Title: The fabrication of labor: Germany and Britain, 1640-1914 
Author: Biernacki, Richard 1956-
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: History | Sociology | Labor Studies | European History
Publisher's Description: This monumental study demonstrates the power of culture to define the meaning of labor. Drawing on massive archival evidence from Britain and Germany, as well as historical evidence from France and Italy, The Fabrication of Labor shows how the very nature of labor as a commodity differed fundamentally in different national contexts. A detailed comparative study of German and British wool textile mills reveals a basic difference in the way labor was understood, even though these industries developed in the same period, used similar machines, and competed in similar markets. These divergent definitions of the essential character of labor as a commodity influenced the entire industrial phenomenon, affecting experiences of industrial work, methods of remuneration, disciplinary techniques, forms of collective action, and even industrial architecture. Starting from a rigorous analysis of detailed archival materials, this study broadens out to analyze the contrasting developmental pathways to wage labor in Western Europe and offers a startling reinterpretation of theories of political economy put forward by Adam Smith and Karl Marx. In his brilliant cross-national study, Richard Biernacki profoundly reorients the analysis of how culture constitutes the very categories of economic life.   [brief]
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Title: Social paralysis and social change: British working-class education in the nineteenth century
Author: Smelser, Neil J
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: History | History | European History | Education
Publisher's Description: Neil Smelser's Social Paralysis and Social Change is one of the most comprehensive histories of mass education ever written. It tells the story of how working-class education in nineteenth-century Britain - often paralyzed by class, religious, and economic conflict - struggled forward toward change.This book is ambitious in scope. It is both a detailed history of educational development and a theoretical study of social change, at once a case study of Britain and a comparative study of variations within Britain. Smelser simultaneously meets the scholarly standards of historians and critically addresses accepted theories of educational change - "progress," conflict, and functional theories. He also sheds new light on the process of secularization, the relations between industrialization and education, structural differentiation, and the role of the state in social change.This work marks a return for the author to the same historical arena - Victorian Britain - that inspired his classic work Social Change in the Industrial Revolution thirty-five years ago. Smelser's research has again been exhaustive. He has achieved a remarkable synthesis of the huge body of available materials, both primary and secondary.Smelser's latest book will be most controversial in its treatment of class as a primordial social grouping, beyond its economic significance. Indeed, his demonstration that class, ethnic, and religious groupings were decisive in determining the course of British working-class education has broad-ranging implications. These groupings remain at the heart of educational conflict, debate, and change in most societies - including our own - and prompt us to pose again and again the chronic question: who controls the educational terrain?   [brief]
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Title: Between craft and class: skilled workers and factory politics in the United States and Britain, 1890-1922 
Author: Haydu, Jeffrey
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Sociology | United States History | European History | Labor Studies | Technology and Society
Publisher's Description: Between Craft and Class provides an incisive new look at workers' responses to the momentous economic changes surrounding them in the early years of the twentieth century. In this work, Haydu focuses on the reaction of skilled metal workers to new production methods that threatened time-honored craft traditions. He finds that the workers' responses to industrial change varied - some defended the status quo, while others agreed to trade customary rules for economic rewards. Under some conditions class protest arose, as workers of diverse skills and trades joined to demand a greater voice in the management of industry. Between Craft and Class explores how broadly based movements for workers' control developed during this critical period, and why they ultimately failed.Comparing workers in the United States and Britain, Haydu's scholarship is distinguished by extensive primary source research and provocative theoretical insights. In its scope and depth, this book will revise current notions of craft politics and working-class radicalism during this period.   [brief]
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Title: At the heart of the Empire: Indians and the colonial encounter in late-Victorian Britain 
Author: Burton, Antoinette M 1961-
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: History | Women's Studies | Autobiographies and Biographies | South Asia | Victorian History | Travel | European History | Asian History
