The fight for a "living wage" has a long and revealing history as documented here by Lawrence B. Glickman. The labor movement's response to wages shows how American workers negotiated the transition from artisan to consumer, opening up new political possibilities for organized workers and creating contradictions that continue to haunt the labor movement today. Nineteenth-century workers hoped to become self-employed artisans, rather than permanent "wage slaves." After the Civil War, however, unions redefined working-class identity in consumerist terms, and demanded a wage that would reward workers commensurate with their needs as consumers. This consumerist turn in labor ideology also led workers to struggle for shorter hours and union labels. First articulated in the 1870s, the demand for a living wage was voiced increasingly by labor leaders and reformers at the turn of the century. Glickman explores the racial, ethnic, and gender implications, as white male workers defined themselves in contrast to African Americans, women, Asians, and recent European immigrants. He shows how a historical perspective on the concept of a living wage can inform our understanding of current controversies.

In Movieland, Jerome Charyn mingles his own life as a moviegoer with the history, romance, and sadness of Hollywood. He meets Paul Newman, Viveca Lindfors, and Mae Clark, the actress who was the original bride of Frankenstein; explores Cinecitta, Mussolini's own Hollywood on the Tiber; recalls his own life as Otto Preminger's house writer (and jester) during Preminger's decline; reinvents the lost years and lost stars of the silent era --Irving Thalberg, Gloria Swanson, and Clara Bow -- and seeks out the hieroglyphics of modern Hollywood; writes of the Nazi officer who saved the Cinematheque Francaise and its library of American films; and pays homage to Hollywood's heroes, victims, goddesses, and neglected lords: Louise Brooks, Raymond Chandler, Carole Landis, Rita Hayworth, Orson Welles, and more.

In 1950s America, it was remarkably easy for police to arrest almost anyone for almost any reason. The criminal justice system-and especially the age-old law of vagrancy-played a key role not only in maintaining safety and order but also in enforcing conventional standards of morality and propriety. A person could be arrested for sporting a beard, making a speech, or working too little. Yet by the end of the 1960s, vagrancy laws were discredited and American society was fundamentally transformed. What happened? In Vagrant Nation, Risa Goluboff provides a groundbreaking account of this transformation. By reading into the history of the 1960s through the lens of vagrancy laws, Goluboff shows how constitutional challenges to long-standing police practices were at the center of the multiple movements that made "the 1960s." Vagrancy laws were so broad and flexible that they made it possible for the police to arrest anyone out of place in any way: Beats and hippies; Communists and Vietnam War protestors; racial minorities, civil rights activists, and interracial couples; prostitutes, single women, and gay men, lesbians, and other sexual minorities. As hundreds of these "vagrants" and their lawyers claimed that vagrancy laws were unconstitutional, the laws became a flashpoint for debates about radically different visions of order and freedom. In Goluboff's compelling portrayal, the legal campaign against vagrancy laws becomes a sweeping legal and social history of the 1960s. Touching on movements advocating civil rights, peace, gay rights, welfare rights, and cultural revolution, Vagrant Nation provides insight relevant to this battle, as well as the battle over the legacy of the 1960s' transformations themselves.

Richard Hofstadter, the distinguished historian and twice winner of the Pulitzer Prize, brilliantly assesses the ideas and contributions of the three major American interpretive historians of the twentieth Frederick Jackson Turner, Charles A. Beard and V.L. Parrington. These men, whose views of history were shaped in large part by the political battles of the Progressive era, provided the Progressive movement with a usable past and the American liberal mind with a historical tradition. The Progressive Historians is at once a critique of historical thought during this decisive period of American development and an account of how these three writers led American historians into the controversial political world of the twentieth century. Turner, in developing his idea that American democracy is the outcome of the experience of frontier expansion and the settlement of the West, introduced his fellow historians to a set of new concepts and methods, and in doing so doing re-drew the guidelines of American historiography. Beard insisted upon the elitist origins of the Constitution, crusaded for the economic interpretation of history, and ultimately staked his historical reputation on an isolationist view of recent American foreign policy. Parrington emphasized the moral and social functions of literature, and read the history of literature as a history of the national political mind. In recent years, the tide has run against the Progressive historians, as one specialist after another has taken issue with their interpretations. The movement of contemporary historical thought has led to a rediscovery of the complexity of the American past. Although he cannot share the faith of the Progressive historians in the sufficiency of American liberalism as a guide to the modern world, Richard Hofstadter believes we have much to learn about ourselves from a reconsideration of their insights.

