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1. cover
Title: Buddha is hiding: refugees, citizenship, the new America
Author: Ong, Aihwa
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Anthropology | American Studies | Asian American Studies | Gender Studies | Urban Studies | Sociology | Immigration
Publisher's Description: Fleeing the murderous Pol Pot regime, Cambodian refugees arrive in America as at once the victims and the heroes of America's misadventures in Southeast Asia; and their encounters with American citizenship are contradictory as well. Service providers, bureaucrats, and employers exhort them to be self-reliant, individualistic, and free, even as the system and the culture constrain them within terms of ethnicity, race, and class. Buddha Is Hiding tells the story of Cambodian Americans experiencing American citizenship from the bottom-up. Based on extensive fieldwork in Oakland and San Francisco, the study puts a human face on how American institutions - of health, welfare, law, police, church, and industry - affect minority citizens as they negotiate American culture and re-interpret the American dream. In her earlier book, Flexible Citizenship, anthropologist Aihwa Ong wrote of elite Asians shuttling across the Pacific. This parallel study tells the very different story of "the other Asians" whose route takes them from refugee camps to California's inner-city and high-tech enclaves. In Buddha Is Hiding we see these refugees becoming new citizen-subjects through a dual process of being-made and self-making, balancing religious salvation and entrepreneurial values as they endure and undermine, absorb and deflect conflicting lessons about welfare, work, medicine, gender, parenting, and mass culture. Trying to hold on to the values of family and home culture, Cambodian Americans nonetheless often feel that "Buddha is hiding." Tracing the entangled paths of poor and rich Asians in the American nation, Ong raises new questions about the form and meaning of citizenship in an era of globalization.   [brief]
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2. cover
Title: The second gold rush: Oakland and the East Bay in World War II
Author: Johnson, Marilynn S
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: History | Urban Studies | Californian and Western History | American Studies | California and the West | Ethnic Studies
Publisher's Description: More than any event in the twentieth century, World War II marked the coming of age of America's West Coast cities. Almost overnight, new war industries prompted the mass urban migration and development that would trigger lasting social, cultural, and political changes. For the San Francisco Bay Area, argues Marilynn Johnson, the changes brought by World War II were as dramatic as those brought by the gold rush a century earlier.Focusing on Oakland, Richmond, and other East Bay shipyard boomtowns, Johnson chronicles the defense buildup, labor migration from the South and Midwest, housing issues, and social and racial conflicts that pitted newcomers against longtime Bay Area residents. She follows this story into the postwar era, when struggles over employment, housing, and civil rights shaped the urban political landscape for the 1950s and beyond. She also traces the cultural legacy of war migration and shows how Southern religion and music became an integral part of Bay Area culture.Johnson's sources are wide-ranging and include shipyard records, labor histories, police reports, and interviews. Her findings place the war's human drama at center stage and effectively recreate the texture of daily life in workplace, home, and community. Enriched by the photographs of Dorothea Lange and others, The Second Gold Rush makes an important contribution to twentieth-century urban studies as well as to California history.   [brief]
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3. cover
Title: Women of the Klan: racism and gender in the 1920s
Author: Blee, Kathleen M
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: History | Sociology | Women's Studies | United States History | American Studies
Publisher's Description: Ignorant. Brutal. Male. One of these stereotypes of the Ku Klux Klan offer a misleading picture. In Women of the Klan , sociologist Kathleen Blee unveils an accurate portrait of a racist movement that appealed to ordinary people throughout the country. In so doing, she dismantles the popular notion that politically involved women are always inspired by pacifism, equality, and justice."All the better people," a former Klanswoman assures us, were in the Klan. During the 1920s, perhaps half a million white native-born Protestant women joined the Women's Ku Klux Klan (WKKK). Like their male counterparts, Klanswomen held reactionary views on race, nationality, and religion. But their perspectives on gender roles were often progressive. The Klan publicly asserted that a women's order could safeguard women's suffrage and expand their other legal rights. Privately the WKKK was working to preserve white Protestant supremacy.Blee draws from extensive archival research and interviews with former Klan members and victims to underscore the complexity of extremist right-wing political movements. Issues of women's rights, she argues, do not fit comfortably into the standard dichotomies of "progressive" and "reactionary." These need to be replaced by a more complete understanding of how gender politics are related to the politics of race, religion, and class.   [brief]
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4. cover
Title: Rethinking the American race problem online access is available to everyone
Author: Brooks, Roy L. (Roy Lavon) 1950-
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: American Studies | Law | Politics | Ethnic Studies