Publisher's Description: Antoinette Burton focuses on the experiences of three Victorian travelers in Britain to illustrate how "Englishness" was made and remade in relation to imperialism. The accounts left by these three sojourners - all prominent, educated Indians - represent complex, critical ethnographies of "native" metropolitan society and offer revealing glimpses of what it was like to be a colonial subject in fin-de-siècle Britain. Burton's innovative interpretation of the travelers' testimonies shatters the myth of Britain's insularity from its own construction of empire and shows that it was instead a terrain open to continual contest and refiguration.Burton's three subjects felt the influence of imperial power keenly during even the most everyday encounters in Britain. Pandita Ramabai arrived in London in 1883 seeking a medical education and left in 1886, having resisted the Anglican Church's attempts to make her an evangelical missionary. Cornelia Sorabji went to Oxford to study law and became the first Indian woman to be called to the Bar. Behramji Malabari sought help for his Indian reform projects in England, and subjected London to colonial scrutiny in the process. Their experiences form the basis of this wide-ranging, clearly written, and imaginative investigation of diasporic movement in the colonial metropolis.   [brief]
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Title: On her their lives depend: munitions workers in the Great War
Author: Woollacott, Angela 1955-
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: History | European History | Women's Studies
Publisher's Description: In this evocative book, Angela Woollacott analyzes oral histories, workers' writings, newspapers, official reports, and factory song lyrics to present an intimate view of women munitions workers in Britain during World War I.Munitions work offered working-class women - for the first time - independence, a reliable income, even an improved standard of living. But male employers and trade unionists brought them face-to-face with their subordination as women within their own class, while experiences with middle-class women co-workers and police reminded them of their status as working class.Woollacott sees the woman munitions worker as a powerful symbol of modernity who challenged the gender order through her patriotic work and challenged class differences through her increased spending power, mobility, and changing social behavior.   [brief]
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Title: The middling sort: commerce, gender, and the family in England, 1680-1780
Author: Hunt, Margaret R 1953-
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: History | Gender Studies | Social Science
Publisher's Description: To be one of "the middling sort" in urban England in the late seventeenth or eighteenth century was to live a life tied, one way or another, to the world of commerce. In a lively study that combines narrative and alternately poignant and hilarious anecdotes with convincing analysis, Margaret R. Hunt offers a view of middling society during the hundred years that separated the Glorious Revolution from the factory age. Thanks to her exploration of many family papers and court records, Hunt is able to examine what people thought, felt, and valued. She finds that early capitalism and early modern family life were far more insecure than their "classical" models supposed.Commercial needs and social needs coincided to a large extent. The family is central to Hunt's story, and she shows how financial struggles brought conflict, ambiguity, and tension to the home. She investigates the way gender intertwined with class and family hierarchy and the way many businesses survived as precarious successes, secured through the sacrifices made by female as well as male family members. The Middling Sort offers a dynamic portrait of a society struggling to minimize the considerable social and psychic dislocation that accompanied England's launch of a full-scale market economy.   [brief]
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Title: Pulling the devil's kingdom down: the Salvation Army in Victorian Britain
Author: Walker, Pamela J 1960-
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: History | Christianity | Victorian History | Religion | Women's Studies
Publisher's Description: Those people in uniforms who ring bells and raise money for the poor during the holiday season belong to a religious movement that in 1865 combined early feminism, street preaching, holiness theology, and intentionally outrageous singing into what soon became the Salvation Army. In Pulling the Devil's Kingdom Down, Pamela Walker emphasizes how thoroughly the Army entered into nineteenth-century urban life. She follows the movement from its Methodist roots and East London origins through its struggles with the established denominations of England, problems with the law and the media, and public manifestations that included street brawls with working-class toughs. The Salvation Army was a neighborhood religion, with a "battle plan" especially suited to urban working-class geography and cultural life. The ability to use popular leisure activities as inspiration was a major factor in the Army's success, since pubs, music halls, sports, and betting were regarded as its principal rivals. Salvationist women claimed the "right to preach" and enjoyed spiritual authority and public visibility more extensively than in virtually any other religious or secular organization. Opposition to the new movement was equally energetic and took many forms, but even as contemporary music hall performers ridiculed the "Hallelujah Lasses," the Salvation Army was spreading across Great Britain and the Continent, and on to North America. The Army offered a distinctive response to the dilemmas facing Victorian Christians, in particular the relationship between what Salvationists believed and the work they did. Walker fills in the social, cultural, and religious contexts that make that relationship come to life.   [brief]
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Title: Licensing entertainment: the elevation of novel reading in Britain, 1684-1750 
Author: Warner, William Beatty
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Literature | European History | Print Media | English Literature
