The American Yawp - Teaching Notes

Parking ideas for teaching here…

Chapter 16: Capital and Labor

Essential Questions:

• Locate and restate the main argument of this chapter.

• List a few of the different methods labor organizers and strikers used to improve conditions for workers. Which methods do you believe were most effective? Use evidence from the text to support your assertion.

• How did labor struggles by farmers and other laborers look different on a national versus local level? Use evidence from the text to support your assertions.

• The role of inequality was argued by both capitalists and laborers. Generally, how did their interpretations differ, and on what information did they base their arguments? Use evidence from the text to support your claims.

• What was the primary means Populists hoped to reform the political economy in favor of workers, and how did they propose this would work?

• According to the text, what is the main reason for the Populist Party’s failure?

• What are key differences in the structure and function of the U.S. Socialist Party compared to the Populist Party?

Vocabulary IDs:

• 1887 Railroad Strike

• Capital/Capitalism/Capitalist

• Corporation

• Economy of Scale

• Taylorism

• Industrializing

• Protective Tariffs

• Knights of Labor

• Haymarket Square Riot

• American Federation of Labor

• Populism

• William Jennings Bryan

• Socialism

• Eugene Victor Debs

Chapter Notes:

1. Introduction

   The 1877 Railroad Strike marks a moment when the deprivations of working-class laborers met the anxieties of the Capitalist class. State militias were called out to quell the strike, and it resulted in $40 million in damages and 100 people dead.

2. The March of Capital

   As industrialization gained speed, so too did the exploitation of laborers. They felt their diminishing ability to survive in a regime of exploitative labor practices and expansion of corporate power.

   The standardization of parts in The Civil War and the development of Taylorism (followed by Fordism) that divided production into repetitive, unskilled labor, both contributed to the reduced power of artisan and non-artisan laborers. Economy of scale manufacturing requires large capital investment, vertical integration, and favors an authoritarian leadership structure. Legal and financial structures allowed for corporations to expand by expanding the investor pool and reducing liability in a volatile and competitive market. Competition was quite dangerous to corporations; massive mergers at the turn of the century underline these fears.

3. Rise of Inequality

   Demonstrates capitalists’ increasing grip on a staggering proportion of wealth in the U.S. economy (10% control 90% of all U.S. wealthy by 1900).

4. The Labor Movement

   Conditions for workers are unsafe, they work long hours, their children are forced to earn money for the family’s survival, and housing conditions are deplorable.

5. The Populist Movement

   Farmers band together on a national scale (Farmer’s Alliance has 1.5 million members) and also uses local cooperatives to gain pricing concessions. Some Democrats defect to the Populist Party because of its support for working farmers; however, many more support a pro-business regime and engage in widespread election fraud. Generally, the Populist Party embraces government as the engine of economic protections against big business, coining silver (see W.J. Bryan) vs. gold standard. Also see multiple areas where non-Populist Democrats take advantage of racial tensions and contribute to division within the Populist Party.

6. William Jennings Bryan and the Politics of Gold

   Strongly influential despite his losses for Presidency at the polls; argues for removal of gold standard and adopting silver; inflation to increase, which will help indebted farmers. Loses to McKinley, who is strongly backed by business and gold standard supporters.

7. The Socialists

   Major point here is the larger inclusivity of the Socialist Party (though one would want to look at this a little closer). Much on Eugene Debs, but be sure to pull more about his work and campaign.

8. Conclusion

   See here for recap of major argument.

Gordon, Linda. The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999.

Title: The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction

Author: Linda Gordon

Year of Publication: 1999

Thesis:

Using the story of predominantly Catholic Mexican Americans who adopted Irish orphans and the backlash from the predominantly Protestant and white community in Clifton, Arizona, Gordon demonstrates the fluidity of whiteness during this period. Orphaned Irish children essentially "became" white as they arrived in Clifton. Using oral interviews, Gordon explores how a major strike in this mining town was so connected to this issue. "Abduction" serves a double meaning, where Mexican Americans were considered undeserving abductors by white people were attempting to abduct legally adopted children while threatening violence.

Time: 1904-5

Geography: New York and Arizona

Organization:

Preface

Cast of Principle Characters

October 2, 1904, Night: North Clifton, Arizona

September 25, 1904: Grand Central Station, New York City

Chapter 1. King Copper

October 1, 1904, 6:30 P.M.: Clifton Railroad Station

Chapter 2. Mexicans Come to the Mines

October 1, 1904, around 7:30 P.M.: Sacred Heart Church, Clifton

Chapter 3. The Priest in hte Mexican Camp

October 2, 1904, Afternoon, Morenci Square and Clifton Library Hall

Chapter 4. The Mexican Mothers and the Mexican Town

October 2, 1904, Evening, The Hills of Clifton

Chapter 5. The Anglo Mothers and the Company Town

October 2, 1904, Night: Clifton Hotel

Chapter 6. The Strike

October 3-4, 1904: Clifton Drugstore and Library Hall, Morenci Htel

Chapter 7. Vigilantism

January 1904: Courtroom of the Arizona Territorial Supreme Court, Phoenix

Chapter 8. Family and Race

Epilogue

- So fascinating that the orphan story (1904) for most respondents in oral interviews was read through the lens of the 1983 strike. 

Notes

Acknowledgments

Index

Maps

Illustrations

Type:

Methods:

Sources:

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Keywords:

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Notes

Jackson, Kenneth T. Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.

Title: Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States

Author: Kenneth T. Jackson

Year of Publication: 1985

Thesis:

Comparing data transnationally, Jackson argues that U.S. nationals' (and especially affluent elites') preference for living in rural areas with detached housing and home-ownership developed alongside government subsidies and interventions largely geared to support a commuting, homeowning, affluent, and racially exclusive suburb, making a series of interventions and collaborations appear as a natural development. Wealthy suburban emigrants had an outsize influence in the social and physical structure of these communities, which he argues, were emulated by others.

"It suggests that the space around us —the physical organization of neighborhoods, roads, yards, houses, and apartments—sets up living patterns that condition our behavior." (intro - no page#)

Time: Largely Postwar Era

Geography: U.S.

Organization:

Introduction

- In 1980, 40% of Americans lived in suburbs.

- Suburbs as symbol of rising middle-class

- Not all that easy to pin down what "suburban" means beyond an ideology

- Ex: There are ethnic suburbs, poor and rich suburbs, etc.

- Suburban density in U.S. compares b/c town & country feel similar vs. continued density next to large open spaces in non-U.S. suburbs (comparing to wealthy nations)

- Ownership (at this time 2-3x other European nations)

- Income, education, etc. tend to be higher in suburbs vs. city areas - this stands in contrast to other areas where inner cities tend to be reserved for the wealthy & poorer people commute (South Africa, Western Europe, Brazil as examples)

- Commute time also inverse relation to non-U.S. countries

- Discusses some of the issues with terms such as density (shifts in meaning over time)

1. Suburbs As Slums

2. The Transportation Revolution and the Erosion of the Walking City

3. Home, Sweet Home: The House and the Yard

4. Romantic Suburbs

5. The Main Line: Elite Suburbs and Communter Railroads

6. The Time of the Trolley

7. Affordable Homes for the Common Man

8. Suburbs into Neighborhoods: The Rise and Fall of Municipal Annexation

9. The New Age of Automobility

10. Suburban Development Between the Wars

11. Federal Subsidy and the Suburban Dream: ow Washington Changed the American Housing Market

12. The Cost of Good Intentions: The Ghettoization of Public Housing in the United States

13. The Baby Boom and the Age of Subdivision

14. The Drive-in Culture of Contemporary America

15. The Loss of Community in Metropolitan America

16. Retrospect and Prospect

Appendix

Notes

Index

Type: "Intellectual, architectural, urban... transportational history, public policy analysis" (no page # - return to enter)

Methods:

Sources:

Historiography:

Keywords:

Suburb (uses comparison against non-U.S. geographies:

- lower population density

- home-ownership (affluence)

- living in the home

- commuting to work

Themes:

Critiques:

Questions:

Research Questions:

"This book attempts to account for the divergence of the American experience from that of the rest of the world. How and why did Americans change their assumptions about the good life in the industrial and post- industrial age? Why did the metropolitan areas of the United States decentralize so quickly? What technological and ideological forces created the peculiar shape of the modern metropolis? Have the spatial patterns of American cities—with all they imply about aspirations and ideals—resulted from or caused a set of social values and political policies favoring suburbanization? To what extent has deconcentration involved sacrificing urban facilities in return for maximizing private space? This book then investigates the dynamics of urban land use, the process of city growth through the past, and the ways in which Americans coming together in metropolitan areas have arranged their activities." (no page # - return to add)

Quotes:

"Suburbia symbolizes the fullest, most unadulterated embodiment of contemporary culture; it is a manifestation of such fundamental characteristics of American society as conspicuous consumption, a reliance upon the private automobile, upward mobility, the separation of the family into nuclear units, the widening division between work and leisure, and a tendency toward racial and economic exclusiveness." (return for page #)

Notes:

From: A Tale of Four Cities - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_p8-hzfHxM

Levine, Lawrence W. Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988.