Publisher's Description: If the conservative view of the American race problem is frightening, the traditional liberal view seems impotent. Analyzing the race problem from neither right nor left, Brooks sheds a new and clarifying light on America's longest running social and moral dilemma.This incisive book provides a bold new examination of the seemingly intractable racial problems confronting Americans at the end of the twentieth century. In a wide-ranging and probing study, Brooks calls into question the prevailing wisdom about racism, civil rights legislation, and the composition of the Black community, going on to offer a dramatic new approach to the race problem. In Brooks' mind, civil rights laws - laws targeted at racial discrimination - have not only failed to engender racial equality, but have in fact had a negative effect on the standard of living of many Blacks. Brooks defines the American race problem so as to carefully separate racial oppression from (economic) class oppression and explains how civil rights legislation since the 1960s has hurt Black Americans of every class. He offers a strategy for resolving the country's racial inequities, unique in its attentiveness to class division in Black society, that combines governmental remedies and an unprecedented program of Black self-help.While Brooks argues that the government has the means to resolve the race dilemma, he suggests that it lacks the spirit to do so. Thus, it may be time for Black Americans to come to grips with an unpleasant reality - namely, that they can count on the government only for minimal alleviation, and must take on the larger portion of responsibility for resolving the American race problem themselves.Certain to arouse controversy, Rethinking the American Race Problem offers new understandings of issues often clouded by misconceptions and backward notions. It is an important book for anyone concerned about the current state of race relations in America.   [brief]
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5. cover
Title: Women without class: girls, race, and identity
Author: Bettie, Julie 1965-
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Gender Studies | Women's Studies | Sociology | Chicano Studies | American Studies | Popular Culture | Education | Anthropology | Social Problems | Immigration
Publisher's Description: In this examination of white and Mexican-American girls coming of age in California's Central Valley, Julie Bettie turns class theory on its head and offers new tools for understanding the ways in which class identity is constructed and, at times, fails to be constructed in relationship to color, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. Documenting the categories of subculture and style that high school students use to explain class and racial/ethnic differences among themselves, Bettie depicts the complex identity performances of contemporary girls. The title, Women Without Class, refers at once to young working-class women who have little cultural capital to enable class mobility, to the fact that class analysis and social theory has remained insufficiently transformed by feminist and ethnic studies, and to the fact that some feminist analysis has itself been complicit in the failure to theorize women as class subjects. Bettie's research and analysis make a case for analytical and political attention to class, but not at the expense of attention to other axes of identity and social formations.   [brief]
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6. cover
Title: Unequal childhoods: class, race, and family life
Author: Lareau, Annette
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Sociology | American Studies | Ethnic Studies | Anthropology | Education
Publisher's Description: Class does make a difference in the lives and futures of American children. Drawing on in-depth observations of black and white middle-class, working-class, and poor families, Unequal Childhoods explores this fact, offering a picture of childhood today. Here are the frenetic families managing their children's hectic schedules of "leisure" activities; and here are families with plenty of time but little economic security. Lareau shows how middle-class parents, whether black or white, engage in a process of "concerted cultivation" designed to draw out children's talents and skills, while working-class and poor families rely on "the accomplishment of natural growth," in which a child's development unfolds spontaneously - as long as basic comfort, food, and shelter are provided. Each of these approaches to childrearing brings its own benefits and its own drawbacks. In identifying and analyzing differences between the two, Lareau demonstrates the power, and limits, of social class in shaping the lives of America's children.   [brief]
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7. cover
Title: Black workers remember: an oral history of segregation, unionism, and the freedom struggle
Author: Honey, Michael K
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: History | United States History | Labor Studies | African American Studies
Publisher's Description: The labor of black workers has been crucial to economic development in the United States. Yet because of racism and segregation, their contribution remains largely unknown. Spanning the 1930s to the present, Black Workers Remember tells the hidden history of African American workers in their own words. It provides striking firsthand accounts of the experiences of black southerners living under segregation in Memphis, Tennessee. Eloquent and personal, these oral histories comprise a unique primary source and provide a new way of understanding the black labor experience during the industrial era. Together, the stories demonstrate how black workers resisted racial apartheid in American industry and underscore the active role of black working people in history.The individual stories are arranged thematically in chapters on labor organizing, Jim Crow in the workplace, police brutality, white union racism, and civil rights struggles. Taken together, the stories ask us to rethink the conventional understanding of the civil rights movement as one led by young people and preachers in the 1950s and 1960s. Instead, we see the freedom struggle as the product of generations of people, including workers who organized unions, resisted Jim Crow at work, and built up their families, churches, and communities. The collection also reveals the devastating impact that a globalizing capitalist economy has had on black communities and the importance of organizing the labor movement as an antidote to poverty.QQ Michael Honey gathered these oral histories for more than fifteen years. He weaves them together here into a rich collection reflecting many tragic dimensions of America's racial history while drawing new attention to the role of workers and poor people in African American and American history.   [brief]
