Rethinking U.S. Labor History: Essays on the Working-Class Experience, 1756-2009

by Donna T. Haverty-Stacke, Daniel J. Walkowitz

Overview

Labor History has recently undergone something of a renaissance that has yet to be documented. Rethinking U.S. Labor History chronicles this rejuvenation with contributions from new scholars as well as established names.

This unique collection of essays blends the work of senior labor historians with that of young scholars working at the frontiers of what we think will be the field's future. All express a continued interest in questions surrounding the relationship of class and culture, especially the association between the changing experience of class and the broader context of American political culture. Their work also reflects a revived interest in the links between workers' experience and the changing political economy, especially as American workers confront the continued flight of manufacturing jobs and the transformation of the nation's retail sector.

Rethinking U.S. Labor History aims to serve as both a practical and substantive contribution to the field of labor history and a comment on its current state and future prospects. The essays demonstrate that the state of labor history today is strong and its possibilities for the future bright.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781441145758
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	10/21/2010
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Donna Haverty-Stacke is Associate Professor of History at Hunter College, CUNY. She is the author of America's Forgotten Holiday: May Day and Nationalism, 1867-1960 (NYU Press, 2009). Daniel Walkowitz is Director of Experiential Education, Acting Director of Metropolitan Studies, Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis, and Professor of History at New York University. He is an American social historian who specializes in labor, urban, and working-class history. Over the past thirty years, Walkowitz has authored over thirty articles and co-edited or authored six books. His most recent books are Working With Class: Social Workers and the Politics of Middle-Class Identity (North Carolina, 1999), and, co-edited with Lisa Maya Knauer, Memory and the Impact of Political Transformation in Public Spaces (Duke, 2004). He is also General Editor for the ten-volume Social History of the United States, forthcoming from ABC-Clio.

Read an Excerpt

It is, I believe, nearly impossible not to love this book. The care and patience with which it is written, the incisiveness of its observations, its humor, its intellectual rigor, its compassion — all these qualities reinforce one another to make it an important, memorable work. . . . It is the true story of a man's experiences, and it asks nothing but the most essential questions: how is information communicated to an anthropologist, what kinds of transactions take place between one culture and another, under what circumstances might secrets be kept? In delineating this unknown civilization for us, Clastres writes with the cunning of a good novelist.

Table of Contents

Contributors vii

Introduction Donna T. Haverty-Stacke Daniel J. Walkowitz 1

Part I Current Research

Chapter 1 Memoirs of an Invalid: James Miller and the Making of the British-American Empire in the Seven Years' War Peter Way 25

Chapter 2 Losing the Middle Ground: Strikebreakers and Labor Protest on the Southwestern Railroads Theresa Ann Case 54

Chapter 3 Rethinking Working-Class Politics in Comparative-Transnational Contexts Shelton Stromquist 82

Chapter 4 No Common Creed: White Working-Class Protestants and the CIO's Operation Dixie Elizabeth Fones-Wolf Ken Fones-Wolf 111

Chapter 5 A. Philip Randolph, Black Anticommunism, and the Race Question Eric Arnesen 137

Chapter 6 The Contextualization of a Moment in CIO History: The Mine-Mill Battle in the Connecticut Brass Valley during World War II Steve Rosswurm 168

Chapter 7 Organizing the Carework Economy: When the Private Becomes Public Eileen Boris Jennifer Klein 192

Chapter 9 Solvents of Solidarity: Political Economy, Collective Action, and the Crisis of Organized Labor, 1968-2005 Joseph A. McCartin 217

Part II New Directions in U.S. Labor History

Chapter 9 Sensing Labor: The Stinking Working-Class after the Cultural Turn Daniel E. Bender 243

Chapter 10 Re-Imagining Labor: Gender and New Directions in Labor and Working-Class History Elizabeth Faue 266

Chapter 11 The Limits of Work and the Subject of Labor History Zachary Schwartz-Weinstein 289

Part III Resources

Labor and Working-Class History Chronology 307

Resources 317

Further Reading 320

Index 329

What People are Saying About This

Paul Auster

It is, I believe, nearly impossible not to love this book. The care and patience with which it is written, the incisiveness of its observations, its humor, its intellectual rigor, its compassion -- all these qualities reinforce one another to make it an important, memorable work.