Title: Highbrow / Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America

Author: Lawrence W. Levine

Year of Publication: 1988

Thesis:

What was popular culture in the early 19th century became high culture in the 20th (Shakespeare as case study) U.S. This puts into question the rigid boundaries around "high" and "low" culture, especially as Levine notes a great deal of pluralistic art culture toward the late 20th century. Constant shifting of the boundaries of cultural hierarchies, is what he finds. Attitudes of pushback from advocates of preserving an elevated culture, such as Allan Bloom, mirror arguments within the historical fields to maintain attention on elite and largely political histories vs. attention toward the democratizing (and therefore threatening) effects of studying history from the bottom up.

Time: 19th-20th centuries

Geography: U.S.

Organization:

Acknowledgments

Prologue

- Shakespeare was popular entertainment (now considered "high" culture) (4)

- Critiques erroneous critiques that denigrate popular audiences of Shakespeare for only understanding the crudeness (5)

- Shakespeare popular in U.S. 19th century - changes to high culture in 20th (6)

- Argues we should consider how fluid cultural demarcations are

One - Wiliam Shakespeare in America

Two - The Sacralization of Culture

Three - Order, Hierarchy, and Culture

Epilogue

- Pluralistic culture developing in the late 20th

- Also a counter-pluralistic angst - Artists rejecting shifts such as colorization of black & white films, etc. (249) Allan Bloom's Closing of the American Mind (249-50)

- Interesting intersection between classicists' idea of culture and the anti-presentist strain in history (quotes Bloom - "the good old Great Books approach, in which a liberal education means reading certain generally recognized classic texts, just read- ing them, letting them dictate what the questions are and the method of approaching them-not forcing them into categories we make up, not treating them as historical products, but trying to read them as their authors wished them to be read") (251)Notes

Index

Type:

Methods:

Sources:

Historiography:

Keywords:

highbrow

middlebrow

lowbrow

popular

mass

Themes:

Critiques:

Questions:

How do we describe the difference in the cultural pluralism where musicians share and relate to one another across genre, but the people who interpret their music do so by rigid classification?

Quotes:

On Americans retaining a colonial cultural mentality

"The idea that Americans, long after they declare their political independence, retained a colonial mentality in matters of culture and intellect is a shrewd perception that deserves serious consideration." (2)

On conflating culture and hierarchy / examining hierarchy perceived as attack on culture

"More troubling was the tendency to equate the notion of culture with that of hierarchy so that to examine closely the manner in which the hierarchy of culture was erected, or to challenge the reasoning behind the hierarchy's parameters, was translated al- most inevitably into an attack on the idea of culture itself. Cultural categories, which no one seemed able to define with any real precision, became fixed givens that one could be skeptical of only at the price of being accused of uncritical democratic rela- tivism." (7)

Central Argument - cultural demarcations always shifting

"One of the central arguments of this book is that because the primary categories of culture have been the products of ideologies which were always subject to modifications and transfor- mations., the perimeters of our cultural divisions have been permeable and shifting rather than fixed and immutable." (8)

Central Argument - share culture in the early 19th century

"in the nineteenth century, especially in the first half, Americans, in addition to whatever specific cultures they were part of, shared a public culture less hierarchically organized, less fragmented into rela- tively rigid adjectival boxes than their descendants were to experience a century later." (9)

On the arrogance of a elitist perception of culture:

"There is, finally, the same sense that culture is something created by the few for the few, threatened by the many, and imperiled by democracy; the conviction that culture cannot come from the young, the inexperienced, the untutored, the marginal; the belief that culture is finite and fixed, defined and measured, complex and difficult of access, recognizable only by those trained to recognize it, comprehensible only to those qualified to comprehend it" (252)

Ralph Ellison on the caricaturization of Black people - this is fantastic and reminds me of this poem I wrote (the idea was obviously around already):

More than two decades ago the novelist Ralph Ellison worried that the chance for empathy and identification with those of other backgrounds was being "blasted in the interest of specious political and philosophical conceits." Those writers and scholars who constructed "prefabricated Negroes," which they then superimposed upon the black community, Ellison maintained, were shocked and even indignant "when someone thrusts his head through the page and yells, 'Watch out there, Jack, there're people living under here.'" (256)

Notes:

Shakespeare festival makes an effort to contextualize his plays for a modern-day audience.

This reminds me of several discussions I've had - thinking Coos Bay on the hill & a more recent one on the violin vs. the fiddle.

Canaday, Margot. The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America. Politics and Society in Twentieth-Century America. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2009.

Drafted early on in this process - return to tidy this up.

Themes: State formation, LGBTQ, bureaucracy
Geographical Scope: U.S.
Chronological Scope: Early-to-mid 20th century
Thesis Summary:  Canaday argues that gay and gender nonconforming people were visible at least from the early 1900s, rendering null the popular notion that visibility after World War II triggered spontaneous government oppression. Her logic questions the possibility of such rapid mobilization. Instead, she argues that repression of gay and gender nonconforming people developed hand-in-hand with state formation. She describes a process by which the state becomes aware of behaviors, begins to surveil and police it, then develops policies to define and combat it. While she charts the state’s development of the identity of homosexuality from its roots in various classifications of deviance, her thesis becomes clear. While local policies governed behavior, federal policies targeted personhood. The areas of inquiry she approaches: immigration, the military, and welfare, are helpful tools for developing a multi-valent analysis. Finally, she succeeds in demonstrating how the state is central in the closeting of people by incentivizing (white) middle-class, heterosexual families.

Chapter Outlines:
Organized in an inverted fashion with two chapters per subject, one on nascent and next on specific forms of the development of "homosexual" as a category of person vs. action and how the state built those distinctions.
Part I - Nascent Policing
1. Immigration
It is clear from this chapter that the government was concerned about immigrant labor becoming a financial burden on the state, and the presumption was that a "degenerate" identity would prevent one from locating gainful employment. Describes a dichotomoy of perversion and dependency, not queer/straight. This was clearly a class-based isssue, as those who could afford it could often get out of suits; those who typically came before the court for so-called deviant behaviors were working-class and itinerant folk.
2. Military - Managing Sexual Stigma in the World War I-Era Military, 1917-1933
In order to maintain a certain image, the military blamed "perversion" on civilians. The military policed behavior, but it tended to focus only on sexual acts when they were violent.
3. Welfare
In this chapter, Canaday discusses an exploitative sexual economy within the hobo community. Camps designed for reform end up doing more to stigmatize this working-class subculture.
Part II - Explicit Regulation
4. Welfare
Social Security Act of 1933 offers aid to heteronormative families, but less and less to homeless people. Canaday finds there is a "mobility/settlement" versus an explicitly stated "queer/straight" binary.
5. Military
Discusses women's integration into the military and "female homosexuality" as the Cold War opened. Early on, the military was a viable alternative to marriage, offering independence. Yet, ambitious career women were policed and threatened. Similar to men in the previous chapter, the most obvious cases of "homosexuality" were set upon. In this chapter, the pattern Canaday has been describing of discovery, policing, and policy making seem to come to fruition.
6. Immigration
Discusses the power of naming. Sexuality considered resulting from early trauma and for at least three years it was in the DSM.
Sources/Methodology: Canaday examines the bureaucracy of the state, which allows for a multi-level analysis that does not focus solely on laws or the most powerful leaders. Congressional texts, medical texts, INS records, court records, newspapers form the bulk of sources.
Historiography: This would connect to Julio Capó Jr.'s work, which brought the development of Florida's gay community, and specifically its immigrant gay population back to the late 19th century.
Keywords: bureacratization of homosexuality
The state - Defined by its practices
Citizenship - A legal distinction, but also informed by process and performance
Homosexuality - defined by overlapping and increasing discourses over time
Degeneracy - early cited forms of homosexual behavior dealt with on a local basis.

Capó, Julio. Welcome to Fairyland: Queer Miami Before 1940. The University of North Carolina Press, 2017.

Notes taken early on in the process - return to clean this up.

