Hammer and Hoe documents the efforts of the Alabama Communist Party and its allies to secure racial, economic, and political reforms. Sensitive to the complexities of gender, race, culture and class without compromising the political narrative, Robin Kelley illustrates one of the most unique and least understood radical movements in American history.The Alabama Communist Party was built from scratch by working people who had no Euro-American radical political tradition. It was composed largely of poor blacks, most of whom were semiliterate and devoutly religious, but it also attracted a handful of whites, including unemployed industrial workers, iconoclastic youth, and renegade liberals. Kelley shows that the cultural identities of these people from Alabama's farms, factories, mines, kitchens, and city streets shaped the development of the Party. The result was a remarkably resilient movement forged in a racist world that had little tolerance for radicals.In the South race pervaded virtually every aspect of Communist activity. And because the Party's call for voting rights, racial equality, equal wages for women, and land for landless farmers represented a fundamental challenge to the society and economy of the South, it is not surprising that Party organizers faced a constant wave of violence.Kelley's analysis ranges broadly, examining such topics as the Party's challenge to black middle-class leadership; the social, ideological, and cultural roots of black working-class radicalism; Communist efforts to build alliances with Southern liberals; and the emergence of a left-wing, interracial youth movement. He closes with a discussion of the Alabama Communist Party's demise and its legacy for future civil rights activism.

    It speaks of rolling mills, mine shafts, and foundries,         and of a people who dig coal, tap blast furnaces, sew shirts, clean fish,         and assemble cars. These subjects, though largely absent from literary         anthologies and textbooks, are increasingly evident in the work of contemporary         poets. Working Classics gathers the best and most representative         of these poems, American and Canadian, from 1945 to the present.       Included are poems by Antler, Robert Bly, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Jim Daniels,         Patricia Dobler, Stephen Dunn, Tess Gallagher, Edward Hirsch, David Ignatow,         June Jordan, Lawrence Joseph, Philip Levine, Chris Llewellyn, Joyce Carol         Oates, Anthony Petrosky, Michael Ryan, Gary Soto, Tom Wayman, James Wright,         and many others. The result is a diverse and evocative collection of 169         poems by 74 poets, nearly a third of them women.

    The book is a series of tightly woven poems that play off one another so that the book accumulates tension and energy as it progresses. Daniels treats his characters and their work with respect, giving them a dignity that factory condition deny them. Opting for blunt, straightforward language, Daniels does not try to "poeticize" the factory but rather injects the factory into his poetry.

    Over fifty selections represent the ethnic, racial, and geographic diversity of working-class experience. This is writing grounded in social history, not in the academy. Traditional boundaries of genre and periodization collapse in this collection, which includes reportage, oral histories, speeches, songs, and letters, as well as poetry, stories, and essays. The divisions in this collection - telling stories, bearing witness, celebrating solidarity - address the distinction of "by" or "about" working-class women, and show the connections between individual identity and collective sensibility in a common history of struggle for economic justice. The geography of home, identity, parents, sex, motherhood, the dominance of the job, the overlapping of private and public worlds, the promise of solidarity and community are a few of the themes of this book. Here is a chorus of working class women's voices: Sandra Cisneros, Barbara Garson, Meridel Le Sueur, Tillie Olsen, Barbara Smith, Endesha I. M. Holland, Mother Jones, Nellie Wong, Agnes Smedley, Bobbie Louise Hawkins, Sharon Doubiago, Carol Tarlen, Hazel Hall, Margaret Randall, Judy Grahn, and many others! The aesthetic impulse is shaped by class, but not limited to one ruling class. What connects these writers is a collective consciousness, a class, which rejects bondage and lays claim to liberation through all  the possibilities of language. Calling Home is illustrated with family photographs as well as images of working women by professional photographers.

    Yet their contacts with workers in port cities around the world imbued them with a sense of internationalism. These factors contributed to a subculture that encouraged militancy, spontaneous radicalism, and a syndicalist mood. Bruce Nelson's award-winning book examines the insurgent activity and consciousness of maritime workers during the 1930s. As he shows, merchant seamen and longshoremen on the Pacific Coast made major institutional gains, sustained a lengthy period of activity, and expanded their working-class consciousness. Nelson examines the two major strikes that convulsed the region and caused observers to state that day-to-day labor relations resembled guerilla warfare. He also looks at related activity, from increasing political activism to stoppages to defend laborers from penalties, refusals to load cargos for Mussolini's war in Ethiopia, and forced boardings of German vessels to tear down the swastika.

    The image of the colonial goodwife, valued for her contribution to household prosperity, had been replaced by the image of a dependent and a non-producer. This book is a history of housework in the United States prior to the Civil War. More particularly, it is a history of women's unpaid domestic labor in the context of the emergence of an industrialized society in the northern United States. Boydston argues that just as a capitalist economic order had first to teach that wages were the measure of a man's worth, it had at the same time, implicitly or explicitly, to teach that those who did not draw wages were dependent and not essential to the real economy. Developing a striking account of the gender and labor systems that characterized industrializing America, Boydston explains how this effected the devaluation of women's unpaid labor.

    More than 600 articles (100 new to this edition) written by 300 leading historians cover keyfigures, events, issues, organizations, and concepts, from Tom paine to the Black Panther Party.

    It produced remarkable social and industrial upheavals which were repugnant to an astonishingly large numbers of Americans. Despite national prosperity, industrial workers suffered severe losses of economic status and independence; in protests grounded in religion and politics, they sought to hold on to what they had, and later to win material gains. Mr. Ware's illuminating book analyzes the conditions which brought on the Industrial Revolution, and traces and interprets the labor struggles that developed in response to the factory system.

    Anyone interested in American labor history or women's history will find this book essential reading.

    Comprised primarily of Southern blacks and Eastern European immigrants, they formed the lower class of this town.  Analyzes the social structure and dominance of the white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant elite.

    

    Dedicated it giving voice to the benumbed foot-soldiers of the information age it contains blistering first-hand accounts of life at the bottom of the ladder in big banks, defense contractors, computer manufacturers and food processing factories. In these pages the service economy and the new high tech jobs often touted in glowing terms by the mainstream media are exposed for their quotidian banality, their essential uselessness, and the catch-22 absurdity that permeates all corporate life under late capitalism.Moving at bike messenger speed between offices, Bad Attitude describes the hazards of the office computer and how to sabotage it, mutant culture in Silicon Valley, the new transiency undercutting links at work, the connections between time and money, bosses and secretaries, resistance and resignation. It provides a unique basis for new theoretical developments in the struggle for human liberation, and, above all, it assures the thousands of isolated rebels mired in dead-end and deadening jobs that they are not alone. The spark of revolt can and must be nurtured until the next wave comes along.