Editorial Reviews

"Drawing on new as well as seasoned talents to probe the outer limits of a rapidly evolving field, Rethinking U.S. Labor History will undoubtedly take its place as a valuable marker of the discipline's own history." --Leon Fink, University of Illinois at Chicago

"Much the way Walkowitz and Michael Frisch did a quarter century ago with Working-Class America, this superb new volume of essays illustrates the state of the field while setting the agenda for the next generation of U.S. labor history. While attentive to the intersections of class and culture that have animated much recent scholarship, this volume also offers a renewed focus on the structural factors that have impinged on workers' lives. Some of the most interesting essays explore how aspects of working-class culture and consciousness offered resistance to the entreaties of organizers, militants, and strikers, matters historians have too often ignored. Yet others consider the past in light of the new demographics and sectoral dimensions of today's labor force, while emphasizing the power of the state and transnational links to shape working-class lives. Collectively, Walkowitz's and Haverty-Stacke's contributors insist that U.S. labor historians rethink for the politics of a new century the shop-worn definitions of our essential subjects: work and the worker. If "labor" has a future in our neo-liberal era-as a material practice, a form of social organization, and a subject fit for close study-clues to its dynamics will be found in these pages." --Alex Lichtenstein, Florida International University, USA

From the Publisher

This extraordinary book, about the life and death of a band of Indians who lived in the Paraguyan jungle exactly as their forebears did for tens of thousands of years, is a stunning reminder that the hunter-gatherers of this planet were, in fact, just like us (in some ways they were smarter: how many of us can design and weave a basket for carrying herbs and fruit?)... The survival of the book is a saga in itself. It was translated into English by a then-impecunious Paul Auster back in 1976, rejected by a string of publishers and finally taken up by one who tried to swindle the translator; when the publishing firm folded, the sole copy of Auster's translation vanished with it. Twenty years later, at one of Auster's book signings in San Francisco, a young collector presented a flabbergasted Auster with the uncorrected proofs of his long—lost manuscript. He told the astonished Auster that he had found them in a remaindered bin at a secondhand bookstore and paid $5 for them, solely because Auster's name was on the cover. Auster still sees the publication of the book (which contains some of Clastre's photographs) as not just an important contribution to anthropology, but as a small triumph against the crushing odds of fate.
—The Jersusalem Post September 9, 1998

Meir Ronnen

Little was known about the nomadic Guayaki Indians of eastern Paraguay until Clastres, a French ethnographer now deceased, made contact with them. He lived among them in 1963-64 and documented their history and culture. His study is extremely valuable because it documents the experiences of a group of people who no longer exist. Clastres published the French edition of this book in 1972, and it has been translated by novelist Auster, who originally translated this title in the mid-1970s. Auster's trials and tribulations in getting it published are documented in the section entitled "Translator's Notes" and his story alone is worth the price of the book. The photographs and illustrations greatly enhance the text and provide valuable information. Highly recommended for specialized collections on South American Indians.John Burch, Cumberland Coll. Lib., Williamsburg, Ky.

Library Journal

Pierre Clastres (1934-1979) was one of the most respected and insightful anthropologists of his day. Chronicle Of The Guayaki Indians (ably translated and with a foreword by Paul Auster) is an vivid and compelling account of his first fieldwork in the early 1960s which included an encounter with a small, unique, and now vanished Paraguayan tribe — the Guayaki. Clastres followed the Guayaki in their everyday lives, determined to record every detail of their history, ritual, myths, and culture. In doing so he had also created a monument of political anthropology which would commemorate a Native American peoples that was to swiftly pass from scene. Chronicle Of The Guayaki Indians is an important addition to any serious anthropology and Native South American studies reference collection.

In an account that is both living history and historical document, a now-vanished tribe of Paraguayan Indians is described as it lives out its last few years of existence. This document was unearthed some 20 years after novelist Auster translated it from the French, through a serendipitous encounter with one of his fans who had purchased a bound galley from a used bookstore. Clastres, who died before the translation was to have been published, lived with this tribe for two years in 1963 and 1964 in a compound that was under the protection of a white Paraguayan. The arrangement for the Indians was through necessity; their numbers had diminished from constant harassment by white settlers. Although their benefactor siphoned off food and other supplies given by the government, this last remnant was at least safe from the encroaching 20th century. As Clastres gained their confidence, he began piecing together the rituals of their daily lives. The Guayaki permitted him to witness birth, which to the Indians was a dangerous cosmic imbalance; the father is sentenced to death by his child's birth and can only escape his immediate fate by killing an animal in the forest. Clastres observed the physically painful initiation rites for young men, after which they were permitted to have sexual relations with women. The anthropologist also followed the tribe into the forest where it searched for honey and grubs or hunted monkeys or coati. Forest existence was precarious: The Guayaki faced danger from jaguars (an old woman was taken by one during Clastres's stay) and in earlier days from neighboring but related tribes, whose long-simmering feuds would lead to periodic violence. But Clastres savesthe best for last: The Guayaki were cannibals, eating not only the bodies of enemy warriors but also their own dead. The account is anything but dry and didactic; Clastres wrote a vibrant but inescapably poignant study about one more doomed tribe of indigenous people. (photos, not seen)

Kirkus Reviews