From the Preface: The world in which we live has its roots far back in history, and as a world power America must come to terms with countries which were formed in their present mold long before the American, revolution. All those to whom an exploration of this historical background will appeal probably share with me an immediate empathy with the anguish of nation-building around the world. This book is a study of what that anguish meant in times past when countries were first developing their political institutions and when they turned more recently from royal authority to a popular mandate. The problems of developing such institutions are formidable, then as well as now. A scholarly concern with these problems must touch on many subjects in social stratification, religion, political sociology, and the history of ideas, and the book treats these and related themes in their specific historical contexts. This interpretive work is addressed not only to students of political development but also to the general reader who is interested in a large view of history. That reader is provided with sufficient detail and annotation so that the many diverse contexts with which this study deals can be understood. A thematic outline of the book is presented on the first pages of the introduction, which deals as well with the reasons for my approach to historical sociology.

The nation's thirty-first state emerged early as one of its most diverse as people immigrated to the west. California's indigenous tribes were forced off their lands first by Spanish settlers, then by the arrival of gold miners from every corner of the world. Because of its Catholic missionary history, Gold Rush California did not experience a more exclusive eastern-style Protestantism. This permitted more rapid and inclusive acculturation. California Jews, unlike their eastern counterparts whose arrival often followed that of European Protestants, were often among the first settlers to establish a west coast community. Jewish immigrants to California took advantage of its physical environment, ethnic diversity, and cultural distinctiveness to fashion a form of Judaism unique in the American experience. California Jews enjoyed unprecedented access to political power a generation earlier than their New York counterparts. They thrived in the multicultural mix, redefining the classic black-white racial binary by forging relations with a variety of religious and ethnic groups in both San Francisco and Los Angeles.

An acclaimed writer on her mother’s tumultuous life as a Jewish immigrant in 1930s New York and her life-long guilt when the Holocaust claims the family she left behind in Latvia A story of love, war, and life as a Jewish immigrant in the squalid factories and lively dance halls of New York’s Garment District in the 1930s, My Mother’s Wars is the memoir Lillian Faderman’s mother was never able to write. The daughter delves into her mother’s past to tell the story of a Latvian girl who left her village for America with dreams of a life on the stage and encountered the realities of her new world: the battles she was forced to fight as a woman, an immigrant worker, and a Jew with family left behind in Hitler’s deadly path. The story begins in 1914: Mary, the girl who will become Lillian Faderman’s mother, just seventeen and swept up with vague ambitions to be a dancer, travels alone to America, where her half-sister in Brooklyn takes her in. She finds a job in the garment industry and a shop friend who teaches her the thrills of dance halls and the cheap amusements open to working-class girls. This dazzling life leaves Mary distracted and her half-sister and brother-in-law scandalized that she has become a “good-time gal.” They kick her out of their home, an event with consequences Mary will regret for the rest of her life. Eighteen years later, still barely scraping by as a garment worker and unmarried at thirty-five, Mary falls madly in love and has a torrid romance with a man who will never marry her, but who will father Lillian Faderman before he disappears from their lives. America is in the midst of the Depression, Hitler is coming to power in Europe, and New York’s garment workers are just beginning to unionize. Mary makes tentative steps to join, despite her lover’s angry opposition. As National Socialism engulfs Europe, Mary realizes she must find a way to get her family out of Latvia, and she spends frenetic months chasing vague promises and false rumors of hope. Pregnant again, after having submitted to two wrenching back-room abortions, and still unmarried, Mary faces both single motherhood and the devastating possibility of losing her entire Eastern European family. Drawing on family stories and documents, as well as her own tireless research, Lillian Faderman has reconstructed an engrossing and essential chapter in the history of women, of workers, of Jews, and of the Holocaust as immigrants experienced it from American shores.