Publisher's Description: Novels have been a respectable component of culture for so long that it is difficult for twentieth-century observers to grasp the unease produced by novel reading in the eighteenth century. William Warner shows how the earliest novels in Britain, published in small-format print media, provoked early instances of the modern anxiety about the effects of new media on consumers.Warner uncovers a buried and neglected history of the way in which the idea of the novel was shaped in response to a newly vigorous market in popular narratives. In order to rein in the sexy and egotistical novel of amorous intrigue, novelists and critics redefined the novel as morally respectable, largely masculine in authorship, national in character, realistic in its claims, and finally, literary. Warner considers early novelists in their role as entertainers and media workers, and shows how the short, erotic, plot-driven novels written by Behn, Manley, and Haywood came to be absorbed and overwritten by the popular novels of Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding. Considering these novels as entertainment as well as literature, Warner traces a different story - one that redefines the terms within which the British novel is to be understood and replaces the literary history of the rise of the novel with a more inclusive cultural history.   [brief]
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Title: Lewis & Clark: legacies, memories, and new perspectives 
Author: Fresonke, Kris 1966-
Published: University of California Press,  2004
Subjects: History | American Studies | American Literature | Native American Ethnicity
Publisher's Description: Two centuries after their expedition awoke the nation both to the promise and to the disquiet of the vast territory out west, Lewis and Clark still stir the imagination, and their adventure remains one of the most celebrated and studied chapters in American history. This volume explores the legacy of Lewis and Clark's momentous journey and, on the occasion of its bicentennial, considers the impact of their westward expedition on American culture. Approaching their subject from many different perspectives - literature, history, women's studies, law, medicine, and environmental history, among others - the authors chart shifting attitudes about the explorers and their journals, together creating a compelling, finely detailed picture of the "interdisciplinary intrigue" that has always surrounded Lewis and Clark's accomplishment. This collection is most remarkable for its insights into ongoing debates over the relationships between settler culture and aboriginal peoples, law and land tenure, manifest destiny and westward expansion, as well as over the character of Sacagawea, the expedition's vision of nature, and the interpretation and preservation of the Lewis and Clark Trail.   [brief]
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Title: The Jews of Britain, 1656 to 2000
Author: Endelman, Todd M
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: Jewish Studies | European History | Ethnic Studies | Immigration
Publisher's Description: In Todd Endelman's spare and elegant narrative, the history of British Jewry in the modern period is characterized by a curious mixture of prominence and inconspicuousness. British Jews have been central to the unfolding of key political events of the modern period, especially the establishment of the State of Israel, but inconspicuous in shaping the character and outlook of modern Jewry. Their story, less dramatic perhaps than that of other Jewish communities, is no less deserving of this comprehensive and finely balanced analytical account. Even though Jews were never completely absent from Britain after the expulsion of 1290, it was not until the mid- seventeenth century that a permanent community took root. Endelman devotes chapters to the resettlement; to the integration and acculturation that took place, more intensively than in other European states, during the eighteenth century; to the remarkable economic transformation of Anglo-Jewry between 1800 and 1870; to the tide of immigration from Eastern Europe between 1870 and 1914 and the emergence of unprecedented hostility to Jews; to the effects of World War I and the turbulent events up to and including the Holocaust; and to the contradictory currents propelling Jewish life in Britain from 1948 to the end of the twentieth century. We discover not only the many ways in which the Anglo-Jewish experience was unique but also what it had in common with those of other Western Jewish communities.   [brief]
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Title: The war come home: disabled veterans in Britain and Germany, 1914-1939
Author: Cohen, Deborah 1968-
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: History | European History | German Studies | Military History | European Studies
Publisher's Description: Disabled veterans were the First World War's most conspicuous legacy. Nearly eight million men in Europe returned from the First World War permanently disabled by injury or disease. In The War Come Home, Deborah Cohen offers a comparative analysis of the very different ways in which two belligerent nations--Germany and Britain--cared for their disabled. At the heart of this book is an apparent paradox. Although postwar Germany provided its disabled veterans with generous benefits, they came to despise the state that favored them. Disabled men proved susceptible to the Nazi cause. By contrast, British ex-servicemen remained loyal subjects, though they received only meager material compensation. Cohen explores the meaning of this paradox by focusing on the interplay between state agencies and private philanthropies on one hand, and the evolving relationship between disabled men and the general public on the other. Written with verve and compassion, The War Come Home describes in affecting detail disabled veterans' lives and their treatment at the hands of government agencies and private charities in Britain and Germany. Cohen's study moves from the intimate confines of veterans' homes to the offices of high-level bureaucrats; she tells of veterans' protests, of disabled men's families, and of the well-heeled philanthropists who made a cause of the war's victims. This superbly researched book provides an important new perspective on the ways in which states and societies confront the consequences of industrialized warfare.   [brief]