Themes: LGBTQ, Borderlands, Frontier

Geographical Scope: Greater Miami, Spanish Caribbean (distinguishes Miami from traditional studies of the urban U.S. South as well as from mainstream borderlands due to its international framework. Thus, it complicates "inward-looking" urban studies - see p.7)

Chronological Scope: 1890s-1940s (useful because it begins with territorial expansion and empire and ends with economic diversification/expansion that negatively impacts the enclave economy)

Summary of Thesis:

Capó emphasizes a transnational, intersectional+ (includes, for example, age and “(dis)ability”) approach to developing histories of gay relations in Greater Miami. Ultimately displacing the dominant “Cuban exceptionalist” narrative by developing the story of immigrant Bahamanians who played a central role in its development through both their labor as well as their conceptualization of themselves. Using court records that develop narratives in concert with traditional tools of social histories, Capó depicts a “Fairyland” that straddled a “resort” appeal with an enclave of transgressive behavior. This required coordination with boosters who promoted “slumming” in a “demimonde.”

Chapter Outlines:

1. Queer Frontier

   1. Vice as an integral piece of urban design—Fairyland as a transgressive pleasure enclave

2. Bahamanians and Miami's Queer Erotic

   1. “Bachelor societies” in Miami skew sexual demographics in Bahamas, making room for less “traditional” family structures

3. Making Fairyland Real

   1. Racialized tourism

4. Miami as Stage

   1. Marketing of Fairyland by boosters

5. Passing through Miami's Queer World

   1. Maps the movements of queer men through the city through their criminalization. 

6. Women and the Making of Miami's Heterosexual Culture

   1. “Normative” heterosexual society created through differentiation from queer behavior.

7. Queers during and after Prohibition

   1. Commodification of queerness

8. Epilogue

   1. Economic diversification and crackdown on vice

Methods:

- Transnational approach

- Novel lens by focusing on the Bahamanian immigrant laborers (vs. "Cuban Exceptionalism")

- Intersectional approach that includes "ethnicity, age, and (dis)ability" (5)

- "Queer" as analytic tool

- "Community Study" approach

Sources:

- *"Queer" as method and archive argues that these sources form that body of resources. "Queering" the archive, then is the amplified voice the silenced voices receive in Capo's book (19)

- Mental hospital records

- Court cases

- Census records

- Municipal records

- Advertisements

- Newspaper articles

- Published papers

- Songs

- Correspondence

- Immigration logs

Historiographical Connections:

- Pushes back on the concept of "Cuban Exceptionalism" viz. Miami

- References below drawn to deal with a wide battery of transnational, urban, economic, labor, borderlands, tourism and "slumming," and ethnicity, while Capo's work centers on the intersectional + lenses he mentions. Limited bibliography:

- Wade, The Urban Frontier

- Cronon, Nature's Metropolis

- Goag, Re-dressing

- Sears, Arresting Dress

- Duany, Blurred Borders

- Sheller, "Mobility History"

- Connolly, A World More Concrete

- Rose, The Struggle for Black Freedom

Keywords: 

Transnational Colonial State

Borderland

Frontier

Resort Town

Queer

Promoter

Booster (includes speculators and paid advertisers)

Cott, Nancy F. The Grounding of Modern Feminism. Yale University Press, 1987.

Notes taken early in the process:

Nancy Cott, working in the period between 1910 and 1930, pushes back on the idea that feminist movement collapsed with the 19th Amendment in 1920. Instead, she traces the genesis of the word "feminism" and how the "woman movement" was supplanted by the use of the term feminism, which had decidedly transcended suffragism. Cott's work makes an important contribution to the scholarship and popular understanding of the term by grounding it in three pieces: sex equality (defined in opposition to sex hierarchy), the sexual construction of gender, and gender group identity based in biological and social groupings. Cott's beautifully constructed definition of feminism rooted in paradox (women and men can be equal and unequal in the same breath) finds its expression in this 20-year period. In the "woman" movement, she argues, the more rights won, the more unity was conceded. One example is how women entered typically male-held jobs but had to sacrifice their group identity as a result (she uses career bureaucrats as an example).  As women in different political and class realms fought over implementation--equal rights or protected rights, elite-focused groups fractured from more politically diverse groups.

- Feminism = opposition to gender hierarchy, socially constructed gender roles, + group gender identity

- gender solidarity breaks apart more strongly forcing women's dependence on men & marriage. Too many groups with political agendas that divide them

- Key issues is elitist NWP - seem atomized groups working aligning together vs. advocates for organic links between women along religion, tradition, etc. / 

- Devaluing of female friendships

- Labor - give up group identity for jobs in male-dominated fields (bureaucrats, for example). *Interestingly, this would be like Helen MacMurchy & others who centered their bureacratic power within their womanhood, no?

- Time 20s-30s

- Keywords: National Women's Party, Equal Rights Amendment, Feminism (term rises in 1910), Women's Joint Congressional Committee

- Mothers and Infants Protection Act

- Nat. Social Welfare Law

- Child Labor Amendment

- Women only vs. equal protection is a dividing issue

- Entering labor force is another (here is a place where one could simply say--women have always been in the labor force and there are only periods where they are disappeared from it - like a Chauncey sort of argument)

- Efforts for world peace

- 19th Amendment is a strong point in existing "river of resistance" type argument

- Feminism grounded in paradox - ex: women equal & different to men / unique pairings with racism, etc. (it's the neutral language everyone loves) / individualism vs. gender identity / personal opportunity vs. group advancement

- Critiques the declension narrative (post-1920 losses)

- Critique of it - heavy focus on elite women

Chapters:

THE BIRTH OF FEMINISM

THE WOMAN'S PARTY

 VOLUNTARIST POLITICS

EQUAL RIGHTS AND ECONOMIC ROLES 

MODERN TIMES 6 THE ENEMY OF SOCIETY 

PROFESSIONALISM AND FEMINISM

IN VOLUNTARY CONFLICT

Conclusion 269 

Stuff to look up:

- Antinomian

Hurley, Andrew. Environmental Inequalities: Class, Race, and Industrial Pollution in Gary, Indiana, 1945-1980. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1995.

Submitted for coursework, spring, 2019

Andrew Hurley, a twentieth-century labor historian, effectively marshals an interdisciplinary approach, bridging environmental, civil rights, and labor and urban history to study the company town of Gary, Indiana, home to U.S. Steel and its subsidiaries. Using this multi-pronged approach, Professor Hurley examines the Gary in the post-war era from 1945-1980. Using public libraries, local, regional, and union archives, union archives, Hurley assembles his narrative with a broad swath of primary sources, including newspapers, census data, U.S. Government studies and reports, union grievance files, and personal interviews with former steel workers, labor leaders, executives, city planners and community members. Hurley argues that “divisions of race and class were instrumental in creating patterns of environmental inequality” (xiv).  White residents and factory owners of Gary employed numerous strategies to perpetuate inequality, chief among them control over jobs and space. In the 1940s, however, according to Hurley, everyone initially subordinated their desire for clean water and air for economic security in the form of employment. Ironically, the large concentration of Blacks relegated to the midtown area in the mid-20th century “kept them from breathing the city’s very worst air” (33-34). This quickly changed, however, as whites were convinced by blockbusting real-estate agents in many cases to move as Blacks sought to suburbanize, as well.

Seven hybrid chapters organized thematically and chronologically provide the framework for Environmental Inequalities. The book opens with a toxic spill of hydrochloric acid in 1987 to set the stage. Chapter 2 explores how local government, rather than challenge firms such as U.S. Steel as it pumped effluents into Lake Michigan, sought ways to filter drinking water as it was pumped out of the Lake and to residential areas for fear that environmentalism and economic progress stood at odds with one another. What Hurley’s description of 1940s Gary lacks in Dickensian rhetorical flourishes, it makes up for in empirical weight, which leaves the reader with an impression of Coketown from Hard Times, sans fiction and social commentary. Chapters 3 through 5 develop the “contradiction between social objectives and environmental practices” (45) and explore environmentalism from “middle-class,” “working-class,” and “African American” frameworks, respectively. By “middle-class” it becomes evident quickly that Hurley struggles not to conflate whiteness with this term, showing how U.S. Steel’s prosperity, the New Deal, and urban “renewal” programs fueled a white migration to suburban areas, and along with it, a desire for the bucolic scenes advertised to them as consumers. This brought about initiatives for cleaner beaches and open spaces, which whites fought for within a context of political pluralism but also against people they didn’t want, such as African Americans, which is addressed later. Hurley’s somewhat Maslowian lens characterizes a more heterogenous group of working-class employees with a view of environmentalism more immediately, but not exclusively, tied to working conditions. Wildcat strikes undermined the cozy relationship between union leadership and factory bosses, which helped reach certain gains in conditions where both sets of leaders ignored important legislation such as OSHA. (88) Other strategies, such as preventing heat exhaustion by negotiating for larger work crews to work in smaller shifts around coke ovens instead of expensive remodeling was one of the ways Hurley points out workers were able to successfully negotiate. (82) Hurley identifies the Calumet Community Congress, an organization developed by steelworker Jim Wright, the son of a Mexican immigrant, as a hopeful organization precisely because it could gather a wider coalition based not on ethnic lines but around issues of environment. (104). African Americans in chapter 5 are championed by Curtis Strong, a lion in union leadership and an activist whom Hurley interviewed personally. Prior to the apex of the Civil Rights Movement in the late 1960s, African Americans used “wildcat strikes, union politics, and legal battles” both within and without of the factory setting. Blacks also organized boycotts for shops that wouldn’t allow them to patronize, laws to protect against predatory housing, and for open spaces such as areas on the beaches (Marquette Park), a taking of freedom that whites could not abide, leading to violence, dissent within more established Black organizations, and some temporary concessions for physical protection. (167) African American Mayor Hatcher’s election in 1967 brought with it new hopes for Blacks and temporarily sustained a multi-racial, multi-class initiative to improve coke oven emissions, but ultimately Nixon Administration priorities, the Carter Administration’s support for jobs over environment, and a recalcitrant U.S. Steel broke the tender coalition. Sand mining, overland waste dumps, and pumping waste deep below the surface of Lake Michigan end the final chapter, demonstrating how nominal gains in air pollution were converted bad losses in land, and particularly in areas where people of color and working-class neighborhoods shared space (162).