Product Description In this thoroughly updated second edition, Judith Walzer Leavitt, a leading authority on the history of women's health issues, has collected thirty-five articles representing important scholarship in this once-neglected field. Timely and fascinating, this volume is organized chronologically and then by topic, covering studies of women and health in the colonial and revolutionary periods and the nineteenth century through the Civil War. The remainder of the book concentrates on the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries and addresses such controversial issues as body image and physical fitness, sexuality, fertility, abortion and birth control, childbirth and motherhood, mental illness, women's health care providers (midwives, nurses, physicians), and health reform and public health. Review "Superb."— Isis "Highly recommended for everyone interested in women's health."— Journal of the American Medical Women's Association "Should be on everyone's reference shelf."— Women's Studies in Indiana "Leavitt is to be commended for selecting pieces which highlight the major debates."— Women's Review of Books "It's a pleasure, as well as useful, to have such a range of excellent work in one book."— Journal of the History of Medicine "[Leavitt's] approach ensures that women's history will meet high standards and, in fact, raises the standards of historical scholarship."— Bulletin of the History of Dentistry "This anthology may be just the prescription to cure a current deficiency disease, to supply in one place the information that has been sadly lacking in historical treatments of women as patients and practitioners."— Mobius About the Author Judith Walzer Leavitt is Ruth Bleier Professor of History of Medicine, History of Science, and Women’s Studies and the associate dean of faculty at the medical school, University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her many books include The Healthiest City and Sickness and Health in America, both also available from the University of Wisconsin Press, as well as Typhoid Mary and Brought to Bed: Childbearing in America 1750–1950.

Investigative reporter Edward Jay Epstein defines the seldom seen universe of intelligence and counterintelligence.Set in the era of the Cold War, it explores the ultimate art of nations: Winning without fighting, or, in a single word, deception. It concerns, as James Jesus Angleton described it to the author, " a state of mind -and the mind of the state." With a new Preface (2014)Praise For Edward Jay Epstein"Epstein delves deep into the wheels-within-wheels of superpower intelligence and counterintelligence, showing ways in which the CIA and the KGB have been "provoked, seduced, lured into false trails, blinded, and turned into unwitting agents." Readers will find new information here on a multitude of subjects: programs involving CIA-written books published under defectors' names; the story of Yuri Nosenko, a KGB officer who defected in 1963 and was "at the heart of everything that happened at the CIA for a decade"; and the theories of James Angleton, the former CIA chief of counterintelligence, on the hidden motives of KGB super-mole Kim Philby. The book concludes with an ominously plausible argument that Gorbachev's glasnost is merely the sixth phase in a grand strategy of Soviet deception conceived soon after the Bolshevik Revolution. Highly recommended."---Publishers Weekly"Epstein's account of the world of intelligence is fascinating, instructive, and, in parts, sensational."-Irving Kristol American Enterprise Institute"This is an important book that reflects an epoch in United States counterintelligence operations and philosophy."-William R. Harris The RAND Corporation"A brilliant investigator examines the fascinating history of glasnost and the unseen motives and machinery of the Soviet state."-Lou Dobbs, CNN

Stories abound of immigrant Jews on the outside looking in, clambering up the ladder of social mobility, successfully assimilating and integrating into their new worlds. But this book is not about the success stories. It's a paean to the bunglers, the blockheads, and the just plain weird—Jews who were flung from small, impoverished eastern European towns into the urban shtetls of New York and Warsaw, where, as they say in Yiddish, their bread landed butter side down in the dirt. These marginal Jews may have found their way into the history books far less frequently than their more socially upstanding neighbors, but there's one place you can find them in force: in the Yiddish newspapers that had their heyday from the 1880s to the 1930s. Disaster, misery, and misfortune: you will find no better chronicle of the daily ignominies of urban Jewish life than in the pages of the Yiddish press. An underground history of downwardly mobile Jews, Bad Rabbi exposes the seamy underbelly of pre-WWII New York and Warsaw, the two major centers of Yiddish culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With true stories plucked from the pages of the Yiddish papers, Eddy Portnoy introduces us to the drunks, thieves, murderers, wrestlers, poets, and beauty queens whose misadventures were immortalized in print. There's the Polish rabbi blackmailed by an American widow, mass brawls at weddings and funerals, a psychic who specialized in locating missing husbands, and violent gangs of Jewish mothers on the prowl—in short, not quite the Jews you'd expect. One part Isaac Bashevis Singer, one part Jerry Springer, this irreverent, unvarnished, and frequently hilarious compendium of stories provides a window into an unknown Yiddish world that was.

