Evelyn Nakano Glenn untangles this complex history in a unique comparative regional study from the end of Reconstruction to the eve of World War II. During this era the country experienced enormous social and economic changes with the abolition of slavery, rapid territorial expansion, and massive immigration, and struggled over the meaning of free labor and the essence of citizenship as people who previously had been excluded sought the promise of economic freedom and full political rights.After a lucid overview of the concepts of the free worker and the independent citizen at the national level, Glenn vividly details how race and gender issues framed the struggle over labor and citizenship rights at the local level between blacks and whites in the South, Mexicans and Anglos in the Southwest, and Asians and haoles (the white planter class) in Hawaii. She illuminates the complex interplay of local and national forces in American society and provides a dynamic view of how labor and citizenship were defined, enforced, and contested in a formative era for white-nonwhite relations in America.

    In this volume, ten leading combat photographers relate incidents of horror, humor, bravery, and daring in locations from Vietnam to Haiti, Ramallah to Chechnya, El Salvador to Sarajevo, the World Trade Center to Afghanistan. Here, in their own words, are their stories of life in the combat zone, together with many of the powerful images they risked their lives to obtain. This historical and very human look at the pathos of war also reveals the moral and ethical issues that this elite corps of photographers face, and the decisions they must make in the chaos of conflict. In addition to the works of these talented photographers are iconic images, from the American Civil War to the devastation of the World Trade Center, that tell the story of the development of combat photography and the profound changes in warfare itself that have occurred in the last century and a half.

    As the citrus-growing regions of the San Gabriel and Pomona Valleys in eastern Los Angeles County expanded during the early twentieth century, the agricultural industry there developed along segregated lines, primarily between white landowners and Mexican and Asian laborers. Initially, these communities were sharply divided. But Los Angeles, unlike other agricultural regions, saw important opportunities for intercultural exchange develop around the arts and within multiethnic community groups. Whether fostered in such informal settings as dance halls and theaters or in such formal organizations as the Intercultural Council of Claremont or the Southern California Unity Leagues, these interethnic encounters formed the basis for political cooperation to address labor discrimination and solve problems of residential and educational segregation. Though intercultural collaborations were not always successful, Garcia argues that they constitute an important chapter not only in Southern California's social and cultural development but also in the larger history of American race relations.

    In this book, Hazel herself tells the stories. From twenty years of taped conversations, Susan Starbuck has fashioned both a biography and a historical document, the tale of a century's forces and events as played out in one woman's extraordinary life.Hazel Wolf earned a national reputation as an environmentalist and was awarded the National Audubon Society's Medal of Excellence, an honor she shared with Rachel Carson and Jimmy Carter. She laid the groundwork for a unique coalition of Native Americans and environmentalists who are now working together on issues related to nuclear energy, fisheries, and oil pipelines. She lectured and taught at schools and universities all over the United States. She lobbied Congress on irrigration, labor rights, nuclear energy, and peace, and she corresponded with a global network of environmental leaders. But for all her influence, she never held a political post higher than precinct committee officer in Seattle's 43rd legislative district, and her highest office in the environmental movement was that of secretary in the Seattle Audubon Society, where she served for thirty-five years.This book follows Hazel Wolf from childhood to old age, a lifetime of burning with a fierce desire for justice. She saw the quest for justice as a collective responsibility. Time and again, she met that challenge head on. Whether organizing for labor rights or founding chapters of the Audubon Society, battling to save old-growth forests or fighting deportation to her native Canada as a communist, over and over she put herself in the line of fire. "I was just there," she said, "powerless and strong, someone who wouldn't chicken out."

    How did the Communists win and hold power in the CIO unions, and what did they do with it once they had it? Did they subordinate the needs of workers to those of the Soviet regime? Stepan-Norris and Zeitlin find that Communists were more egalitarian and most progressive on class, race and gender issues. They were also leading fighters in exemplary workplace struggles to enlarge the freedom and enhance the human dignity of America's workers.

