Book picks similar to
Teamster Power by Farrell Dobbs


labor
politics
history
labor-and-labor-history

Algiers, Third World Capital


Elaine Mokhtefi - 2018
    Here, Elaine Mokhtefi, a young American woman who had become involved in the struggle and worked with leaders of the Algerian Revolution, including Frantz Fanon, found a home. As journalist and translator, she lived among guerillas, revolutionaries, exiles and visionaries, was even present in the groundbreaking The Battle of Algiers.

Personal Politics: The Roots of Women's Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement & the New Left


Sara M. Evans - 1979
    On the basis of years of research, interviews with dozens of the central figures, and her own personal experience, Evans explores how the political stance of these women was catalyzed and shaped by their sharp disillusionment at a time when their skills as political activists were newly and highly developed, enabling them to join forces to support their own cause.

Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939


Lizabeth Cohen - 1990
    We follow Chicago workers as they make choices about whether to attend ethnic benefit society meetings or to go to the movies, whether to shop in local neighborhood stores or patronize the new A & P. Although workers may not have been political in traditional terms during the '20s, as they made daily decisions like these, they declared their loyalty in ways that would ultimately have political significance. As the depression worsened in the 1930s, not only did workers find their pay and working hours cut or eliminated, but the survival strategies they had developed during the 1920s were undermined. Looking elsewhere for help, workers adopted new ideological perspectives and overcame longstanding divisions among themselves to mount new kinds of collective action. Chicago workers' experiences as citizens, ethnics and blacks, wage earners and consumers all converged to make them into New Deal Democrats and CIO unionists.

Capital Moves: RCA's Seventy-Year Quest for Cheap Labor


Jefferson R. Cowie - 1999
    Before the largest companies moved beyond national boundaries, they crossed state lines, abandoning the industrial centers of the Eastern Seaboard for impoverished rural communities in the Midwest and South. In their wake they left the decaying urban landscapes and unemployment rates that became hallmarks of late twentieth-century America. This is the story that Jefferson Cowie, in “a stunningly important work of historical imagination and rediscovery” (Nelson Lichtenstein), tells through the lens of a single American corporation, RCA.Capital Moves takes us through the interconnected histories of Camden, New Jersey; Bloomington, Indiana; Memphis, Tennessee; and Juárez, Mexico—four cities radically transformed by America’s leading manufacturer of records and radio sets. In a sweeping narrative of economic upheaval and class conflict, Cowie weaves together the rich detail of local history with the national—and ultimately international—story of economic and social change.

A Fortress in Brooklyn: Race, Real Estate, and the Making of Hasidic Williamsburg


Nathaniel Deutsch - 2021
    . . . To fully understand Satmar, of course, one has to be born into it. But to understand how political prowess and real-estate know-how shaped the group’s current iteration in Brooklyn, it would be wise to start with this outstanding book."—Laura E. Adkins, LA Review of Books The Hasidic community in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn is famously one of the most separatist, intensely religious, and politically savvy groups of people in the entire United States. Less known is how the community survived in one of the toughest parts of New York City during an era of steep decline, only to later resist and also participate in the unprecedented gentrification of the neighborhood. Nathaniel Deutsch and Michael Casper unravel the fascinating history of how a group of determined Holocaust survivors encountered, shaped, and sometimes fiercely opposed the urban processes that transformed their gritty neighborhood, from white flight and the construction of public housing to rising crime, divestment of city services, and, ultimately, extreme gentrification. By showing how Williamsburg’s Hasidim rejected assimilation while still undergoing distinctive forms of Americanization and racialization, Deutsch and Casper present both a provocative counter-history of American Jewry and a novel look at how race, real estate, and religion intersected in the creation of a quintessential, and yet deeply misunderstood, New York neighborhood.

24 Hours Inside the President's Bunker: 9-11-01: The White House


Robert J. Darling - 2010
    Robert J. Darling organizes President Bush's trip to Florida on Sept. 10, 2001, he believes the next couple of days will be quiet. He has no idea that a war is about to begin. The next day, after terrorists crash airliners into the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon, Maj. Darling rushes to the president's underground chamber at the White House. There, he takes on the task of liaison between the vice president, national security advisor and the Pentagon. He works directly with the National Command Authority, and he's in the room when Vice President Cheney orders two fighter jets to get airborne in order to shoot down United Flight 93. Throughout the attacks, Maj. Darling witnesses the unprecedented actions that leaders are taking to defend America. As Vice President Cheney, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and others make decisions at a lightning pace with little or no deliberation, he's there to lend his support. Follow Darling's story as he becomes a Marine Corps aviator and rises through the ranks to play an incredible role in responding to a crisis that changed the world in 9-11-01: The White House: Twenty-Four Hours inside the President's Bunker.