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Title: A science of impurity: water analysis in nineteenth century Britain 
Author: Hamlin, Christopher 1951-
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: History | European History | History and Philosophy of Science
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Title: Working-class heroes: protecting home, community, and nation in a Chicago neighborhood
Author: Kefalas, Maria
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Sociology | American Studies | Anthropology | Urban Studies | Ethnic Studies | Gender Studies | Politics | Social Problems | Urban Studies | Urban Studies
Publisher's Description: Chicago's Southwest Side is one of the last remaining footholds for the city's white working class, a little-studied and little-understood segment of the American population. This book paints a nuanced and complex portrait of the firefighters, police officers, stay-at-home mothers, and office workers living in the stable working-class community known as Beltway. Building on the classic Chicago School of urban studies and incorporating new perspectives from cultural geography and sociology, Maria Kefalas considers the significance of home, community, and nation for Beltway residents.   [brief]
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Title: The German worker: working-class autobiographies from the age of industrialization
Author: Kelly, Alfred 1947-
Published: University of California Press,  1987
Subjects: History | European History | Social Problems
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Title: Industrialization, family life, and class relations: Saint Chamond, 1815-1914 
Author: Accampo, Elinor Ann
Published: University of California Press,  1989
Subjects: History | European History | Women's Studies
Publisher's Description: In this provocative study, Elinor Accampo explores the interrelationship between the structure of work and strategies of family formation in Saint Chamond, a French city that underwent intensive industrialization during the nineteenth century. Through a detailed analysis of fertility, mortality, marriages, and migration, the author analyzes the ways in which the family responded to changes in the organization of work. In the first half of the nineteenth century work was in the home, and families tended to be large in order to meet the demand for workers. But by the 1860s the mechanization of labor had begun to separate family life and work life, fundamentally transforming the relationship between work and family and making the survival of the working-class family more difficult. Accampo argues that workers began to have smaller families much earlier than has previously been suggested, and she demonstrates that fertility declined for reasons unique to working-class conditions. This decline in family size, and the context in which it took place, provides fascinating new material for understanding the working class world and the dynamics of class relations.   [brief]
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Title: Workers against work: labor in Paris and Barcelona during the popular fronts 
Author: Seidman, Michael (Michael M.)
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: History | European History | Social Science | French Studies | Labor Studies
Publisher's Description: Why did a revolution occur in Spain and not in France in 1936? This is the key question Michael Seidman explores in his important new study of the relations between industrial capitalists and working-class movements in the early part of this century. In a comparative analysis of Paris during the Popular Front and Barcelona during the Spanish Revolution, Seidman examines the strengths and weaknesses of the bourgeoisie in these two cities and traces workers' resistance to, and acceptance of, work. His emphasis on the continuing refusal to work challenges the dominant views of labor historiography and contributes to a general theory of revolutionary workers' control.Seidman illuminates three crucial issues that have broad implications for the history of the twentieth century. His comparative approach delineates the nature of class confrontation in societies with different kinds of bourgeoisies or capitalist elites. He also shows how the differences between these elites affected the labor movements in France and Spain, and he demonstrates how rank-and-file workers actually responded to the revolutionary situation in Barcelona and to the advent of the reformist government in Paris.A social history of acceptance and rejection of work, this book offers a new conceptualization of wage earners and a critique of work itself.   [brief]
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Title: Working people of California 
Author: Cornford, Daniel A 1947-
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: History | Ethnic Studies | California and the West | Labor Studies | Californian and Western History
