Prisoners of the American Dream is Mike Davis's brilliant exegesis of a persistent and major analytical problem for Marxist historians and political economists: Why has the world's most industrially advanced nation never spawned a mass party of the working class? This series of essays surveys the history of the American bourgeois democratic revolution from its Jacksonian beginnings to the rise of the New Right and the re-election of Ronald Reagan, concluding with some bracing thoughts on the prospects for progressive politics in the United States.

    It gives a history of the related processes of colonization and "housewifization" and extends this analysis to the contemporary new international division of labor and the role that women have to play as the cheapest producers and consumers. First published in 1986, it was hailed as a major paradigm shift for feminist theory. Eleven years on, Maria Mies' theory of capitalist patriarchy has become even more relevant; this new edition includes a substantial new introduction in which she both applies her theory to the new globalized world and answers her critics.

    Divided into three massive sections - The Martyrs & Their Movements, Defense & Amnesty and The Heritage, contributors include William J Adelman, Carlotta Anderson, Paul Avrich, Sam Dolgoff, Richard Drinnon, Philip Foner, Joseph Jablonski, Bruce Nelson, Fred Thompson and many more. It features reprints of hard-to-find speeches and writings from the likes of the Haymarket martyrs themselves, Oscar Ameringer, Edward Bellamy, Ralph Chaplin, Voltaiarine de Cleyre, Eugene Debs, Emma Goldman, Sam Gompers, Mother Jones, Peter Kropotkin, Jo Labadie, Lucy Parsons, Kenneth Rexroth, Carl Sandburg and a whole lot more. Also included are an abundance of cartoons and other illustrations from the likes of Flavio Constantini, Walter Crane, Robert Green, Mike Konopacki, Ernest Riebe, Art Young, and numerous others. Truly a comprehensive, engaging, and enlightening work. 250 massive pages, oversize and abundant.

    This is the most comprehensive and up-to-date synthesis of current research on the social conditions, experiences and reactions of working people during the period 1750 - 1850.

    Controversial analysis of the Jackson campaign by a black scholar who argues that his candidacy hurt the development of a viable black political movement.

    

    Slayton's Back of the Yards is one of the finest accounts I have ever read on an urban, working-class neighborhood in twentieth-century America. Its focus on family, politics, and worklife is penetrating and its conclusions reinforce an emerging scholarly picture of ordinary people exercising unique forms of power."—John Bodnar, author of The Transplanted: A History of Immigrants in Urban America