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8. cover
Title: The fabrication of labor: Germany and Britain, 1640-1914 online access is available to everyone
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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9. cover
Title: The velvet glove: paternalism and conflict in gender, class, and race relations online access is available to everyone
Author: Jackman, Mary R
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Sociology | Social Problems | American Studies | Ethnic Studies | Gender Studies
Publisher's Description: This landmark study analyzes and compares the ideologies that develop among unequal social groups. Mary Jackman employs a unique national survey to investigate all three of the most prominent relations of inequality in the United States: gender, class, and race. Where other scholars have emphasized conflict as the emblem of intergroup oppression, Jackman proposes a theory in which both dominant and subordinate groups maneuver to avoid open hostility as they strive to control resources within the confines of their mutual relationship.Hostility, Jackman points out, creates resistance in a relationship. Dominant groups therefore try to preempt the use of force by following a velvet-glove strategy of "sweet persuasion." They are drawn especially to the ideological mold of paternalism, in which the coercion of subordinates is grounded in love rather than hate. Dominant-group members pronounce authoritatively on the needs and welfare of all and then profess to "provide" for those needs. Love, affection, and praise are offered to subordinates on strict condition that they comply with the terms of the unequal relationship. Whether in the home or in the arena of class or race relations, paternalism wraps control and authority in an ideological cocoon in which discriminatory actions are defined as benevolent and affection is made contingent on compliance.Jackman's emphasis on the practice of coercive love in race, class, and gender relations is sure to generate controversy and further research. Sociologists, psychologists, political scientists, and anyone interested in group ideology will find here a provocative challenge to conventional views.   [brief]
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10. cover
Title: Battling for American labor: wobblies, craft workers, and the making of the union movement
Author: Kimeldorf, Howard
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: American Studies | Sociology | History | United States History | Labor Studies
Publisher's Description: In this incisive reinterpretation of the history of the American labor movement, Howard Kimeldorf challenges received thinking about rank-and-file workers and the character of their unions. Battling for American Labor answers the baffling question of how, while mounting some of the most aggressive challenges to employing classes anywhere in the world, organized labor in the United States has warmly embraced the capitalist system of which they are a part. Rejecting conventional understandings of American unionism, Kimeldorf argues that what has long been the hallmark of organized labor in the United States - its distinctive reliance on worker self-organization and direct economic action - can be seen as a particular kind of syndicalism.Kimeldorf brings this syndicalism to life through two rich and compelling case studies of unionization efforts by Philadelphia longshoremen and New York City culinary workers during the opening decades of the twentieth century. He shows how these workers, initially affiliated with the radical IWW and later the conservative AFL, pursued a common logic of collective action at the point of production that largely dictated their choice of unions. Elegantly written and deeply engaging, Battling for American Labor offers insights not only into how the American labor movement got to where it is today, but how it might possibly reinvent itself in the years ahead.   [brief]
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11. cover
Title: Female subjects in black and white: race, psychoanalysis, feminism
Author: Abel, Elizabeth
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Literature | African American Studies | Gender Studies | Literary Theory and Criticism | American Literature | GayLesbian and Bisexual Studies
Publisher's Description: This landmark collaboration between African American and white feminists goes to the heart of problems that have troubled feminist thinking for decades. Putting the racial dynamics of feminist interpretation center stage, these essays question such issues as the primacy of sexual difference, the universal nature of psychoanalytic categories, and the role of race in the formation of identity. They offer new ways of approaching African American texts and reframe our thinking about the contexts, discourses, and traditions of the American cultural landscape. Calling for the racialization of whiteness and claiming that psychoanalytic theory should make room for competing discourses of spirituality and diasporic consciousness, these essays give shape to the many stubborn incompatibilities - as well as the transformative possibilities - between white feminist and African American cultural formations.Bringing into conversation a range of psychoanalytic, feminist, and African-derived spiritual perspectives, these essays enact an inclusive politics of reading. Often explosive and always provocative, Female Subjects in Black and White models a new cross-racial feminism.   [brief]
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12. cover
Title: Redefining Black film
Author: Reid, Mark (Mark A.)
