Books in the Culture, Labor, History series

Examines how the fortunes of Mexicans in South Chicago were linked to the environment they helped to build

Challenges readers to alter their conceptual frameworks about Africans by looking at them as workers who, through the course of the Atlantic slave trade and plantation labor, shaped the development of the Americas

A study of undercover investigations of work and poverty in America, in which an award-winning historian examines how intellectuals were shaped by their experiences with the poor, and how despite their sympathy toward working-class people, they unintentionally helped to develop the contemporary concept of a degraded and other American underclass.

If the railroads won the Gilded Age, the coal industry lost it. Railroads epitomized modern management, high technology, and vast economies of scale. By comparison, the coal industry was embarrassingly primitive. This book shows how disorder in the coal industry disrupted the strategic plans of the railroads.

At one time, Asa Philip Randolph (1889-1979) was a household name. Featuring both established and emergent intellectual voices, this project seeks to avoid both hagiography and blanket condemnation alike.

Shortly after the dawn of the twentieth century, the New York City Department of Health decided to address what it perceived as the racial nature of health. It delivered heavily racialized care in different neighborhoods throughout the city: syphillis treatment among African Americans, tuberculosis for Italian Americans, and so on. It was a challenging and ambitious program, dangerous for the providers, and troublingly reductive for the patients. Nevertheless, poor and working-class African American, British West Indian, and Southern Italian women all received some of the nation¿s best health care during this period.Health in the City challenges traditional ideas of early twentieth-century urban black health care by showing a program that was simultaneously racialized and cutting-edge. It reveals that even the most well-meaning public health programs may inadvertently reinforce perceptions of inferiority that they were created to fix.

Millions of laborers, from the Philippines to the Caribbean, performed the work of the United States empire. Forging a global economy connecting the tropics to the industrial center, workers harvested sugar, cleaned hotel rooms, provided sexual favors, and filled military ranks. Placing working men and women at the center of the long history of the U.S. empire, these essays offer new stories of empire that intersect with the ¿grand narratives¿ of diplomatic affairs at the national and international levels. Missile defense, Cold War showdowns, development politics, military combat, tourism, and banana economics share something in common¿they all have labor histories. This collection challenges historians to consider the labor that formed, worked, confronted, and rendered the U.S. empire visible. The U.S. empire is a project of global labor mobilization, coercive management, military presence, and forced cultural encounter. Together, the essays in this volume recognize the United States as a global imperial player whose systems of labor mobilization and migration stretched from Central America to West Africa to the United States itself.Workers are also the key actors in this volume. Their stories are multi-vocal, as workers sometimes defied the U.S. empire¿s rhetoric of civilization, peace, and stability and at other times navigated its networks or benefited from its profits. Their experiences reveal the gulf between the American `denial of empire¿ and the lived practice of management, resource exploitation, and military exigency. When historians place labor and working people at the center, empire appears as a central dynamic of U.S. history.

Passed in June 1940, the Smith Act was a peacetime anti-sedition law that marked a dramatic shift in the legal definition of free speech protection in America by criminalizing the advocacy of disloyalty to the government by force. It also criminalized the acts of printing, publishing, or distributing anything advocating such sedition and made it illegal to organize or belong to any association that did the same. It was first brought to trial in July 1941, when a federal grand jury in Minneapolis indicted twenty-nine Socialist Workers Party members, fifteen of whom also belonged to the militant Teamsters Local 544. Eighteen of the defendants were convicted of conspiring to overthrow the government. Examining the social, political, and legal history of the first Smith Act case, this book focuses on the tension between the nation’s cherished principle of free political expression and the demands of national security on the eve of America’s entry into World War II. Based on newly declassified government documents and recently opened archival sources, Trotskyists on Trial explores the implications of the case for organized labor and civil liberties in wartime and postwar America. The central issue of how Americans have tolerated or suppressed dissent during moments of national crisis is not only important to our understanding of the past, but also remains a pressing concern in the post-9/11 world. This volume traces some of the implications of the compromise between rights and security that was made in the mid-twentieth century, offering historical context for some of the consequences of similar bargains struck today.

"Also available as an ebook"--Title page verso.

The history of domestic labor markets in 19th century America From the era of Irish Famine migration to the passage of quota restrictions in the 1920s, household domestic service was the single largest employer of women in the United States, and, in California, a pivotal occupation for male Chinese immigrants. Servants of both sexes accounted for eight percent of the total labor force - about one million people. In Brokering Servitude, Andrew Urban offers a history of these domestic servants, focusing on how Irish immigrant women, Chinese immigrant men, and American-born black women navigated the domestic labor market in the nineteenth century - a market in which they were forced to grapple with powerful racial and gendered discrimination. Through vivid examples like how post-famine Irish immigrants were enlisted to work as servants in exchange for relief, this book examines how race, citizenship, and the performance of domestic labor relate to visions of American expansion. Because household service was undesirable work stigmatized as unfree, brokers were integral to steering and compelling women, men, and children into this labor. By the end of the nineteenth century, the federal government became a major broker of domestic labor through border controls, and immigration officials became important actors in dictating which workers were available for domestic labor and under what conditions they could be contracted.Drawing on a range of sources - from political cartoons to immigrant case files to novels - Brokering Servitude connects Asian immigration, European immigration, and internal, black migration. The book ultimately demonstrates the ways in which employers pitted these groups against each other in competition for not only servant positions, but also certain forms of social inclusion, offering important insights into an oft-overlooked area of American history.