The Triangle Fire: A Brief History with Documents


Jo Ann E. Argersinger - 2009
    The tragedy brought national attention to the unsafe working conditions, long hours, and low pay that had prompted a national garment workers’ strike a year before. Jo Ann Argersinger’s volume examines the context, trajectory, and impact of this Progressive Era event. An introduction explores the demands industrialization placed upon urban working women, their fight to unionize, and the Triangle fire’s significance in the greater scope of labor reform. Documents from newspaper reports to the personal stories of labor agitators and fire survivors continue the story, giving voice to the "girl strikers," their enemies and upper-class allies in the effort to reform the garment industry, and the public outrage that followed the fire. Document headnotes, a chronology, questions for consideration, a selected bibliography, and an index enrich students’ understanding of this historical moment.

Kennedy and Nixon: The Rivalry That Shaped Postwar America


Chris Matthews - 1996
    But what drove history was the enmity between these two towering figures whose 1960 presidential contest would set the nation's bitter course for years to come. In this startling dual portrait, the author of Hardball shows how the early fondness between the two men degenerated into distrust and paranoia--the same emotions that, in the early '70s, ravaged the nation. of photos.

Haymarket


Martin Duberman - 2003
    The officers immediately opened fire, killing a number of protestors and wounding some two hundred others. Albert Parsons was the best-known of those hanged; Haymarket is his story. Parsons, humanist and autodidact, was an ex-Confederate soldier who grew up in Texas in the 1870s, and fell in love with Lucy Gonzalez, a vibrant, outspoken black woman who preferred to describe herself as of Spanish and Creole descent. The novel tells the story of their lives together, of their growing political involvement, of the formation of a colorful circle of "co-conspirators"-immigrants, radical intellectuals, journalists, advocates of the working class-and of the events culminating in bloodshed. More than just a moving story of love and human struggle, more than a faithful account of a watershed event in United States history, Haymarket presents a layered and dynamic revelation of late nineteenth-century Chicago, and of the lives of a handful of remarkable individuals who were willing to risk their lives for the promise of social change.

A Criminal and an Irishman: The Inside Story of the Boston Mob - IRA Connection


Patrick Nee - 2006
    After returning from Vietnam where he served as a combat Marine, Pat Nee fought a gang war against Whitey Bulger. When members of Nee's Mullen gang killed the leader of Bulger's Killeen faction, Nee arranged for the dispute to be mediated by Howie Winter and Patriarca crime family captain Joseph Russo. The two gangs joined forces, with Winter as overall boss. When Winter was convicted of fixing horse races in 1979, Bulger became leader, and Nee responded by concentrating his energy on raising money and smuggling guns to the Provisional IRA. Disgusted by Bulger's brutality, and increasingly focused on the Irish cause, Nee distanced himself from his former ally. Ultimately it was revealed that, for years, Bulger had served as an FBI informant. A Criminal and an Irishman is the story of Pat Nee's life as an Irish immigrant and Southie son, a Marine, a convicted IRA gun smuggler, and a former violent rival and then associate of James "Whitey" Bulger. His narrative transports the reader into the criminal underworld, inside planning and preparation for an armored car heist, inside gang wars and revenge killings. Nee details his evolution from tough street kid to armed robber to dangerous potential killer, and discloses for the first time how he used his underworld connections and know-how as a secret, Boston-based operative for the Irish Republican Army. For years Pat smuggled weapons and money from the United States to Ireland - in the bottoms of coffins, behind false panels of vans - leading up to a transatlantic shipment of seven and a half tons of munitions aboard the fishing trawler Valhalla. No other Southie underworld figure can match Pat's reputation for resolve and authenticity.

Citizen Coors: A Grand Family Saga of Business, Politics, and Beer


Dan Baum - 2000
    From the moment when the dsitute Prussian Adolph Coors stows away to America in 1868, through the creation of the Heritage Foundation, to the global expansion of the billion-dollar Coors Brewing Company, the Coors family triumphed by iron-willed commitment to its own values -- values that ironically prove the family's undoing on both the business and political fronts.Acclaimed writer Dan Baum captures it all, from Adolph's Prohibition-provoked suicide to the banishment of an heir-apparent for marrying without permission. Baum vividly depicts the genius, eccentricity, and tragic weaknesses of the remarkable Coors family.

The Bending Cross: A Biography of Eugene Victor Debs


Ray Ginger - 1949
    This moving story presents the definitive account of the life and legacy of the most eloquent spokesperson and leader of the U.S. labor and socialist movements.With a new introduction by Mike Davis.

Blood Runs Coal: The Yablonski Murders and the Battle for the United Mine Workers of America


Mark A. Bradley - 2020
    Seven months earlier, Yablonski had announced his campaign to oust the corrupt president of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), Tony Boyle, who had long embezzled UMWA funds, silenced intra-union dissent, and served the interests of Big Coal companies. Yablonski wanted to return the union to the coal miners it was supposed to represent and restore the organization to what it had once been, a powerful force for social good. Boyle was enraged about his opponent’s bid to take over—and would go to any lengths to maintain power.One of the most infamous crimes in the history of American labor unions, the Yablonski murders triggered one of the most intensive and successful manhunts in FBI history—and also led to the first successful rank-and-file takeover of a major labor union in modern U.S. history. One that inspired workers in other labor unions to rise up and challenge their own entrenched, out-of-touch leaders.