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Cinema and Performance Arts | Film | African American Studies
Publisher's Description: Can films about black characters, produced by white filmmakers, be considered "black films"? In answering this question, Mark Reid reassesses black film history, carefully distinguishing between films controlled by blacks and films that utilize black talent, but are controlled by whites. Previous black film criticism has "buried" the true black film industry, Reid says, by concentrating on films that are about, but not by, blacks.Reid's discussion of black independent films - defined as films that focus on the black community and that are written, directed, produced, and distributed by blacks - ranges from the earliest black involvement at the turn of the century up through the civil rights movement of the Sixties and the recent resurgence of feminism in black cultural production. His critical assessment of work by some black filmmakers such as Spike Lee notes how these films avoid dramatizations of sexism, homophobia, and classism within the black community.In the area of black commercial film controlled by whites, Reid considers three genres: African-American comedy, black family film, and black action film. He points out that even when these films use black writers and directors, a black perspective rarely surfaces.Reid's innovative critical approach, which transcends the "black-image" language of earlier studies - and at the same time redefines black film - makes an important contribution to film history. Certain to attract film scholars, this work will also appeal to anyone interested in African-American and Women's Studies.   [brief]
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13. cover
Title: Race music: black cultures from bebop to hip-hop
Author: Ramsey, Guthrie P
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Music | American Music | American Studies | Popular Music | United States History | Ethnomusicology | African American Studies
Publisher's Description: This powerful book covers the vast and various terrain of African American music, from bebop to hip-hop. Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr., begins with an absorbing account of his own musical experiences with family and friends on the South Side of Chicago, evoking Sunday-morning worship services, family gatherings with food and dancing, and jam sessions at local nightclubs. This lays the foundation for a brilliant discussion of how musical meaning emerges in the private and communal realms of lived experience and how African American music has shaped and reflected identities in the black community. Deeply informed by Ramsey's experience as an accomplished musician, a sophisticated cultural theorist, and an enthusiast brought up in the community he discusses, Race Music explores the global influence and popularity of African American music, its social relevance, and key questions regarding its interpretation and criticism. Beginning with jazz, rhythm and blues, and gospel, this book demonstrates that while each genre of music is distinct - possessing its own conventions, performance practices, and formal qualities - each is also grounded in similar techniques and conceptual frameworks identified with African American musical traditions. Ramsey provides vivid glimpses of the careers of Dinah Washington, Louis Jordan, Dizzy Gillespie, Cootie Williams, and Mahalia Jackson, among others, to show how the social changes of the 1940s elicited an Afro-modernism that inspired much of the music and culture that followed. Race Music illustrates how, by transcending the boundaries between genres, black communities bridged generational divides and passed down knowledge of musical forms and styles. It also considers how the discourse of soul music contributed to the vibrant social climate of the Black Power Era. Multilayered and masterfully written, Race Music provides a dynamic framework for rethinking the many facets of African American music and the ethnocentric energy that infused its creation.   [brief]
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14. cover
Title: Race and the invisible hand: how white networks exclude black men from blue-collar jobs
Author: Royster, Deirdre A. (Deirdre Alexia) 1966-
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Sociology | American Studies | Anthropology | Economics and Business | Urban Studies | Public Policy | African American Studies | Urban Studies | Public Policy
Publisher's Description: From the time of Booker T. Washington to today, and William Julius Wilson, the advice dispensed to young black men has invariably been, "Get a trade." Deirdre Royster has put this folk wisdom to an empirical test - and, in Race and the Invisible Hand, exposes the subtleties and discrepancies of a workplace that favors the white job-seeker over the black. At the heart of this study is the question: Is there something about young black men that makes them less desirable as workers than their white peers? And if not, then why do black men trail white men in earnings and employment rates? Royster seeks an answer in the experiences of 25 black and 25 white men who graduated from the same vocational school and sought jobs in the same blue-collar labor market in the early 1990s. After seriously examining the educational performances, work ethics, and values of the black men for unique deficiencies, her study reveals the greatest difference between young black and white men - access to the kinds of contacts that really help in the job search and entry process.   [brief]
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15. cover
Title: Law and disorder on the Narova River: the Kreenholm strike of 1872
Author: Zelnik, Reginald E
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: History | Labor Studies | European History | European Studies