Hurley’s prose is so engaging and fluid that a casual reader might wonder if academic rigor had been eschewed for an emphasis on style, but Hurley combines what few authors can: concision, precision, and academic rigor. While it is considered unproductive to critique a book for missing a point it did not intend to make, it is this reviewer’s opinion that the space Hurley made available through brevity leaves room to develop a sustained critique of gender as a factor in the changes that occurred during the 35 years of Hurley’s study. A desire for brevity also likely inspired statements such as the following: “The Native American Potawatomis who had roamed the Lake Michigan shores until the 1830s moved westward when white pioneers pushed through the area, leaving behind a landscape bereft of humans” (37). Readers might wonder if there is more to that story, or the story of “Mexicans” that are mentioned sporadically but never gain a foothold in the narrative. The only other minor criticism is that without reading carefully, some of Hurley’s arguments can be misunderstood. On the one hand, he posits that race largely determined the exposure to pollutants within the factory, with African Americans (and Mexicans) subjected to the least healthy jobs, but that outside the factory the pollutants were more evenly distributed in the air supply and water in the 1940s (31, 37, 114). Certainly the distribution was more even in that all people were exposed to poor air quality, but his evidence develops a very similar thesis outside of the factory as well, with social factors controlling access to cleaner air and water.

Hurley’s approach allows Environmental Inequalities to dialogue with legal works on residential segregation such as Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law (2017) as well as scholarship in environmental history, such as Kate Brown’s Plutopia (2013) in which workers in Hanford nuclear site and Osersk, Russia, also enjoy a measure of economic security while perpetuating racist exclusionary tactics in exchange for subordinating their civic rights. Environmental Inequalities reads like a trade paperback supported with a solid chassis of primary evidence, and therefore it would be appropriate for a upper-level high school or undergraduate course, deepening the connection between environmental studies, labor history, and race and class studies.

Sklaroff, Lauren Rebecca. Black Culture and the New Deal: The Quest for Civil Rights in the Roosevelt Era. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009.

Martin Summers has clearly plunged headlong into the tangled thicket of gender and masculinity studies more than once and returned from it with a theoretically robust and unscathed introduction to Manliness and Its Discontents: The Black Middle Class and the Transformation of Masculinity, 1900-1930. A social history of the first order, Summers develops narratives of several different groups: The Prince Hall Freemasons and its women’s auxiliary organization, Order of the Eastern Star (EOS), and finally the UNIA. The second half of the book is concerned with cultural shifts in the Harlem Renaissance and in post-WWI Black Campuses. According to Summers, this shift “is about the transition in definitions of manhood—from production to consumption, from character and respectability to the body and personality, from manliness to masculinity—and how that transition played out within the black middle class intergenerationally” (19).

Summers mines collections such as the Marcus Garvey Memorial Collection at Fisk University, a variety of rare collections at Yale and Howard Universities, the New York Public Library and Schomburg Center for Research in Back Culture and the W.E.B. DuBois papers in New Jersey, along with a fair collection of newspapers and additional primary sources. The book’s strength lies in its first three chapters, in which Summers juxtaposes the Prince Hall Freemasons, UNIA Garveyites, and the Women’s auxiliary group, Order of the Eastern Star. Manliness and Its Discontents does a remarkable job of using letters between officiants in African American institutions to suss out ways in which black males “performed a gendered subjectivity” during this period, and Summers does so by using somewhat of a transnational approach, noting how Caribbean immigrants were prominent along with migrations out of the U.S. South.

Summers’ welcome chapter on the OES illustrates how African American members “attempted to introduce domestic efficiency, temperance, and middle-class standards of morality into the lives of working-class and poor blacks.” In his discussion of both men and women, Summers also attempts to locate the fault lines of power where the dominant “hegemonic model of manhood” (and by extension, womanhood), intersected with African Americans’ desire to own and develop their own standards of gender. What emerges is a study in nuance, in which African American men were “not merely screens on which white men projected their anxieties,” nor was their identity simply an expression of resistance.

Whether the book succeeds in the latter chapters is up for debate. Concentration on prominent African Americans in the Harlem Renaissance leaves the book open for critique, whether or not the reader agrees with the premise that the African American culture was shifting away from a model of respectability to one of consumption. Barring the question of sufficient representation, it is clear that Summers argues effectively that at least overlapping shifts were occurring from what Kevin Gaines dubs a “preoccupation with bourgeois status” to something decidedly different. This book would make an excellent addition to a gendered study of African American institutions in the early twentieth century.

Sklaroff, Lauren Rebecca. Black Culture and the New Deal: The Quest for Civil Rights in the Roosevelt Era. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009.

Submitted for coursework, spring 2019

Sklaroff locates significant roots of the Long Civil Rights Movement within Black cultural development that thrived as a result of the Federal Works Progress Administration programs.  Winding her way through the political bureaucracy of New Deal and Cold War politics, Sklaroff presents a more nuanced framework within the age-old, Manichean struggle between agency and structure, widening the lens on Black and white leaders during the period. Using an impressive array of theatrical and other manuscripts within the Federal Works Progress Administration, Presidential papers, and a formidable index of periodicals, journals, and newspapers, Black Culture and the New Deal aims to demonstrate ways in which Black and white administrators, playwrights, and performers set the stage for successive movements as they negotiated for Black autonomy and equality.

According to some authors, Black Culture and the New Deal fits squarely within cultural histories that exemplify “quotidian forms of politics” (Glickman, 233). In six chapters, Sklaroff invites her readers on a journey that begins as FDR’s administration courted Black votes while eschewing Black equality. She develops the Federal Theater Project and the Federal Writers’ Project, demonstrating how not only did they help African Americans survive, but how many writers and playwrights (among them Richard Wright) saw the role of culture as emancipatory. The subsequent chapters analyze the phenomenon of Joe Louis, variety shows for servicemen, and how Black people interacted with the screen. In each case, Sklaroff describes African Americans stuck in dual roles meant to pacify Blacks while they also symbolized powerful forms of inspiration and autonomy. Joe Louis, for example, fought exhibition fights, yet he also was a Black man who beat up white men; in doing so he was able to transcend the role he had been given as many Black people internalized the pride he gave permission to take.

That the Roosevelt administration eagerly sought Black votes while hoping to assuage powerful Southern Democrats is no surprise. However, Sklaroff’s selective framing only depicts African Americans taking assertive steps within the context of ambivalent white benevolence. Readers are left to wonder how African Americans simultaneously equipped to exert creative and powerful influence within institutions like the WPA operated outside of these circumscribed contexts.

One of Sklaroff’s most fascinating use of sources is Sterling Brown’s unpublished history entitled “Portrait of the Negro in America.” Brown was significant not only as an African American historian but also as a national editor in the Federal Writer’s Project. Sklaroff’s use of this unpublished document shows how what does not reach the public can also contribute to significant change. Nevertheless, Sklaroff’s interpretations of the sources do not always consult the well-known scholarship of her time. Certainly, nobody would fault the author for collecting only what was germane to her study in the NAACP papers, yet works other works with more extensive attention could have, such as Carol Anderson’s Eyes off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944-1955 (2003). Anderson could add a third and necessary dimension to her flattened read of Eleanor Roosevelt and Walter White. Sklaroff depicts Roosevelt as an initially reluctant but later uncompromising soldier for Civil Rights. In fact, Sklaroff opens her book with Eleanor’s lamentation about her husband’s political impotence from her 1949 memoir, This I Remember, a book she penned just as she and Walter White undermined the struggle for Black equality due to the very same political vulnerability she had complained her husband had been compromised by.