Enlightened Democracy: The Case for the Electoral College


Tara Ross - 2004
    It is a sure recipe for losing respect for the institution. Media commentators are swift to dismiss the institution as outdated and elitist, an anachronism that should be replaced by a direct popular vote. In recent years, this discontent has found a voice as a well-funded, California-based effort seeks to bypass the constitutional amendment process and effectively eliminate the Electoral College through a series of state laws. Such efforts to eliminate the Electoral College are misguided, and this book shows why. Written in straightforward language, Enlightened Democracy traces the history of the Electoral College from the Constitutional Convention to the present. This second edition of the book is revised and expanded to include a new section about the National Popular Vote legislative effort. The Electoral College protects our republic and promotes our liberty. Americans should defend their unique presidential election system at all costs.

Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Revised)


Daniel T. Rodgers - 1998
    Earlier reformers, progressives of his day, and later New Dealers lamented the nation's resistance to models abroad for correctives to the backwardness of American social politics. Atlantic Crossings is the first major account of the vibrant international network that they constructed--so often obscured by notions of American exceptionalism--and of its profound impact on the United States from the 1870s through 1945.On a narrative canvas that sweeps across Europe and the United States, Daniel Rodgers retells the story of the classic era of efforts to repair the damages of unbridled capitalism. He reveals the forgotten international roots of such innovations as city planning, rural cooperatives, modernist architecture for public housing, and social insurance, among other reforms. From small beginnings to reconstructions of the new great cities and rural life, and to the wide-ranging mechanics of social security for working people, Rodgers finds the interconnections, adaptations, exchanges, and even rivalries in the Atlantic region's social planning. He uncovers the immense diffusion of talent, ideas, and action that were breathtaking in their range and impact.The scope of Atlantic Crossings is vast and peopled with the reformers, university men and women, new experts, bureaucrats, politicians, and gifted amateurs. This long dur e of contemporary social policy encompassed fierce debate, new conceptions of the role of the state, an acceptance of the importance of expertise in making government policy, and a recognition of a shared destiny in a newly created world.

Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights: 1919-1950


Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore - 2008
    This contentious mix of home-grown radicals, labor activists, newspaper editors, black workers, and intellectuals employed every strategy imaginable to take Dixie down, from a ludicrous attempt to organize black workers with a stage production of Pushkin—in Russian—to the courageous fight of striking workers against police and corporate violence in Gastonia in 1929. In a dramatic narrative Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore deftly shows how the movement unfolded against national and global developments, gaining focus and finally arriving at a narrow but effective legal strategy for securing desegregation and political rights. Little-known heroes abound in a book that will recast our understanding of the most important social movement in twentieth-century America.

Finks: How the CIA Tricked the World's Best Writers


Joel Whitney - 2017
    The story continues to unfold, with the reputations of some of America’s best-loved literary figures—including Peter Matthiessen, George Plimpton, and Richard Wright—tarnished as their work for the intelligence agency has come to light.Finks is a tale of two CIAs, and how they blurred the line between propaganda and literature. One CIA created literary magazines that promoted American and European writers and cultural freedom, while the other toppled governments, using assassination and censorship as political tools. Defenders of the “cultural” CIA argue that it should have been lauded for boosting interest in the arts and freedom of thought, but the two CIAs had the same undercover goals, and shared many of the same methods: deception, subterfuge and intimidation.Finks demonstrates how the good-versus-bad CIA is a false divide, and that the cultural Cold Warriors again and again used anti-Communism as a lever to spy relentlessly on leftists, and indeed writers of all political inclinations, and thereby pushed U.S. democracy a little closer to the Soviet model of the surveillance state.

Tinder Street


Nick Russell - 2020
    Following Rachel McNally to the big city, he had no idea how much his life and the world around him would change.Chronicling the days leading up to World War I and the events that followed, Tinder Street is the first book in a saga that will take readers from rural farms to a major industrial city in the Midwest, across an ocean where German U-boats lurk waiting for a target to come within range of their deadly torpedoes, to the bloody trench warfare of France, and home again. And of how, back at home, the soldiers of a victorious Army try to put their experiences behind them and pick up the pieces of the lives they once had, to look toward a future bright with promise. Lucas was one of those soldiers, a man who hated the thought of killing, but did his duty. A duty that would haunt him long after the last shots were fired.This is also the story of the simple working class people who built America. Farmers, factory workers, streetcar conductors, midwives, and public servants. Their joys and sorrows, their wins and losses, and how these people who struggled together to build a better life for themselves and their children changed a place named Tinder Street to Tender Street, a reflection of one family’s devotion to their neighbors.

Half A Brain: Confessions of a Special Needs Mom


Jenni Basch - 2020
    

A Short History of San Francisco


Tom Cole - 1988
    A bestseller in its original edition (Lexikos Books) now restored, after more than a decade OP, with a new afterword by the author.

The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot


Russell Kirk - 1953
    Buckley, Jr.Russell Kirk's The Conservative Mind is one of the greatest contributions to twentieth-century American conservatism. Brilliant in every respect, from its conception to its choice of significant figures representing the history of intellectual conservatism, The Conservative Mind launched the modern American Conservative Movement when it was first published in 1953 and has become an enduring classic of political thought.The seventh revised edition features the complete text and an introduction by publisher Henry Regency.A must-read.