The Making of the English Working Class


E.P. Thompson - 1963
    E.P. Thompson shows how the working class took part in its own making & recreates the whole life experience of people who suffered loss of status & freedom, who underwent degradation & who yet created a culture & political consciousness of great vitality. "Thompson's book has been called controversial, but perhaps only because so many have forgotten how explosive England was during the Regency & the early reign of Victoria. Without any reservation, The Making of the English Working Class is the most important study of those days since the classic work of the Hammonds."--Commentary "Mr Thompson's deeply human imagination & controlled passion help us to recapture the agonies, heroisms & illusions of the working class as it made itself. No one interested in the history of the English people should fail to read his book."--Times Literary Supplement

Meade at Gettysburg: A Study in Command


Kent Masterson Brown - 2021
    Meade guided his forces to victory in the Civil War's most pivotal battle. Commentators often dismiss Meade when discussing the great leaders of the Civil War. But in this long-anticipated book, Kent Masterson Brown draws on an expansive archive to reappraise Meade's leadership during the Battle of Gettysburg. Using Meade's published and unpublished papers alongside diaries, letters, and memoirs of fellow officers and enlisted men, Brown highlights how Meade's rapid advance of the army to Gettysburg on July 1, his tactical control and coordination of the army in the desperate fighting on July 2, and his determination to hold his positions on July 3 insured victory.Brown argues that supply deficiencies, brought about by the army's unexpected need to advance to Gettysburg, were crippling. In spite of that, Meade pursued Lee's retreating army rapidly, and his decision not to blindly attack Lee's formidable defenses near Williamsport on July 13 was entirely correct in spite of subsequent harsh criticism. Combining compelling narrative with incisive analysis, this finely rendered work of military history deepens our understanding of the Army of the Potomac as well as the machinations of the Gettysburg Campaign, restoring Meade to his rightful place in the Gettysburg narrative.

Raising Expectations (and Raising Hell); My Decade Fighting for the Labor Movement


Jane F. McAlevey - 2012
    Today, less than 7 percent of American private-sector workers belong to a union, the lowest percentage since the beginning of the twentieth century, and public employee collective bargaining has been dealt devastating blows in Wisconsin and elsewhere. What happened?Jane McAlevey is famous—and notorious—in the American labor movement as the hard-charging organizer who racked up a string of victories at a time when union leaders said winning wasn’t possible. Then she was bounced from the movement, a victim of the high-level internecine warfare that has torn apart organized labor. In this engrossing and funny narrative—that reflects the personality of its charismatic, wisecracking author—McAlevey tells the story of a number of dramatic organizing and contract victories, and the unconventional strategies that helped achieve them.Raising Expectations (and Raising Hell) argues that labor can be revived, but only if the movement acknowledges its mistakes and fully commits to deep organizing, participatory education, militancy, and an approach to workers and their communities that more resembles the campaigns of the 1930s—in short, social movement unionism that involves raising workers’ expectations (while raising hell).

Dirty Little Secrets About Black History : Its Heroes & Other Troublemakers


Claud Anderson - 1997
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Rainbow's End: The Crash of 1929


Maury Klein - 2001
    The book offers a vibrant picture of a world full of plungers, powerful bankers, corporate titans, millionaire brokers, and buoyantly optimistic stock market bulls. We meet Sunshine Charley Mitchell, head of the National City Bank, powerful financiers Jack Morgan and Jacob Schiff, Wall Street manipulators such as the legendary Jesse Livermore, and the lavish-living Billy Durant, founder of General Motors. As Klein follows the careers of these men, he shows us how the financial house of cards gradually grew taller, as the irrational exuberance of an earlier age gripped America and convinced us that the market would continue to rise forever. Then, in October 1929, came a perfect storm-like convergence of factors that shook Wall Street to its foundations. We relive Black Thursday, when police lined Wall Street, brokers grew hysterical, customers bellowed like lunatics, and the ticker tape fell hours behind.This compelling history of the Crash--the first to follow the market closely for the two years leading up to the disaster--illuminates a major turning point in our history.

Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist


Nick Salvatore - 1982
    He was the leader of the Socialist party, five-time Socialist candidate for president, outspoken on the rights of all workers, and a persistent defender of America's democratic traditions.Using new manuscript materials, Nick Salvatore offers a major reevaluation of Debs, the movements he launched, and his belief in American Socialism as an extension of the nation's democratic traditions. He also shows the relationship between Debs's public image and his private life as child, sibling, husband, and lover. Salvatore's Debs--weaknesses intact--emerges as a complex man, frustrated and angered by the glaring inequities of a new economic order, and willing to risk his freedom to preserve the essence of democratic society.

Che Guevara


Andrew Sinclair - 1970
    I fought in Cuba, and I began to be a revolutionary in Guatemala.' Che Guevara was the most admired and beloved revolutionary of his time, the first man since Simon Bolivar seriously to plan to unite the countries of Latin America. This concise biography unravels Che's life, from his birth in 1928, the child of free-thinking radical Argentinian aristocrats, his youthful membership of Accion Argentina and his training as a doctor in Buenos Aires, through his witnessing of the fall of the new revolutionary government in Guatemala alongside its leader, Arbenz, his action as a commander in the guerrilla war in Cuba with Fidel Castro and his part in the reforming Marxist Cuban government, to his fight for liberation of the Congo and, finally, of Bolivia, where he was executed.

Triangle: The Fire That Changed America


David von Drehle - 2003
    On March 25, 1911, as workers were getting ready to leave for the day, a fire broke out in the Triangle Shirtwaist factory in New York’s Greenwich Village. Within minutes it spread to consume the building’s upper three stories. Firemen who arrived at the scene were unable to rescue those trapped inside: their ladders simply weren’t tall enough. People on the street watched in horror as desperate workers jumped to their deaths. The final toll was 146 people—123 of them women. It was the worst disaster in New York City history.

The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit


Thomas J. Sugrue - 1996
    In this reappraisal of America's dilemma of racial and economic inequality, Thomas Sugrue asks why Detroit and other industrial cities have become the sites of persistent racialized poverty.