Black Culture and the New Deal would be suitable for undergraduate courses to illustrate the Long Civil Rights Movement within a cultural and political context. It also contains fascinating descriptions of plays that may have fallen out of view that would be excellent primary source material. As many of these plays were rejected or edited, these sources, and so does Sklaroff, paint a much more nuanced picture of the many different ways African Americans creatively reacted to their surroundings.

Molina, Natalia. How Race Is Made in America: Immigration, Citizenship, and the Historical Power of Racial Scripts. University of California Press, 2013.

Natalia Molina argues that public health discourse contributed to racializing Chinese, Japanese, and Mexican laborers in Los Angeles County in the late 1800s to the mid 1900s. For these groups, a multitude of urban issues, but especially inadequate access to clean water, sewage processing, garbage pickup, and health care contributed to morbidity and disproportionately high infant mortality rates. When epidemics inevitably spread, all attention was paid to immigrant spaces, effectively rendering invisible more widespread issues and laying the blame on biological or cultural factors, whichever was the more convenient explanation. Public health discourse served the dual purposes of assigning blame, binding negative associations with immigrants, and allowing public officials to extend the reach of the State well beyond the clinic door. Chinese people fought attempts to destroy their laundry and vegetable purveying industries by appealing to a Chinese business conglomerate to petition the mayor; at the same time Japanese farmers were said to be biologically predisposed to stooping, their “fecundity” was also billed as a threat. While Mexican workers were initially designated “white,” this changed as the Great Depression put pressure on the local economy. Forced deportations of Mexicans under the guise of their being a public health threat and their return in the 40s under the Bracero program highlight how public health discourse responded to economic expediency. Molina’s regional approach to racialization in public health discourse on Chinese, Japanese, and Mexican laborers illustrates how racial fault lines in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Los Angeles transcended established black-white binaries.

Williams, Eric. Capitalism & Slavery. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1944.

Written for coursework, June, 2019

Of this classic economic critique of the British Slave Trade it is often said that the Trade became less profitable than free labor, which was the real motive behind the abolition of the trade. This is perhaps Williams’ argument too deeply distilled. He argues convincingly that to fully understand the traffic and its disruption, a narrow focus on the abolitionists would not do. In fact, his most interesting chapter widens the aperture on this particular class, calling out individuals by name whose wealth was surely tied up with the continuance of slavery even after the British had abolished the trade. He found instead historical patterns among capitalists that seemed capricious and hypocritical, but that were more likely than not rooted in their economic interests. “Slave traders,” he argued, “were among the leading humanitarians of their day,” and capitalists “had first encouraged West-Indian slavery and then helped to destroy it. When British capitalism depended on the West Indies, they ignored slavery or defended it. When British capitalism found the West Indian monopoly a nuisance, they destroyed West Indian slavery as the first step in the destruction of West Indian monopoly” (45, 169). It was not so much a problem with slavery but a problem with monopoly. Decades later, Seymour Drescher would champion the successful role abolitionists played in removing slavery from the metropole from the European states (Abolition: A History of Slavery and Anti-Slavery, 2008). Williams would have bristled at this claim and sought to establish how slave labor capitalized the Industrial Revolution, which in turn led to its selective abolition, landing his work squarely in a debate over the profitability of the Slave Trade.

Williams’ most captivating use of sources draws on the direct quotes from leading abolitionists, many of whom make it clear they have little interest in halting the institution of slavery, only the traffic contrary to their economic interests. Williams shows at best that some abolitionists presumed slavery would fade away on its own after the transatlantic ban, a thesis he hotly contradicts. Williams exposes their empty public rhetoric as impractical for enslaved people. Other sources include a host of libraries and their special collections, museums, and a parliamentary papers, including debates and correspondence. There is a noticeable absence of documents that would suggest a robust accounting for the numbers.

Capitalism and Slavery unfolds in twelve brief chapters, beginning with the development of the slave trade and ending with an attempt to recover the position of slaves within the dialogue. Opening with the slave trade allows Williams to describe the racialization of slavery, which was not a smooth journey from indigenous to African labor, but from Indigenous to white labor. This is an apt approach for an exploration of the arbitrariness in the search for cheap labor. The book develops several major trends: the shift from protectionist and monopolistic practices to free trade, the transition from sugar-based wealth to cotton-based wealth and the coterminous need for more and more production of raw materials to refine in Britain’s burgeoning factories.

Despite the obvious critiques of Capitalism and Slavery, it might be more aptly titled: Capitalism, British Slavery, the Industrial Revolution, and Abolition as it is his main focus.

Brown, Kate. Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Disasters. New York and London: Oxford University Press, 2013.

Review written for coursework in 2017.

In the mid-1940s, plutonium plants in Hanford, Washington, and Ozersk, USSR, independently leached double the toxic waste into neighboring environments than the 1986 Chernobyl meltdown in the Ukraine. Whereas many environmental histories have focused on the tail-end of nuclear disasters, namely bomb explosions and their impacts on bombing victims, Kate Brown’s unique transnational history channels the comparative experiences of ordinary people working in day-to-day operations. By privileging declassified documents and oral interviews, she teases out a tense and intimate narrative.

Just as U.S. plant managers initially struggled to keep rowdy military personnel occupied in remote locations, so did Russians, who experimented with gulag prison labor. In seeking a resolution to the labor issue, Plutopia argues that in the U.S., plant designers and managers engineered a racially-segregated, carceral society centered around a newly-formed, white suburban “monoclass” who would happily exchange civic freedoms for financial security. Russian class divisions in the Urals were based more on national and regional differences than “race,” but the expensive, taxpayer-funded, corporate-sponsored socialist experiments in Richfield—the community just south of Hanford—were the model Russians emulated just after the U.S. annihilated the Nagasaki and Hiroshima. The irony was that both countries backed a state-subsidized consumer society as a form of labor pacification.

In the foreground, Brown offers a well-researched, thematic and chronological history of rushed plutonium manufacture in both Hanford and Ozersk, dividing the book into four parts that compare labor concerns and the design period (parts one and two), a series of disasters, and the dual efforts to improve access to and contain information on the environmental and medical ramifications of nuclear waste entering the ground, water, and air. The very brief chapters in the form of vignettes almost come at the expense of maintaining the narrative thread, especially where it jumps back and forth between Russia and the U.S., but the book overall is very well written and suitable for both the undergraduate and graduate level.

Plutopia would be valuable to students of race and class, environmentalists and environmental historians, ethnohistorians, labor historians, and historians of the Cold War; however, Brown’s signature gift is to the oral history profession. Brown invites the reader on a deeply personal journey where just at the right moments, she includes herself in the narrative, alerting the reader that she is both participant-observer and researcher-activist.

Cohen, Lizabeth. A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America. 1st ed. New York: Knopf : Distributed by Random House, 2003.

Title: A Consumers' Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America

Author: Lizabeth Cohen

Year of Publication: 2003

Thesis:

Argues that the roots of the Consumer Republic, a term she coined to describe the post-WWII shift to mass consumerism as a solution to right the U.S. economy involving the cooperation of a cadre of government and private entities, can be found in the Progressive Era and again in the 1930s as FDR's responses to the Great Depression emphasized government action to spur the economy. This fusing of consumers and citizens would, in theory, also provide a socially harmonious, egalitarian society full of prosperity. She argues, particularly for African Americans, this was an unfulfilled promise, and locates the GI Bill, discrimination in purchasing single-familiy homes, white flight into from cities into segregated suburbs that relied on property and local taxes to fund services, as main contributor to that inequity. 

Time: 1930-1970s, then forward to 2000s

Geography: U.S., D.C., but mostly NJ

Organization:

Cover

About the Author

Other Books by This Author

Title Page

Dedication

Prologue

- Author's personal history of jumping from suburban house to house in increasingly upward mobility and increasing property taxes in order to provide for local services.

- Notes two African American families who purchased homes on the outskirts, development reaching them (this is interesting - same deal in South Palo Alto)

- She worked in Shirley Chisholm's campaign - pretty neat!

- See this sectioon for historiography, arguments, chapter summaries.

Part One.

THE ORIGINS OF THE POSTWAR CONSUMERS' REPUBLIC

1. DEPRESSION: Rise of the Citizen Consumer

2. WAR: Citizen Consumers Do Battle on the Home Front

- See here for how white women managed white, middle-class homes and how African Americans pushed against exclusion from the ability to consume equally.

Part Two.