Stories abound of immigrant Jews on the outside looking in, clambering up the ladder of social mobility, successfully assimilating and integrating into their new worlds. But this book is not about the success stories. It's a paean to the bunglers, the blockheads, and the just plain weird—Jews who were flung from small, impoverished eastern European towns into the urban shtetls of New York and Warsaw, where, as they say in Yiddish, their bread landed butter side down in the dirt. These marginal Jews may have found their way into the history books far less frequently than their more socially upstanding neighbors, but there's one place you can find them in force: in the Yiddish newspapers that had their heyday from the 1880s to the 1930s. Disaster, misery, and misfortune: you will find no better chronicle of the daily ignominies of urban Jewish life than in the pages of the Yiddish press. An underground history of downwardly mobile Jews, Bad Rabbi exposes the seamy underbelly of pre-WWII New York and Warsaw, the two major centers of Yiddish culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With true stories plucked from the pages of the Yiddish papers, Eddy Portnoy introduces us to the drunks, thieves, murderers, wrestlers, poets, and beauty queens whose misadventures were immortalized in print. There's the Polish rabbi blackmailed by an American widow, mass brawls at weddings and funerals, a psychic who specialized in locating missing husbands, and violent gangs of Jewish mothers on the prowl—in short, not quite the Jews you'd expect. One part Isaac Bashevis Singer, one part Jerry Springer, this irreverent, unvarnished, and frequently hilarious compendium of stories provides a window into an unknown Yiddish world that was.

"Profound, vital and correct. Hirsch highlights the essence of our American being and the radical changes in education necessary to sustain that essence. Concerned citizens, teachers, and parents take note! We ignore this book at our peril."-- Joel Klein, former Chancellor of New York City Public Schools Now in paperback, the bestselling author of Cultural Literacy delivers a powerful manifesto on the failures of America's early education system and its impact on our current national malaise, advocating for a shared knowledge curriculum students everywhere can be taught--an educational foundation that can help improve and strengthen America's unity, identity, and democracy. In How to Educate a Citizen, E.D. Hirsch continues the conversation he began thirty years ago with his classic bestseller Cultural Literacy, urging America's public schools, particularly at the elementary level, to educate our children more effectively to help heal and preserve the nation. Since the 1960s, our schools have been relying on "child-centered learning." History, geography, science, civics, and other essential knowledge have been dumbed down by vacuous learning "techniques" and "values-based" curricula; indoctrinated by graduate schools of education, administrators and educators have believed they are teaching reading and critical thinking skills. Yet these cannot be taught in the absence of strong content, Hirsch argues. The consequence is a loss of shared knowledge that would enable us to work together, understand one another, and make coherent, informed decisions. A broken approach to school not only leaves our children under-prepared and erodes the American dream but also loosens the spiritual bonds and unity that hold the nation together. Drawing on early schoolmasters and educational reformers such as Noah Webster and Horace Mann, Hirsch charts the rise and fall of the American early education system and provides a blueprint for closing the national gap in knowledge, communications, and allegiance. Critical and compelling, How to Educate a Citizen galvanizes our schools to equip children with the power of shared knowledge.

The turn of the century was a time of explosive growth for American cities, a time of nascent hopes and apparently limitless possibilities. In Children of the City, David Nasaw re-creates this period in our social history from the vantage point of the children who grew up then. Drawing on hundreds of memoirs, autobiographies, oral histories and unpublished—and until now unexamined—primary source materials from cities across the country, he provides us with a warm and eloquent portrait of these children, their families, their daily lives, their fears, and their dreams. Illustrated with 68 photographs from the period, many never before published, Children of the City offers a vibrant protrait of a time when our cities and our grandparents were young.

"This is a book for everyone who has developed an unexpected nostalgia for political 'norms' during the Trump years . . . Other books on the Trump White House expertly detail the mayhem inside; this book builds on those works to detail its consequences." —Carlos Lozada (one of twelve books to read "to understand what's going on") "Perhaps the most penetrating book to have been written about Trump in office." —Lawrence Douglas, The Times Literary Supplement The definitive account of how Donald Trump has wielded the powers of the American presidency The extraordinary authority of the U.S. presidency has no parallel in the democratic world. Today that authority resides in the hands of one man, Donald J. Trump. But rarely if ever has the nature of a president clashed more profoundly with the nature of the office. Unmaking the Presidency tells the story of the confrontation between a person and the institution he almost wholly embodies. From the moment of his inauguration, Trump has challenged our deepest expectations of the presidency. But what are those expectations, where did they come from, and how great is the damage? As editors of the “invaluable” ( The New York Times ) Lawfare website, Susan Hennessey and Benjamin Wittes have attracted a large audience to their hard-hitting and highly informed commentary on the controversies surrounding the Trump administration. In this book, they situate Trump-era scandals and outrages in the deeper context of the presidency itself. How should we understand the oath of office when it is taken by a man who may not know what it means to preserve, protect, and defend something other than himself? What aspects of Trump are radically different from past presidents and what aspects have historical antecedents? When has he simply built on his predecessors’ misdeeds, and when has he invented categories of misrule entirely his own? By setting Trump in the light of history, Hennessey and Wittes provide a crucial and durable account of a presidency like no other.

