Book picks similar to
The Road to Matewan by William Trent Pancoast
environmental-degradation
human-exploitation
labor
race-culture-ethnicity-appalachian
Storming Heaven
Denise Giardina - 1987
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 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.
A People's History of Science: Miners, Midwives, and Low Mechanicks
Clifford D. Conner - 2005
This history is made up of long periods of ignorance and confusion, punctuated once an age by a brilliant thinker who puts it all together. These few tower over the ordinary mass of people, and in the traditional account, it is to them that we owe science in its entirety. This belief is wrong. A People's History of Science shows how ordinary people participate in creating science and have done so throughout history. It documents how the development of science has affected ordinary people, and how ordinary people perceived that development. It would be wrong to claim that the formulation of quantum theory or the structure of DNA can be credited directly to artisans or peasants, but if modern science is likened to a skyscraper, then those twentieth-century triumphs are the sophisticated filigrees at its pinnacle that are supported by the massive foundation created by the rest of us.
The Enemy Within: The Secret War Against the Miners
Seumas Milne - 1994
Seumas Milne revealed for the first time the astonishing lengths to which the government and its intelligence machine were prepared to go to destroy the power of Britain’s miners’ union. There was an enemy within. It was the secret services of the British state, operating inside the NUM itself.Milne revealed for the first time the astonishing lengths to which the government and its intelligence machine were prepared to go to destroy the power of Britain’s miners’ union. Using phoney bank deposits, staged cash drops, forged documents, agents provocateurs and unrelenting surveillance, M15 and police Special Branch set out to discredit Scargill and other miners’ leaders. Planted tales of corruption were seized on by the media and both Tory and Labour politicians in what became an unprecedentedly savage smear campaign.In this new edition, published for the twentieth anniversary of Britain’s most important postwar social confrontation, new material brings the story up to date – and, in the wake of the Iraq war intelligence scandals, highlights the continuing threat posed by the security services to democracy today.
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.
Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley
Corey Pein - 2018
His goal: to learn how such an overhyped industry could possibly sustain itself as long as it has. Determined to cut through the clichés of big tech—the relentless optimism, the incessant repetition of vacuous buzzwords—Pein decided that he would need to take an approach as unorthodox as the companies he would soon be covering. To truly understand the delirious reality of a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, he knew, he would have to inhabit that perspective—he would have to become an entrepreneur. Thus he begins his journey—skulking through gimmicky tech conferences, pitching his over-the-top business ideas to investors, and interviewing a cast of outrageous characters: cyborgs and con artists, Teamsters and transhumanists, jittery hackers and naive upstart programmers whose entire lives are managed by their employers—who work endlessly and obediently, never thinking to question their place in the system.In showing us this frantic world, Pein challenges the positive self-image that the tech tycoons have crafted—as benevolent creators of wealth and opportunity—to reveal their self-justifying views and their insidious visions for the future. Vivid and incisive, Live Work Work Work Die is a troubling portrait of a self-obsessed industry bent on imposing its disturbing visions on the rest of us.
The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality
Bhaskar Sunkara - 2019
With the stunning popularity of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Americans are embracing the class politics of socialism. But what, exactly, is socialism? And what would a socialist system in America look like? The editor of Jacobin magazine, Sunkara shows that socialism, though often seen primarily as an economic system, in fact offers the means to fight all forms of oppression, including racism and sexism. The ultimate goal is not Soviet-style planning, but to win rights to healthcare, education, and housing, and to create new democratic institutions in workplaces and communities. A primer on socialism for the 21st century, this is a book for anyone seeking an end to the vast inequities of our age.
The Factory Witches of Lowell
C.S. Malerich - 2020
S. Malerich's The Factory Witches of Lowell is a riveting historical fantasy about witches going on strike in the historical mill-town of Lowell, Massachusetts.Faced with abominable working conditions, unsympathetic owners, and hard-hearted managers, the mill girls of Lowell have had enough. They're going on strike, and they have a secret weapon on their side: a little witchcraft to ensure that no one leaves the picket line.For the young women of Lowell, Massachusetts, freedom means fair wages for fair work, decent room and board, and a chance to escape the cotton mills before lint stops up their lungs. When the Boston owners decide to raise the workers’ rent, the girls go on strike. Their ringleader is Judith Whittier, a newcomer to Lowell but not to class warfare. Judith has already seen one strike fold and she doesn’t intend to see it again. Fortunately Hannah, her best friend in the boardinghouse—and maybe first love?—has a gift for the dying art of witchcraft.At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century
Michael Denning - 1997
Disney cartoonists walked picket lines, and Billie Holiday sand ‘Strange Fruit’ at the left-wing cabaret, Café Society. Duke Ellington produced a radical musical, Jump for Joy, New York garment workers staged the legendary Broadway revue Pins and Needles, and Orson Welles and his Mercury players took their labor operas and anti-fascist Shakespeare to Hollywood and made Citizen Kane.A major reassessment of US cultural history, The Cultural Front is a vivid mural of this extraordinary upheaval which reshaped American culture in the twentieth century.