THE BIRTH OF THE CONSUMERS' REPUBLIC

This is the ideology she believes won out: "entrusted the private mass consumption marketplace, supported by government resources, with delivering not only economic prosperity but also loftier social and political ambitions for a more equal, free, and democratic nation." (return for page #)

3. RECONVERSION: The Emergence of the Consumers' Republic

- GI Bill & collective bargaining

4. REBELLION: Forcing Open the Doors of Public Accommodations

- Focus on African Americans

Part Three.

THE LANDSCAPE OF MASS CONSUMPTION

5. RESIDENCE: Inequality in Mass Suburbia

- Suburbanization patterns & inequality

- Shopping centers stress family-owned businesses and displace geography.

- State legal cases affecting freedom of speech on private property

6. COMMERCE: Reconfiguring Community Marketplaces

Part Four.

THE POLITICAL CULTURE OF MASS CONSUMPTION

7. CULTURE: Segmenting the Mass

- Advertising segmentation - different products for different market segments or same products advertised differently. Political campaigns utilize this strategy as well.

8. POLITICS: Purchasers Politicized

Epilogue

Notes

Acknowledgments

Copyright

Type:

Methods:

Sources: Material culture, legal cases

Historiography:

In the prologue, she looks at historiographical and historical shifts at the same time, comparing her own book, where she found some cause to celebrate a very tentative class solidarity in the CIO in Chicago, to Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class, who found elite taste governing burgeoning middle-class desire, to Simon Patten, who notes the satisfaction immigrant communities derived from purchasing power. Proceeds through a litany of critiques of mass consumption during the post-WWII period.

Keywords:

Citizen Consumer - New Deal/WWI period - consumers and gov't as allies - consume to preserve democracy and rights of consumers

Purchaser Consumer - Same period, but stresses self-interest.

Purchaser as Citizen - Serving oneself as serving the national interest

Consumerized Republic - where people come to expect the gov't to serve them personally over whatever they believe is the "common good."

First-wave consumer movement - Progressive Era

Third-wave consumer movement - 1960s-70s - Republic's promises failing, even though the consumer still considered important

Themes:

Critiques:

Questions:

Quotes:

Notes:

https://www.c-span.org/video/?161424-1/a-consumers-republic-politics-mass-consumption

Very well-written and informative prologue.

U.S. Hist - Brief Comments on the Atlantic World

I decided to juxtapose Philip Curtin's Atlantic Slave Trade (1969) against Bernard Bailyn's Voyagers to the West. (1986) because they highlight ways historians used quantitative data to begin telling a story of how the the Americas, and especially the United States, were shaped. Obviously, the way this is set up, this is really a European-American Atlantic World, so it could use development by including literature on French, Dutch, Spanish, and Portuguese settlers.

Beginning with a base of knowledge of the land and peoples occupying it prior to European settlement is also important. For the moment, I will be relying on textbooks that offer a wide reach as well as the books on Native Americans in this section. This is a key area of work I need to do, as well.

The inclusion of a "slavery" category within the Colonial Period is troublesome. While all of the categories reveal some sort of power differential, where enslaved people are concerned within the context of a U.S. History course can give the impression that slavery was the only thing that African people's forced to cross the Atlantic experienced. Eventually, I would like to meld all three of my lists together to get a better sense of how all of these pieces fit together.

In Bailyn's case, he uses census data to disaggregate different socio-economic groups from England on the eve of the American Revolution. This is a story led by economics and push and pull factors, with largely single and young craftsmen moving from the South of England and responding to massive recruitment to the middle colonies, while intact farming families from the North, fleeing economic insecurity, moved to the frontier. Bailyn's invocation of the dissonance between "civilization" and "savagery" is repeated in many places and in many ways. While I would not use this book as a model for how to theorize modernity, it is helpful for asking oneself questions about gender, class, and specifically for getting rid of the idea of the British as monolith.

Philip Curtin synthesizes decades worth of secondary literature on the importation of enslaved people, arriving at an estimate very near what the most recent data has shown (http://www.slavetrade.org/). In emphasizing the huge quantities of people who were forced to Brazil, he encourages a reckoning with slavery as a worldwide and multi-national institution, while also asking researchers to think more deeply about what in time and place makes that form of enslavement significant. Interestingly, Curtin's work was printed long before Ira Berlin's field-changing article on the necessity of looking at time and space when studying the history of slavery (1986). Reactions to Curtin's work have been mixed, evincing a desire for scholars of slavery to do more than account for numbers, but to be held accountable to their historical subjects. A more recent trend in using quantitative data has been led by scholars such as Calvin Schermerhorn, Daina Ramey Berry, and Edward Baptist.

One book I would probably add to this group as far as Atlantic history goes is John Tutino's Making a New World: Founding Capitalism in the Bajío and Spanish North America (2011). If we consider accumulation of capital a necessary prerequisite to Capitalism, then Tutino finds it in Mexican silver mines, enriching Spain and providing Chinese currency with stable specie.

Cohen, Lizabeth. Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939. Cambridge [England] ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

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

Author: Lizabeth Cohen

Year of Publication: 1990

Thesis:

Shift from dependence on ethnic affiliation/employer (welfare capitalism) to national welfare / national labor unions & federal gov't. Chicago is a good case study for what is going on in the rest of the U.S. Segregation by race/ethnicity / lack of communication / pitting against one another by employers - explains the strikes not working as effectively. Big shift is from welfare capitalism (employer sponsored) to moral capitalism (nationally sponsored) that admits profit but attempts to ensure spoils of labor are more evenly distributed. The Great Depression fuels activism & shapes The New Deal, which is in many ways a way of delivering moral capitalism unevenly.

Time: 1919-1939

Geography: Chicago

Organization:

List of Illustrations

List of Tables

Acknowledgments

Preface to the Second Edition

Introduction

- In the early 20th century, unions struggled to gain ground as they tended to organize behind ethnicity, geography, and job type. Employers were successful at pitting ethnicities against one another, with African Americans used as strike breakers.

1. Living and Working in Chicago in 1919

2. Ethnicity in the New Era

- Older immigrants still much involved in culture; younger generation exposed to much more. Ethnic communities took on mutual aid, remittances, etc. Shifts from narrower associations to ethnic consolidation in order to deal with new conditions (Affiliation with Italian town/region cedes to Italians in general)

3. Encountering Mass Culture

- Not an immediate takeover by mass culture - comes filtered in slowly through ethnic lenses. More locally controlled, communal experiences (think: radio, movies, etc.)

- However, argues that African American experiences were different. Ex: local store, theater, etc. often owned by non-African Americans.

4. Contested Loyalty at the Workplace

- Welfare capitalism - worker influence, stock options, insurance benefits, social activities. This is a reaction to strikes of early 20s. Sets up expectations, even though companies don't follow through. As production ramps up, ethnic solidarity increases (English as a spoken language begins to increase ability to work in intra-ethnic ways)

5. Adrift in the Great Depression

- Insecurity from Depression renders mutual aid associations broke, and the companies' help is scaled back. Shift to looking to gov't & national union, despite mistrust.

6. Workers Make a New Deal

- People not ashamed to be asking for & receiving help.

- Gov't campaigns to make people feel ashamed.

- Most unionists not Communists - they see moral capitalism

7. Becoming a Union Rank and File

8. Workers' Common Ground

Conclusion

Notes

Index

Gender:

- Male-oriented unios - males seen as heads of household & therefore union voice.

- Union women sidelined into gendered roles (this is b/c men with higher paying jobs lose them quicker - women & children make it up - return to power is a loss for women in some ways

Type:

Social/political history, bottom-up style. Local focus allows for comparison between working at different types of work (steel, packinghouses) and within industry (one steel manufacturer to another)

Methods:

Chronological

Sources:

Newspapers, company communications, MA theses, WPA papers

Historiography:

Very scarce social histories in 20th century; this is a new contribution in that respect.

Keywords:

Welfare capitalism

Moral capitalism (union/workers develop this non-communistic concept out of expectations from welfare capitalism. Instead - Capitalism is considered fine as long as benefits are being distributed equitably)

Themes:

Critiques:

Questions:

Quotes:

Notes:

https://newbooksnetwork.com/lizabeth-cohen-making-a-new-deal-industrial-workers-in-chicago-1919-1939-cambridge-up-2014

Started out as a museum person. Went to UC Berkeley to refine skills. This work turned into her book.

Cott, Nancy F. The Bonds of Womanhood: “Woman’s Sphere” in New England, 1780-1835. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977.