Publisher's Description: Reginald Zelnik uses a single episode - a militant strike at the Kreenholm factory, Europe's largest textile plant - to explore the broad historical moment. In examining this crucial event of Russian history he sheds fresh light on local power relations, high politics in St. Petersburg, controversies over the rule of law, and the origins of the Russian labor movement. Zelnik sees this pivotal moment in Russian labor history as the beginning step in the series of conflicts that eventually led to the upheavals of the early twentieth century.   [brief]
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16. cover
Title: Laughter out of place: race, class, violence, and sexuality in a Rio shantytown
Author: Goldstein, Donna M
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Anthropology | Ethnic Studies | Gender Studies | Latin American Studies | Sociology | Urban Studies | Urban Studies
Publisher's Description: Donna M. Goldstein challenges much of what we think we know about the "culture of poverty." Drawing on more than a decade of experience in Brazil, Goldstein provides an intimate portrait of everyday life among the women of the favelas, or urban shantytowns. These women have created absurdist and black-humor storytelling practices in the face of trauma and tragedy. Goldstein helps us to understand that such joking and laughter is part of an emotional aesthetic that defines the sense of frustration and anomie endemic to the political and economic desperation of the shantytown.   [brief]
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17. cover
Title: Workers against work: labor in Paris and Barcelona during the popular fronts online access is available to everyone
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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18. cover
Title: Urban revolt: ethnic politics in the nineteenth-century Chicago labor movement online access is available to everyone
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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19. cover
Title: The struggle for the breeches: gender and the making of the British working class
Author: Clark, Anna
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: History | European History | Gender Studies | Labor Studies
Publisher's Description: Linking the personal and the political, Anna Clark depicts the making of the working class in Britain as a "struggle for the breeches." The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries witnessed significant changes in notions of masculinity and femininity, the sexual division of labor, and sexual mores, changes that were intimately intertwined with class politics. By integrating gender into the analysis of class formation, Clark transforms the traditional narrative of working-class history.Going beyond the sterile debate about whether economics or language determines class consciousness, Clark integrates working people's experience with an analysis of radical rhetoric. Focusing on Lancashire, Glasgow, and London, she contrasts the experience of artisans and textile workers, demonstrating how each created distinctively gendered communities and political strategies.Workers faced a "sexual crisis," Clark claims, as men and women competed for jobs and struggled over love and power in the family. While some radicals espoused respectability, others might be homophobes, wife-beaters, and tyrants at home; a radical's love of liberty could be coupled with lust for the life of a libertine. Clark shows that in trying to create a working class these radicals closed off the movement to women, instead adopting a conservative rhetoric of domesticity and narrowing their notion of the working class.   [brief]
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20. cover
Title: The comparative imagination: on the history of racism, nationalism, and social movements online access is available to everyone
Author: Fredrickson, George M 1934-
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: History | United States History
Publisher's Description: In this collection of essays, an eminent American historian of race relations discusses issues central to our understanding of the history of racism, the role of racism, and the possibilites for justice in contemporary society. George M. Fredrickson provides an eloquent and vigorous examination of race relations in the United States and South Africa and at the same time illuminates the emerging field of comparative history - history that is explicitly cross-cultural in its comparisons of nations, eras, or social structures. Taken together, these thought-provoking, accessible essays - several never before published - bring new precision and depth to our understanding of racism and justice, both historically and for society today.The first group of essays in The Comparative Imagination summarizes and evaluates the cross-national comparative history written in the past fifty years. These essays pay particular attention to comparative work on slavery and race relations, frontiers, nation-building and the growth of modern welfare states, and class and gender relations. The second group of essays represents some of Fredrickson's own explorations into the cross-cultural study of race and racism. Included are new essays covering such topics as the theoretical and cross-cultural meaning of racism, the problem of race in liberal thought, and the complex relationship between racism and state-based nationalism. The third group contains Fredrickson's recent work on anti-racist and black liberation movements in the United States and South Africa, especially in the period since World War II.In addition, Fredrickson's provocative introduction breaks significant new intellectual ground, outlining a justification for the methods of comparative history in light of such contemporary intellectual trends as the revival of narrative history and the predominance of postmodern thought.   [brief]
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