. Each country was faced with the challenges of addressing and alleviating poverty on a national scale. With a limited amount of resources, questions arose about who should receive relief. What should it look like? How should it be administered? And how would poverty and policy affect political, economic, social and familial structures? [ …

Family Wages: The Roles Of Wives And Mothers In U.S. Working-Class Survival Strategies, 1880-1930, Ileen Devault

Ileen A DeVault

The common image of a female wage earner in the U.S. in the decades around the turn of the 20th century is that of a young, single woman: the daughter of her family. However, the wives and mothers of these families also made important economic contributions to their families' economies. This paper argues that we need to rethink our evaluation of the economic roles played by ever-married women in working-class families. Using a range of government reports as well as IPUMS, I document three ways in which working-class wives and mothers strove to bring cash into their family units: through …

Les Origines Du Socialisme Parlementaire En Australie, 1850-1920, Terry Irving

Terence H Irving, Dr (Terry)

An English-language version of this article appears in 'LABOUR HISTORY - A JOURNAL OF LABOUR AND SOCIAL HISTORY', 67 (November 1994), 97-109. It describes the mid-19th century origins of the working class, the impact of the early introduction of parliamentary politics, the rise of industrial unionism and the formation of the Labor parties.

Class Structure In Australian History - Poverty And Progress, Terry Irving, Raewyn Connell

Terence H Irving, Dr (Terry)

First published in 1980, this book is an updated and reorganized account of the history of the class structure in Australia. A new chapter discusses the period 1975-1991, and there is a new theoretical chapter introducing the reader to modern debates about class. Separate sections for documents and photographs support the narrative. Extensive notes provide a guide to research literature.

The Southern Tree Of Liberty - The Democratic Movement In New South Wales Before 1856, Terry Irving

Terence H Irving, Dr (Terry)

Responsible government began in New South Wales after two decades of radical democratic agitation. Radical intellectuals from England, Ireland, Scotland and Europe mobilized the working men and women of the colony to resist the aristocratic form of government proposed by pastoralists and city capitalists. There was violence on the streets and goldfields, and some notable electoral victories. As 'a great fear' gripped the local elites the British government forced them to accept a more liberal form of representative government in the belief that this would placate the democrats and keep the colony safe for British imperial needs.

Oral History, Working Class Culture, And Local, Pauleena M. Macdougall

Publications

Stories of factory closings from many industries throughout the latter part of the twentieth century are common and numerous studies have documented the economic impact of these unfortunate events. In this case study of Brewer, Maine, oral histories with former workers at the primary source of local employment, Eastern Corporation, illuminate the nature of management-worker interactions at the mill. Eastern’s former employee narratives reveal a surprisingly unified perspective regarding the closing of the mill that does not reflect the public narrative put forward by management and business leaders.

From Housewife To Household Weapon: Women From The Bolivian Mines Organize Against Economic Exploitation And Political Oppression, Catherine A. Raney

CMC Senior Theses

Drawing from oral histories which I gathered while living in Bolivia, this thesis tracks the start, growth, and development of the political movement led by women from the Bolivian mines from 1961 to 1987. This movement helped create a new political culture that recognized the importance of women’s participation in politics and human rights. Today, this culture lives on. Bolivia has not experienced a coup since 1980, and the nation’s human rights record has improved dramatically since the 1980s as well.

Prior to the mid-1980s, Bolivia was often under the control of oppressive military regimes that resorted to many different …

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, …

[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 …

You Say Poor Boy, I Say Po-Boy: New Orleans’ Culinary And Labor History Sandwiched Together, Michael Mizell-Nelson

Michael Mizell-Nelson

No abstract provided.

Strike Fever: Labor Unrest, Civil Rights And The Left In Atlanta, 1972, Monica Waugh-Benton

History Theses

This thesis aims to provide a history of African American working class and Leftist activism in Atlanta, Georgia during the early 1970s. It places a series of wildcat strikes within the context of political and social transition, and charges unequal economic conditions and a racially charged discriminatory environment as primary causes. The legacies of both the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left are identified as key contributing factors to this wave of labor unrest. One path taken by former Civil Right activists was to focus on poor peoples’ movements, and one course taken by the 1960s-era New Left activists …

The Southern Tree Of Liberty - The Democratic Movement In New South Wales Before 1856, Terry Irving

Terry Irving

Responsible government began in New South Wales after two decades of radical democratic agitation. Radical intellectuals from England, Ireland, Scotland and Europe mobilized the working men and women of the colony to resist the aristocratic form of government proposed by pastoralists and city capitalists. There was violence on the streets and goldfields, and some notable electoral victories. As 'a great fear' gripped the local elites the British government forced them to accept a more liberal form of representative government in the belief that this would placate the democrats and keep the colony safe for British imperial needs.

Polish Immigrants And Industrial Chicago, Dominic Pacyga

Dominic Pacyga

How did working-class immigrants from Poland create new communities in Chicago during the industrial age? This book explores the lives of immigrants in two iconic Polish neighborhoods—the Back of the Yards and South Chicago—and the stockyards and steel mills in which they made their living.