Title: The Bonds of Womanhood: "Woman's Sphere" in New England, 1780-1835

Author: Nancy Cott

Year of Publication: 1977

Thesis:

The "bonds of womanhood" Sarah Grimke refers to serve a dual purpose: to explain how white, middle-class, married, Protestant women in 19th-century New England saw themselves as bound to marriage contracts and bonded to one another in "sisterhood." These connections developed through their common experiences as white, middle-class, married, Protestant women, especially in the sociality they had in the Church, as parents, and in initiatives to reform women. Cott concedes neither that they were completely dominated by coverture nor did they enjoy unchecked authority through their domesticity, relatively recent literacy, religion, or sense of sisterhood. Instead, she makes best use of a short book to explore these tensions governing domestic and male-centered public spheres where these women saw themselves as different but equal. Despite their anxieties about acquiring suitable white, middle-class, Protestant, male partners, white, middle-class, Protestant women exchanged, at least in principle if not in substance, their subordinated identity by law, dominion over money, public affairs, and right to rationality, for authority in "matters of the heart."

Time: 1780-1835

Geography: New England (Mainly MA & CT, but also RI, VT, NH, and ME)

Organization:

Acknowledgments

Introduction

- This is rich - just read again.

1. Work

- Opens w/Martha ballard as emblematic of middle-class, white women in Early America (19)

- Defines work as related to sexual identity (20)

- Women's work is devalued

- Legal conditions of marriage proscribe women's motivation for economic ambition? (21) <--?

- Men seen as the engine of economic activity (21)

- Interdependance in the home dilutes the importance of women's work (and therefore the loss of ambition?) (22)

- The idea of the household dominates even after the economy shifts (23)

- Describes market-oriented to manufacturing shift as:

- agriculture, transportation, *specialization, *division of labor, & industry consolidation & concentration (24,25)

- Time period can predict the type of work people did

- Ex: late 18th century, women working at home & making products (I have a question about servants in this whole book)

- Unmarried women produce & also serve in others homes (28)

- Domestic "help" is essential (28)

- Unmarried women teach, too (30-31) (for some, more of a duty than essential, 32)

- Teaching shifts to a necessity as "market-oriented" production takes place (32)

- Religion and teaching go hand-in-hand

- Teaching considered a respectable profession

2. Domesticity

- Much literary/non-fiction instruction for women

- Home as the refuge and sanctuary ("there is no place like home" is coined during this period")

- Bourgeois respectability/virtue vs. aristocratic frivolity

- "Woman" and "home" become synonymous and opposite from public life (ergo, a woman can refer to her attention to the domestic realm as "retirement")

- In the home is "anti-pecuniary" vs. outside, which is pecuniary

- Idea was that women could use their "moral power" to train children and soothe their husband's anxieties and frustrations about the social/economic changes happening outside the home (she is therefore, under this rubric, contributing to the progress of the nation)

- Also, women didn't have legal right to property/earnings

- Women's "unselfishness" and "disinterestedness" seem to explain "bourgeois virtue" really well, in that they are both moral and economic roles of care and staying out of public (men's) lives.

- Women writers become forefront promoting this ideology

- Ex: school girls should pursue purity, affiliation (treating others well, etc.) vs. boys' education - education, success, etc.

- Difficult to manage a family / household - women describing it as stressful and blaming themselves (see: women's diaries she references in chapter)

- Choosing men was a precarious affair (bond is not easy to break) & she demonstrates how in women's letters from one to another their concerns and anxieties

- Mothers considered the educators and caretakers of children in the home (also, heavily religiously based)

- Journaling evinces scientific rearing of children (88)

- Motherhood as joy & burden (90)

- Add "self-denial" to women's domestic virtue (91)

- Interprets sex as both what aligns women (not class) and how sex and work roles become synonymous (100)

3. Education

- Literacy widely available in 1840 NE vs. 60 years prior (101)

- Signing one's name is the way we figure this out 

- Post-primary ed for girls needed justification (104)

- Reference to Benjamin Rush's book - important to make a woman useful for a man (105)

- Conversely, men's education had to do with preparation for employment (taken from Locke, Franklin) (108)

- Negative image of educated women persisted - concerns about them having "false gentility" or becoming too full of themselves (110)

- Schools for girls also taught mostly by women (115)

- Good quote: "As Benjamin Rush had announced decades before, the 

strongest justification for educating women lay in the social utility and political value of well-instructed mothers." (120)

- Insistence of the non-existence of classes (see: quote from Beecher) (123-4)

- Women, it turns out, didn't stick to only books that guided them domestically as they became educated; suggests there is also a tendency to unite as women because of this schooling (125) * This would explain the exclusionary nature of "womanhood" based on race.

4. Religion

- Women dominate the church in sex-segregated prayer

- Women found "self & community" 

- Religion gave life a sense of purpose and order (139)

- Religious conversion parallels earlier conversations about submission in the home (139)

- Religion allows women to rely on a higher power (not men) (140)

- Women leverage religion to examine gender roles (140)

- voluntary association (143)

- Ministers get on board but also use women's sphere rhetoric to attempt to channel and contain women's power

- Women use their authority to develop initiatives to "reform" women while calling out male abusers. (153)

5. Sisterhood

- Different but equal concept (men - strength & rationality; women "qualities of the heart.") (161)

- Notion that women sought out one another for support (161)

- Often frendhsips between women are rooted in religious framework (179) *makes sense, as they are most numerous in churches, do their reform work as Protestant women, etc.

- Marriage is a necessity in order to enjoy sisterhood (193)

- Friend - (p173)

Conclusion: On "Woman's Sphere" and Feminism

List of Women's Documents Consulted

List of Ministers' Sermons Consulted

Index

Type:

Methods:

Sources:

Historiography:

Keywords:

First Great Awakening

Second Great Awakening

Merchant Capitalism

Mercantile Capitalism

Domestic retirement

Sisterhood

Friend - used to mean family; changes to a modern concept during this period.

Themes:

Critiques:

Questions:

Even in its rather basic sense, could a cookbook not signify white midle-class status + a way of claiming domestic authority?

Quotes:

Notes:

Painter, Nell Irvin. Standing at Armageddon: The United States, 1877-1919. 1st ed. New York: W.W. Norton, 1987.

Title: Standing at Armageddon: A Grassroots History of the Progressive Era

Author: Nell Irvin Painter

Year of Publication: 2008

Thesis:

Tensions during the Progressive Era were characterized by opposing ideologies of prosperity and democracy, the former favoring order and hierarchy; the other favoring a democratic order in which all had the opportunity to voice themselves. The greater the voice of the people, the more they encountered repression.

Time: 1877-1919

Geography: U.S. & Colonies

Organization:

Preface to the 2008 Edition

- Unequal distribution of wealth still an issue

Acknowledgments

Introduction

- Production in U.S. goes way up during the 1870s, especially steel

- Describes wealth inequality as rather stark, then especially along gendered and racial lines, and even by type of work.

- Working life characterized by unemployement

- Mobility was downward as well as upward for M/C folks

- Defines classes

- Identifies "respectable" who seem to dovetail with the idea of middle-class

- Stereotypes of poor, working folk (Irish forefront)

- Irish success in politics credited to their permanence

- 1880-1920-  Immigration patterns shift from NW Europe & China to Central/eastern Europe

- Economic mobility a possibility (curious what of this formed part of remittances)

- Because of appearance of classless society, economic vulnerability equated to democratic vulnerability for many

- Initially reforms were simple but large-scale (land grants, etc.)

- Producer/prosperity/hierarchical ideology - sees workers and capitalists working together, not in opposition (what's good for the business is good for the people)

- "Identity of Interest" = survival of the fittest

- "Democratizers" on the other hand see competing interests as a natural state of things and an aristocracy being built out of it, which they saw as a threat to Democracy, so reforms are therefore necessary

- Workers have trouble with messaging - folks believe they bring chaos

Chapter 1 - The Tocsin Sounds (Alarm Bell)

- Reversion to Democratic Party rule by 1877 in many southern states

- Coinciding with Hayes' removal of troops from the capitol cities

- Redemption ideology claims Black people and northerners were incompetent & malicious

- Black people leave in droves

- Economic downturn and fingerpointing

- National institutions (Supreme Court, for example) have lukewarm efforts for supporting Black folk

- In the South, Black people blamed - in the North, Irish

- Dichotomy - Knights of Labor/Jay Gould (financier)

Chapter 2 - The Great Upheaval

- Dichotomy - Statue of Liberty (freedom) / Brooklyn Bridge (progress)

- Railroads become synonymous with prosperity, progress, Manifest Destiny

- Dichotomy - modernity & poverty & death

- Knights of Labor fight to be recognized as speaking for labor

- Folks are able to use the Great Southwest Strike helps create idea that labor is reckless

- Labor begins to organize, realizing it needs to develop legislation to defend as well as to use striking as a means of political capital

- Appears to be no huge challenge to capitalism itself, just the distribution

Chapter 3 - Remedies

- Tarrifs - generally Democrats oppose (protecting consumers) / Republicans support (protecting industrialists)

- "By Democratic logic, the protective tariff enriched manufacturers at the 

expense of farmers and workers, priced American producers out of world markets, and encouraged the consolidation of wealth into trusts and 

monopolies that kept prices unnecessarily high."