Publisher's Description: From the California Indians who labored in the Spanish missions to the immigrant workers on Silicon Valley's high-tech assembly lines, California's work force has had a complex and turbulent past, marked by some of the sharpest and most significant battles fought by America's working people. This anthology presents the work of scholars who are forging a new brand of social history - one that reflects the diversity of California's labor force by paying close attention to the multicultural and gendered aspects of the past. Readers will discover a refreshing chronological breadth to this volume, as well as a balanced examination of both rural and urban communities.Daniel Cornford's excellent general introduction provides essential historical background while his brief introductions to each chapter situate the essays in their larger contexts. A list of further readings appears at the end of each chapter.   [brief]
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Title: Reds or rackets?: the making of radical and conservative unions on the waterfront 
Author: Kimeldorf, Howard
Published: University of California Press,  1988
Subjects: Sociology | United States History | Labor Studies
Publisher's Description: Why is the American working class different? For generations, scholars and activists alike have wrestled with this question, with an eye to explaining why workers in the United States are not more like their radicalized European counterparts. Approaching the question from a different angle, Reds or Rackets? provides a fascinating examination of the American labor movement from the inside out, as it were, by analyzing the divergent sources of radicalism and conservatism within it. Kimeldorf focuses on the political contrast between East and West Coast longshoremen from World War I through the early years of the Cold War, when the difference between the two unions was greatest. He explores the politics of the West Coast union that developed into a hot bed of working class insurgency and contrasts it with the conservative and racket-ridden East Coast longshoreman's union. Two unions, based in the same industry - as different as night and day. The question posed by Kimeldorf is, why? Why "reds" on one coast and racketeers on the other?To answer this question Kimeldorf provides a systematic comparison of the two unions, illuminating the political consequences of occupational recruitment, industry structure, mobilization strategies, and industrial conflict during this period. In doing so, Reds orRackets? sheds new light on the structural and historical bases of radical and conservative unionism.More than a comparative study of two unions, Reds or Rackets? is an exploration of the dynamics of trade unionism, sources of membership loyalty, and neglected aspects of working class consciousness. It is an incisive and valuable study that will appeal to historians, social scientists, and anyone interested in understanding the political trajectory of twentieth-century American labor.   [brief]
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Title: Opium regimes: China, Britain, and Japan, 1839-1952
Author: Brook, Timothy 1951-
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: History | China | Asian History
Publisher's Description: Opium is more than just a drug extracted from poppies. Over the past two centuries it has been a palliative medicine, an addictive substance, a powerful mechanism for concentrating and transferring wealth and power between nations, and the anchor for a now vanished sociocultural world in and around China. Opium Regimes integrates the pioneering research of sixteen scholars to show that the opium trade was not purely a British operation but involved Chinese merchants, Chinese state agents, and Japanese imperialists as well. The book presents a coherent historical arc that moves from British imperialism in the nineteenth century, to Chinese capital formation and state making at the turn of the century, to Japanese imperialism through the 1930s and 1940s, and finally to the apparent resolution of China's opium problem in the early 1950s. Together these essays show that the complex interweaving of commodity trading, addiction, and state intervention in opium's history refigured the historical face of East Asia more profoundly than any other commodity.   [brief]
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Title: Urban revolt: ethnic politics in the nineteenth-century Chicago labor movement 
Author: Hirsch, Eric L 1952-
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: History | United States History | Urban Studies
Publisher's Description: Urban Revolt is a careful, incisive reexamination of the most highly mobilized urban revolutionary force in American history - the late nineteenth-century Chicago labor movement. By documenting the importance of ethnic origins in accounting for political choice, Eric L. Hirsch completely reconceptualizes the dynamics of urban social movements.Hirsch links the industrialization of Chicago to the development and maintenance of an ethnically segmented labor market. Urbanization, he argues, fostered ethnic enclaves whose inhabitants were channeled into particular kinds of jobs and excluded from others. Hirsch then demonstrates the political implications of emergent ethnic identities and communities.In the late nineteenth century, Chicagoans of German background - denied economic power by Anglo-Americans' control of craft unions and excluded from political influence by Irish-dominated political machines - formulated radical critiques of the status quo and devised innovative political strategies. In contrast, the Irish revolutionary movement in Chicago targeted the oppressive British political system; Irish activists saw no reason to overthrow a Chicago polity that brought them political and economic upward mobility. Urban Revolt gives a new perspective on revolutionary mobilization by de-emphasizing the importance of class consciousness, social disorganization, and bureaucracy. In his original and provocative focus on the importance of ethnicity in accounting for political choice, Hirsch makes a valuable contribution to the study of social movements, race, and working-class politics.   [brief]
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