    Glaberman is the most important writer on labor matters in the United States during the second half of the 20th century. He developed distinctive concepts concerning the nature of trade unionism; the unfolding of working-class consciousness; and the forms of revolutionary organization appropriate to modern industrial society... [from the Introduction by Staughton Lynd]. Dropping out of masters degree in Economics at Columbia University, he spent 20 years laboring for wages in plants in and around Detroit as an assembly line worker and machinist....and organizer. On the eve of the second world war, he associated himself with the West Indian Marxist intellectual CLR James, and never looked back. Autoworker, historian, humorist, sociologist, poet, and baseball coach, Marty Glaberman had as close a knowledge of working people as any intellectual of his generation. He also had, as these wonderful collected writings show, the most firm confidence in their revolutionary potential. [David Roediger]

    Paradoxically, the country that pioneered the expansion of civil liberties allowed corporations to assemble private armies to disrupt union organizing, spy on workers, and break strikes. Using a social-historical approach, Stephen Norwood focuses on the mercenaries the corporations enlisted in their anti-union efforts--particularly college students, African American men, the unemployed, and men associated with organized crime. Norwood also considers the paramilitary methods unions developed to counter mercenary violence. The book covers a wide range of industries across much of the country. Norwood explores how the early twentieth-century crisis of masculinity shaped strikebreaking's appeal to elite youth and the media's romanticization of the strikebreaker as a new soldier of fortune. He examines how mining communities' perception of mercenaries as agents of a ribald, sexually unrestrained, new urban culture intensified labor conflict. The book traces the ways in which economic restructuring, as well as shifting attitudes toward masculinity and anger, transformed corporate anti-unionism from World War II to the present.

    Charles P. Korr also draws on interviews with ballplayers, journalists, and labor executives to construct an insider's view of the successful sports union's formative years.

    "Runaway" factories, especially ones from Manhattan, set up shop in mining towns where labor was plentiful and unions scarce. By the 1930s, garment factories employed thousands of wives and daughters of unemployed or underemployed coal miners in the Wyoming Valley. Organizing workers would prove difficult for the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU). Fighting for the Union Label tells the story of how workers in the Wyoming Valley, led by Min Lurye Matheson and her husband, Bill, banded together and built one of the largest and most activist movements of garment workers in the ILGWU's vast network. Workers' education, political activism, a health care center, and a widely recognized chorus were among the union's trademarks. Despite the union's influence, however, the apparel industry migrated to the American South and then overseas in the 1970s and 1980s. Tens of thousands of workers throughout the state and nation would loose their jobs, and sweatshops would become part of the economic landscape in countries like Guatemala. The first major work on the garment industry and its workers in Pennsylvania, Fighting for the Union Label draws extensively upon the Wyoming Valley Oral History Project (co-directed by Ken and Robert Wolensky) which has collected the reminiscences of more than 325 workers, factory owners, public officials, and others. The story of the dynamic Min Matheson and the rise and fall of the garment industry provides key insights into the deindustrialization of northeastern Pennsylvania.

    . . full of marvelous quotes."--William W. Freehling, University of Kentucky"Shows clearly that the Solid South was not solid at all [and] demonstrates that the war encompassed much more than military strategy and tactics . . . it was fought at home as well as on the battlefield."--Wayne K. Durrill, University of CincinnatiThis compelling and engaging book sheds new light on how planter self-interest, government indifference, and the very nature of southern society produced a rising tide of dissent and disaffection among Georgia's plain folk during the Civil War. The authors make extensive use of local newspapers, court records, manuscript collections, and other firsthand accounts to tell a story of latent class resentment that emerged full force under wartime pressures and undermined southern support for the Confederacy.More directly than any previous historians, the authors make clear the connections between the causes of class resentment and their impact. Planters produced far too much cotton and avoided the draft at will. Speculators hoarded scarce goods and brought on spiraling inflation. Government officials turned a blind eye to the infractions of the rich, and were often bribed to do so. Women left to go hungry took matters into their own hands, stealing livestock in rural areas and rioting for food in every major city in Georgia. The hardships of families back home weighed heavily on soldiers in the field, contributing to rampant desertion. Deserters banded together, sometimes with draft dodgers and blacks escaping enslavement, to defend themselves or to go on the offensive against Confederate authorities. Some whites even planned and participated in slave resistance, a joining of forces that previous historians have long dismissed as highly improbable. So violent did Georgia’s inner civil war become that one resident commented, "We are fighting each other harder than we ever fought the enemy."This work stresses more forcefully than any before it that plain folk in the Deep South were far from united behind the Confederate war effort. That lack of unity, brought on largely by class resentment, helped to ensure that the Confederacy’s cause would, in the end, be lost.David Williams is professor and acting chair of the Department of History at Valdosta State University.

