It stole everything it hadn't bothered to buy -- land deeds, private homes, and ultimately, the souls of its men and women.In 1921, an army of 10,000 unemployed pro-union coal miners took up arms and threatened to overthrow the governments of two West Virginia counties. They were greeted by U.S. Army airplanes, bombs, and poison gas. This book recounts the real story of what happened--and where it all went wrong.Four people tell this powerful, deeply moving tale: Activist Mayor C. J. Marcum. Fierce, loveless union man Rondal Lloyd. Gutsy nurse Carrie Bishop, who loved Rondal. And lonely, Sicilian immigrant Rosa Angelelli, who lost four sons to the deadly mines. They all bear witness to nearly forgotten events of history, culminating in the final, tragic Battle of Blair Mountain--the first crucial battle of a war that has yet to be won.

    The American enslavement of blacks and the Russian subjection of serfs flourished in different ways and varying degrees until they were legally abolished in the mid-nineteenth century. Historian Peter Kolchin compares and contrasts the two systems over time in this magisterial book, which clarifies the organization, structure, and dynamics of both social entities, highlighting their basic similarities while pointing out important differences discernible only in comparative perspective.These differences involved both the masters and the bondsmen. The independence and resident mentality of American slaveholders facilitated the emergence of a vigorous crusade to defend slavery from outside attack, whereas an absentee orientation and dependence on the central government rendered serfholders unable successfully to defend serfdom. Russian serfs, who generally lived on larger holdings than American slaves and faced less immediate interference in their everyday lives, found it easier to assert their communal autonomy but showed relatively little solidarity with peasants outside their own villages; American slaves, by contrast, were both more individualistic and more able to identify with all other blacks, both slave and free.Kolchin has discovered apparently universal features in master-bondsman relations, a central focus of his study, but he also shows their basic differences as he compares slave and serf life and chronicles patterns of resistance. If the masters had the upper hand, the slaves and serfs played major roles in shaping, and setting limits to, their own bondage.This truly unprecedented comparative work will fascinate historians, sociologists, and all social scientists, particularly those with an interest in comparative history and studies in slavery.

    Although 'Mac' knew and worked with many of the best-known Wobblies - Big Bill Haywood, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Frank Little and others - his purpose here is not to discuss prominent personalities or world-famous events, but rather to tell of the unsung tens of thousands of militant working men and women who, in the 1910s, made the IWW one of the grandest labor organizations the world has ever seen. Here at last is the Wobblies' inside story: how they lived and worked and hoboed; how they organized; how they ran their legendary strikes and free-speech fights; how they went about 'fanning the flames of discontent' each and every day all across America. Packed with invaluable firsthand information unavailable anywhere else, this splendid, compact chronicle of a rank-and-filer's exciting adventures fighting for working class emancipation takes its place among America's labor classics. Also included are a 1914 article by McGuckin from the International Socialist Review, and a sketch of the author's later life by his son, Henry McGuckin Jr.

    Peter J. Kuznick here traces the origin of that debate to the 1930s and places it in a context that forces a reevaluation of the relationship between science and politics in twentieth-century America. Kuznick reveals how an influential segment of the American scientific community during the Depression era underwent a profound transformation in its social values and political beliefs, replacing a once-pervasive conservatism and antipathy to political involvement with a new ethic of social reform.

    Reviving old IWW traditions of workers' solidarity and direct action as its members added many an innovation discovered in the course of new struggles, the STFU brought a luster all its own to the labor insurgency of the 1930s and 1940s. The first fully integrated multiracial union in the modern South, the STFU prefigured not only later farm-workers' unionization by also the civil rights agitation of the 1960s and the growing rank and file labor revolt of our own time. Here is the dramatic first-hand account of the origins, struggles, strikes, achievements, humor, songs and poems of the rural south, told through one of the founders of the union.

    

    Edited and introduced by Gutman’s colleague Ira Berlin, the book includes original, unpublished essays from throughout Gutman’s career and important but unavailable works from journals and periodicals, as well as an extended interview with Gutman and a comprehensive bibliography of his works.Power and Culture features essays on the lives of workers and the formation of class during the “Gilded Age” of American corporations, and on the lives of African American slaves and freedmen—the studies for which Gutman became famous. But it also shows the range of his thought on such subjects as Roots and popular historical awareness. With Berlin’s critical and biographical introduction, Power and Culture is an important reappraisal of a major scholar.

    The subsequent uprising lead to the lynching of an IWW member. The men convicted of the Legionnaire killing later inspired the sympathies of the Wobbly's successors--the CIO. The Centralia War became a cause celebre in the tradition of the Sacco-Vanzetti case. The author has uncovered much new information regarding the events surrounding the Centralia case & has provided many photgraphs & documents. "The men who were convicted in the Centralia case came to be regarded as 'class-war prisoners,' & in time inspired the sympathies of many prominent persons as well as those who succeeded the Wobblies in advocating industrial unionism- members of the CIO. Theirs was a cause celebre in the tradition of the Haymarket & Sacco-Vanzetti cases."