Pacyga shows how Poles forged communities on the South Side in an attempt to preserve the customs of their homeland—how through the development of churches, the building of schools, the founding of street gangs, and the opening of saloons they tried to recreate the feel of an Eastern European village. Through such institutions, Poles also …

Sitting On The Rail: The Westralian Worker's Response To Wartime Issues, Robert P. Corr

Theses

The Westralian Worker occupies a privileged place in Western Australia's labour history, as the working class movement's official organ. This study seeks to understand how the paper dealt with its conflicting roles as reflector and projector of labour movement opinion - the observer-agent dichotomy. It does so by analysing the Worker's response to some of the major issues facing labour during World War I. The peace movement, anti-German attitudes, the persecution of the IWW, and the conscription debates are considered. It will be argued that the Worker attempted to accommodate a wide range of views, but as organised labour's divisions …

Les Origines Du Socialisme Parlementaire En Australie, 1850-1920, Terry Irving

Terry Irving

An English-language version of this article appears in 'LABOUR HISTORY - A JOURNAL OF LABOUR AND SOCIAL HISTORY', 67 (November 1994), 97-109. It describes the mid-19th century origins of the working class, the impact of the early introduction of parliamentary politics, the rise of industrial unionism and the formation of the Labor parties.

Labour's Love Lost: Observations On The Historiography Of Class And Ethnicity In The Nineteenth Century, Peter Way

History Publications

During the last thirty years, American labor and ethnic historiography, generally relying on pioneers like E. P. Thompson and Herbert Gutman, interpreted the 19th-century industrial experiences of the working classes and ethnic groups by explaining how such groups fashioned their own, separate, subcultures. Such scholarship idealized workers, minimized the primacy of industrial capitalism and its power to shape society according to capitalist ideologies, and ignored worker unrest that flared sporadically into violence. This unrest was never driven sufficiently by social class solidarity and ethnic consciousness that an autonomous subculture could root in those circles.

The Paradox Of Ideology, Justin Schwartz

Justin Schwartz

A standard problem with the objectivity of social scientific theory in particular is that it is either self-referential, in which case it seems to undermine itself as ideology, or self-excepting, which seem pragmatically self-refuting. Using the example of Marx and his theory of ideology, I show how self-referential theories that include themselves in their scope of explanation can be objective. Ideology may be roughly defined as belief distorted by class interest. I show how Marx thought that natural science was informed by class interest but not therefore necessarily ideology. Capitalists have an interest in understanding the natural world (to a …

Labor News Clippings, 22 Scrapbooks, 1867-1902, Scott Molloy

Special Collections (Miscellaneous)

Clippings from the Providence Journal, Providence Evening Bulletin, Providence Morning Herald, Manufacturers and Farmers' Journal, and Providence Morning Star, 1867-1902. Compiled by Scott Molloy, with the cooperation of the Rhode Island Historical Society, 1993. Clippings are grouped by year but do not appear in exact chronological order.

Class Structure In Australian History - Poverty And Progress, Terry Irving, Raewyn Connell

Terry Irving

First published in 1980, this book is an updated and reorganized account of the history of the class structure in Australia. A new chapter discusses the period 1975-1991, and there is a new theoretical chapter introducing the reader to modern debates about class. Separate sections for documents and photographs support the narrative. Extensive notes provide a guide to research literature.

Class Culture And Generational Change: Immigrant Families In Two Connecticut Industrial Cities During The 1930s, Ivan Greenberg

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Recent social history stresses the autonomy of workers, especially the ways that immigrant families made "lives of their own." However, little attention is focused on the particular experiences of the second generation and the ways they forged their own group identity. This study, by locating the emergence of this generation, highlights an important demographic change within the working class.

Familiar developments of the 1930s take on new meaning. For example, the pivotal role of the second generation in the rise of the CIO helps to recast the early history of industrial unionism. The resurgence of the labor movement parallels the …

The Danish Immigrant Experience In The Fiction Of Enok Mortensen, Rudolf J. Jensen

The Bridge

Here are several short quotations from Enok Mortensen 's fiction for the purpose of showing its primary themes: " . .. for you emigrants, nothing is ever as good as it was in Denmark . .. you always have to compare . .. Over here one always possesses a peculiar unrest-only another hundred dollars, a thousand, or a million dollars more. In the old country everything was ordered and secure . .. Sons followed in the footsteps of their fathers, but as a rule they didn't get any farther either . .. Here in America it was the Golden Chance …

The Utah County Labor Movement, J. Kenneth Davies

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis was begun as just a history of the labor movement in Utah County, but as the research for data proceeded it became more evident that the factors influencing the retardation and development of the movement were the important things to consider. As a consequence, the greater portion of this work is so devoted.

Labor's Own William Z. Foster: A Communist's Fifty Years Of Working-Class Leadership And Struggle, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn

PRISM: Political & Rights Issues & Social Movements

No abstract provided.

Marx And America, Bertram David Wolfe

PRISM: Political & Rights Issues & Social Movements

No abstract provided.

Chartism And The "Trades Union", Raymond Postgate

PRISM: Political & Rights Issues & Social Movements

No abstract provided.

Industrial Education In Public Schools, Edwin F. Small

Maine History Documents

York Institute Publication volume 1, number 2, an address delivered February 13, 1884 before the Society on the topic of public school education and providing education for all classes.

Catalogue Of The Manufacturers' And Mechanics' Library Association Of Lewiston: With The Charter, Constitution, And By-Laws, Manufacturers' And Mechanics' Library Association Of Lewiston (Me.)

Maine History Documents

Detailed information about the administration, duties of librarians, membership criteria, and list of books available at the Manufacturers' and Mechanics' Library in Lewiston, Maine, in the year that it was incorporated, 1861.