- Covers Populists

- Cites Hull House & women's efforts

Chapter 4 - The Depression of the 1890s

- Rhetoric of cooperation, but Pinkertons as the reality

- Chicago Pullman strike

- Pullman also builds little towns - idea is to control labor by keeping them respectable

- Labor injunction makes striking illegal (interesting that initially gov't comes out behind labor)

- Populists don't deliver all the way, but 1896 election = McKinley representing elite interests vs. Bryan representing folks at the bottom

- Country traumatized from unemployment and strife 

Chapter 5 - The White Man's Burden

- Entering an era of expansionism fueled by U.S. overproduction

- U.S. sheds its issues with imperialism & adopts a virile Anglo-Saxonism to justify war.

- Spanish American War (Cuba, Puerto Rico, Philippines become U.S. Colonies)

- U.S. businesses invest heavily in Cuba, but under Spanish rule. Cubans try to throw of Spanish; U.S. intervenes but resumes control.

- Filipinos fight back, hard, and suffer 400k losses; Americans also die in much greater #'s than in Span-Am War.

- White Americans tend to side with Europeans / Black Americans tend to empathize with colonized

Chapter 6 - Prosperity

- McKinley shot; T. Roosevelt enters presidency

- Didn't know - Roosevelt wins Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating peace between Japan & Russia (even while not being particularly peaceful elsewhere)

- Taylorism - workers produce faster to increase profit

- Roosevelt blamed for financial collapse in 1908 for trustbusting - issues bonds to mitigate damage

- Roosevelt doubles down & sees more cause for regulation

Chapter 7 - Race and Disfranchisement

- Economic interventions that seemed extreme in 19th seemed tame in the 20th.

- Racism looks more apparent to white people outside of the South with racial violence

- Booker T. Washington placed squarely on the side of identity interests

- Compromise speech, then riot

- (right after The Clansmen play is shown)

- Folks who seem "progressive" in many other ways do so at the expense of Black voters (some poor whites, as well)

- Du Bois on the scene critiquing Washington

- Ida B Wells as well, confronting the lies

- Springfield a total fake accusation (white man is the perpetrator)

Chapter 8 - Woman Suffrage and Women Workers

Chapter 9 - The Progressive Era

Chapter 10 - Wars

Chapter 11 - The European War Takes Over

Chapter 12 - The Great Unrest

Epilogue

Afterword

Index

Type:

Political/Labor history

Methods:

Sources:

Historiography:

Keywords:

Themes:

Critiques:

Questions:

Quotes:

On the special interest groups within interest groups (separating and sometimes allying along lines of race, class, and gender):

"As a result, reformers who advocated much needed positive change 

sometimes seemed at once to protect the interests of groups with legitimate grievances even as they defined themselves as a privileged subset within their larger group. Thus the spokesmen of organized labor were the most constant and most positive protectors of working people at the same time that they were the opponents of the poorest-paid workers, called contract labor. Women workers, for instance, could hardly look to employers to further their interests as workers. Yet organized labor itself rarely welcomed women workers or took up their specific grievances. The best representatives of workers not only conducted a campaign to prohibit the immigration of Asian workers to the United States but also neglected and opposed the interests of black workers."

On the advantages of Reconstruction:

"Led by new elements in southern politics, the Reconstruction 

governments had given eleven southern states modern constitutions, public schools for black and white, modern prisons, social welfare organizations, and universal manhood suffrage (although some states temporarily disfranchised many former Confederates). But not only had this new leadership included elements that the old elites despised (poor whites and blacks), but the new constitutions also embodied an active role for government, which ran counter to southern traditions."

On the complicated nature of tarrifs:

"The bagging used for grain furnished a handy example of how tariffs 

victimized farmers. This bagging was subject to a tariff of 54 percent, which meant that for every $100 worth of bagging that was imported, the farmer paid $154. But this was not the crucial point. Far more damaging was the effect on prices of domestically produced bagging. Even if this amount of bagging could be manufactured in the United States and sold profitably for $100 or $125, the manufacturer could charge any price under $154, undersell imports, and pocket the additional profit, thanks to the protective tariff. “This is called protection to the American bagging manufacturer,” said the congressman, but “it can be plainly seen that what is prosperity and advantage to the American bagging industry is an injury 

and disadvantage to the farming classes.” 

Reminiscent of the 1776 Project:

"The arguments of the Anglo-Saxonists rested on a specially tailored 

version of English and American history. In this telling Americans were the descendants of the revolutionaries of 1776, who at Lexington and Concord threw off colonial rule and established the first successful republic in the history of mankind. Earlier attempts at republicanism all had failed for lack of intelligence, morality, self-restraint, and the genius for self-government that ran in the English “blood” of the American people. 

Anglo-Saxonists admitted that Anglo-Saxons (or Teutons) had not always possessed this self-governing trait. It had developed slowly over the centuries, they said, since either the Roman occupation of England in the first century a.d. or the signing of the Magna Carta in 1215. Various theories existed on the import of this slow evolution for what were called less developed races. For Benjamin Tillman, Democratic senator from South Carolina, no others could make that journey, because “the Anglo-Saxon is superior to the African or to any other colored people and is alone capable 

of self-government."

Notes:

- No notes have page #'s - search in chapter

Shah, Nayan. Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.

Title: Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco's Chinatown

Author: Nyan Shah

Year of Publication: 2001

Thesis:

Chinese Americans shifted from a perceived threat (as agents of corruption and disease) to a stratified society in which those who could outwardly display middle-class habits, hygiene, and nuclear familial arrangements were distanced from Chinese Americans who did not fit this rigid prescription. Public health simultaneously shifted from the 19th to 20th centuries, from a system emphasizing control to one of entitlement, and entitlement Chinese middle-class Americans were able to take part in.

Time: 1876-1950s (with an epilogue looping in the 1980s & AIDS activism)

Geography: San Francisco

Organization:

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Public Health, Race, and Citizenship

- Chinese Americans and immigrants associated with disease

- Culture blamed for conditions that led to disease

- Goal of surrounding society was for Chinese peoples to adopt "Occidental" habits (2)

- Shift from "menace to model minority" (3)

- Public health seen as "civilizing" (3)

- Public health also useful as a tool of hte state for regulating property and behavior (3)

- Modernity - paradoxical in that it emphasizes universality yet dwells on difference (5)

- Shift from public health from regulation to entitlement (6) 

- Racial ideology works in concert with accommodating difference through segregation (7)

- Self knowlege as a political claim - from other groups' imposed regulation to self regulation (8-9)

- Whiteness defines itself through creating difference (11)

- White people perceived Chinese peoples' behavior as a threat (11)

- Gender imbalance in Chinese communities was manufactured by racism and xenophobia (13)

- Some Chinese Americans choose to showcase middle-class respectability, emphasizing hygience. (15)

1. Public Health and the Mapping of Chinatown

2. Regulating Bodies and Space

3. Perversity, Contamination, and the Dangers of Queer Domesticity

- Essentially defines "queer domesticity," showing how it provided an alternative/alternative model to non-Chinese folks as well as Chinese Americans, especially compared to white, middle-class, heteronormative, and nuclear familial norms. Anything outside of this was seen as a threat to white culture.

4. White Women, Hygiene, and hte Struggle for Respectable Domesticity

5. Plague and Managing the Commercial City

6. White Labor and hte American Standard of Living

7. Making Medical Borders at Anglel Island

8. Helathy Spaces, Healthy Conduct

9. Reforming Chinatown

Conclusion: Norms as a Way of Life

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Type:

Methods:

Sources:

Historiography:

Fits in well with other works that combine citizenship and race at the turn of the 20th century; Julie Weise, Peggy Pascoe, Kelly Lytle Hernández. 

Shah brings up the question of which historians interpret Chinese American history as one of contributionism or otherwise.

Keywords:

citizen-subject

modernity

Queer domesticity

"The analysis of 'queer domesticity' emphasizes the variety of erotic ties and social affiliations that counters normative expectations. Rather than viewing the term queer as a synonym for homosexual identity, I use it to question the formation of exlusionary norms of respectable middle-class, heterosexual marriage. The analytical category of queer upsets the strict gender roles, the firm divisions between public and private, and the implicit presumptions of self-sufficient economics and intimacy in the respectable domestic household." (13-14)

Themes:

modernity

heteronormativity / queer domesticity

citizen-subject

Critiques:

Questions:

Quotes:

Notes:

Important to note the imposed gender imbalances - they seem to influence Shah's concept of queer domesticity.