The New Minority: White Working Class Politics in an Age of Immigration and Inequality
Justin Gest - 2016
But today members of the same demographic, feeling silenced and ignored by mainstream parties, have moved to the political margins. In the United States and the United Kingdom, economicdisenfranchisement, nativist sentiments and fear of the unknown among this group have even inspired the creation of new right-wing parties and resulted in a remarkable level of support for fringe political candidates, most notably Donald Trump.Answers to the question of how to rebuild centrist coalitions in both the U.S. and U.K. have become increasingly elusive. How did a group of people synonymous with Middle Britain and Middle America drift to the ends of the political spectrum? What drives their emerging radicalism? And what couldpossibly lead a group with such enduring numerical power to, in many instances, consider themselves a minority in the countries they once defined? In The New Minority, Justin Gest speaks to people living in once thriving working class cities--Youngstown, Ohio and Dagenham, England--to arrive at anuanced understanding of their political attitudes and behaviors. In this daring and compelling book, he makes the case that tension between the vestiges of white working class power and its perceived loss have produced the unique phenomenon of white working class radicalization.
Prisoners of the American Dream: Politics & Economy in the History of the U. S. Working Class
Mike Davis - 1986
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.
Voices from the Valley: Tech Workers Talk about What They Do--And How They Do It
Moira Weigel - 2020
In the process, Weigel and Tarnoff open the conversation about the tech industry at large, a conversation that has previously been dominated by the voices of CEOs. Deeply illuminating, revealing, and at times lurid, Voices from the Valley is a vital and comprehensive view of an industry that governs our lives.FSG Originals � Logic dissects the way technology functions in everyday lives. The titans of Silicon Valley, for all their utopian imaginings, never really had our best interests at heart: recent threats to democracy, truth, privacy, and safety, as a result of tech's reckless pursuit of progress, have shown as much. We present an alternate story, one that delights in capturing technology in all its contradictions and innovation, across borders and socioeconomic divisions, from history through the future, beyond platitudes and PR hype, and past doom and gloom. Our collaboration features four brief but provocative forays into the tech industry's many worlds, and aspires to incite fresh conversations about technology focused on nuanced and accessible explorations of the emerging tools that reorganize and redefine life today.
Shell Shaker
LeAnne Howe - 2001
. . He's a very different kind of Wasano, bloodsucker, he always hungers for more".—from Shell ShakerThe action in this debut novel alternates between 1738, as a Choctaw family prepares for war against the English, and the 1990s, as their Oklahoma descendants, the Billys, fight a Mafia takeover of the tribe's casino. In trouble with the law and in the fight of their lives, the Billy women must find a way, as their ancestors did, to join forces against a devious foe. Humor, toughness, and resourcefulness are the Billys' only weapons.Until the Shell Shaker shows up.LeAnne Howe, an enrolled member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, is a fiction writer, playwright, scholar and poet whose writings on Choctaw women are drawn from both personal experience and scholarly research. Her short fiction has appeared in several anthologies, including Through the Eye of the Deer, Returning the Gift, Spider Woman's Granddaughters, and Earth Song, Sky Spirit, as well as in journals such as Callaloo and Fiction International.Howe has read her fiction and lectured throughout the United States, Japan and the Middle East, and her plays have been produced in Los Angeles and New York City. She has also presented programs on recruitment and retention of American Indians at universities and colleges. Currently, she teaches in the English Department at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.In 1991, Howe received a National Endowment for the Humanities grant to conduct research for Shell Shaker.
The Instinct for Cooperation: A Graphic Novel Conversation With Noam Chomsky
Jeffrey Wilson - 2018
The Instinct for Cooperation innovatively balances those real-life stories of struggle with conversations the author has had with Chomsky on how best to understand them. Although the themes are wide-ranging, this book is ultimately about the importance and need for spaces of resistance in countering state and other institutional forms of violence. For example, when discussing the removal of books by police and sanitation workers from Zuccotti Park in November of 2011, Chomsky paused to say "Arizona knows all about that," referring to the 2010 ban of Mexican American Studies in Tucson schools under Arizona House Bill 2281, which deemed classes that taught "ethnic solidarity" to be illegal. Rather than footnote the reference, Wilson tells that story. Like Joe Sacco's animated political journalism, this book offers a unique perspective on current issues, while providing a major contribution to the understanding of Chomsky's political theories.
Temp: How American Work, American Business, and the American Dream Became Temporary
Louis Hyman - 2018
But over the last fifty years, job security has cratered as the postwar institutions that insulated us from volatility--big unions, big corporations, powerful regulators--have been swept aside by a fervent belief in "the market." Temp tracks the surprising transformation of an ethos which favored long-term investment in work (and workers) to one promoting short-term returns. A series of deliberate decisions preceded the digital revolution and upended the longstanding understanding of what a corporation, or a factory, or a shop, was meant to do.Temp tells the story of the unmaking of American work through the experiences of those on the inside: consultants and executives, temps and office workers, line workers and migrant laborers. It begins in the sixties, with economists, consultants, business and policy leaders who began to shift the corporation from a provider of goods and services to one whose sole purpose was to maximize profit--an ideology that brought with it the risk-taking entrepreneur and the shareholder revolution and changed the very definition of a corporation.With Temp, Hyman explains one of the nation's most immediate crises. Uber are not the cause of insecurity and inequality in our country, and neither is the rest of the gig economy. The answer goes deeper than apps, further back than downsizing, and contests the most essential assumptions we have about how our businesses should work.