    They killed five demonstrators and wounded ten. All those killed were anti-racist community and labor leaders. Love and Revolution: A Political Memoir is both memoir and people's history. It is a factually detailed and passionate account of events surrounding the Greensboro Massacre by a woman intimately connected with the events. The author's husband, a pediatrician who abandoned medicine to work in a textile mill and organize low-wage workers, was among the slain. The activists killed were from Christian, Jewish, African American, and Latino backgrounds; they were Cesar Cauce, Michael Nathan, M.D., William Sampson, Sandra Smith, and James Waller, M.D. All were in Greensboro that day on behalf of the Workers Viewpoint Organization (WVO), part of a New Communist Movement inspired by Marx, Lenin, and Mao Tse-Tung. As the Ku Klux Klan came out of the woodwork during a period of economic downturn in the late seventies, WVO activists took a militant stand against the Klan and its racism. In the aftermath of Greensboro, survivors and concerned citizens faced an uphill battle for justice that eventually uncovered the involvement of official agencies in abetting the attack. At last, a 1985 civil suit found several of the attackers, as well as Greensboro police officers, liable for the wrongful death of Dr. Nathan. The union organizing, the massacre, the coverup of official complicity, and the struggle for justice are all essential moments of this political memoir. Readers become acquainted with a neglected portion of recent U.S. history the South of the 1970s and 1980s and with lovers and revolutionaries who did not accept the established order and dared to struggle to change it. Waller explores the meaning and implications of the events for the survival of American democracy.

    It informed him that he had been fired from his job. Eighteen other educators in the Ocean Hill–Brownsville area of Brooklyn received similar letters that day. The dismissed educators were white. The local school board that fired them was predominantly African-American. The crisis that the firings provoked became the most racially divisive moment in the city in more than a century, sparking three teachers’ strikes and increasingly angry confrontations between black and white New Yorkers at bargaining tables, on picket lines, and in the streets. This superb book revisits the Ocean Hill–Brownsville crisis—a watershed in modern New York City race relations. Jerald E. Podair connects the conflict with the sociocultural history of the city and explores its legacy. The book is a powerful, sobering tale of racial misunderstanding and fear, a New York story with national implications.

    Includes interviews with leading African socialists and activists.With contributions from Leo Zeilig, David Seddon, Anne Alexander, Dave Renton, Ahmad Hussein, Jussi Vinnikka, Femi Aborisade, Miles Larmer, Austin Muneku, Peter Dwyer, Trevor Ngwane, Munyaradzi Gwisai, Tafadzwa Choto, and Azwell Banda.Leo Zeilig coordinated the independent media center in Zimbabwe during the presidential elections of 2002 and, prior to this, worked as a lecturer at Université Cheikh Anta Diop in Dakar, Senegal. He then worked for three years as a lecturer and researcher at Brunel University, moving later to the Center of Sociological Research at the University of Johannesburg. He has written on the struggle for democratic change, social movements, and student activism in sub-Saharan Africa. Zeilig is co-author of The Congo: Plunder and Resistance 1880–2005.

    But what about World War I? Who assembled all those fabriccovered biplanes? Who shaped and filled the millions of cartridges that America sent over to the trenches of Europe? Who made the gas masks to protect American soldiers facing chemical warfare for the first time? Although the World War II posters of Rosie the Riveter and Wendy the Welder remind us of the women who contributed to the nation's war effort in the 1940s, the women workers of World War I are nearly forgotten. In Rosie's Mom, Carrie Brown recovers these women of an earlier generation through lively words and images. She takes us back to the time when American women abandoned their jobs dipping chocolates, sewing corsets, or canning pork and beans, to contribute to the war effort. Trading their ankle-length skirts and crisp white shirtwaists for coarse bloomers or overalls, they went into the munition plants to face explosives, toxic chemicals, powerful metal-cutting machines, and the sullen hostility of the men in the shops. By the end of the war, notes the author, more than a million American women had become involved in war production