The many con men, gangsters, and drug lords portrayed in popular culture are examples of the dark side of the American dream. Viewers are fascinated by these twisted versions of heroic American archetypes, like the self-made man and the entrepreneur. Applying the critical skills he developed as a Shakespeare scholar, Paul A. Cantor finds new depth in familiar landmarks of popular culture. He invokes Shakespearean models to show that the concept of the tragic hero can help us understand why we are both repelled by and drawn to figures such as Vito and Michael Corleone or Walter White. Beginning with Huckleberry Finn and ending with The Walking Dead , Cantor also uncovers the link between the American dream and frontier life. In imaginative variants of a Wild West setting, popular culture has served up disturbing--and yet strangely compelling--images of what happens when people move beyond the borders of law and order. Cantor demonstrates that, at its best, popular culture raises thoughtful questions about the validity and viability of the American dream, thus deepening our understanding of America itself.

Homicide has many social and psychological implications that vary from culture to culture and which change as people accept new ideas concerning guilt, responsibility, and the causes of crime . A study of attitudes toward homicide is therefore a method of examining social values in a specific setting. Homicide in American Fiction, 1798-1860 is the first book to contrast psychological assumptions of imaginative writers with certain social and intellectual currents in an attempt to integrate social attitudes toward such diverse subjects as human evil, moral responsibility, criminal insanity, social causes of crime, dueling, lynching, the "unwritten law" of a husband's revenge, and capital punishment. In addition to works of literary distinction by Cooper, Hawthorne, Irving, and Poe, among others, Davis considers a large body of cheap popular fiction generally ignored in previous studies of the literature of this period. This is an engrossing study of fiction as a reflection of and a commentary on social problems and as an influence shaping general beliefs and opinions.

What does is it mean to be a citizen of the United States? Susan Griffin’s provocative investigation of that question takes us from the Declaration of Independence to the Iraq War, with many stops in between. Her conclusion: democracy is nothing less than a revolution of consciousness, and the revolution has just begun.

The Ojibwa Woman is a book written by Ruth Landes that explores the life and culture of the Ojibwa people, specifically focusing on the experiences of Ojibwa women. The book is based on Landes' fieldwork among the Ojibwa people in the early 1930s, during which she lived among the tribe and conducted extensive interviews with women to gain a better understanding of their lives, beliefs, and customs.The book covers a wide range of topics related to Ojibwa women, including their roles in the community, their relationships with men and other women, their experiences of motherhood and childbirth, and their spiritual beliefs and practices. Landes also explores the impact of colonialism and Christianity on the Ojibwa people, and the ways in which these forces have affected the lives of Ojibwa women.Throughout the book, Landes presents a nuanced and empathetic portrait of the Ojibwa people and their culture, drawing on her own observations and the insights of the women she interviewed. The book is a valuable resource for anyone interested in the history and culture of indigenous peoples, as well as for those interested in the experiences of women in different cultures and societies.This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the old original and may contain some imperfections such as library marks and notations. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions, that are true to their original work.

Often referred to as the city of the future, Los Angeles is known for its sprawl, its constant change, and its special relationship to the film industry. The twelve contributors to Looking for Los Angeles focus on dramatic shifts in the urban landscape, important moments in the city's architectural history, and the role of the image in this mecca of image makers. Dutch writer Cees Nooteboom searches for Los Angeles's center and finds a city that "breaks itself down, builds itself up again, displaces and regroups itself" and where "freedom of movement" is a basic premise of life. Historian Philip Ethington documents the city's changing character in both text and images, urban studies professor Dana Cuff exposes the demise of once-thriving urban neighborhoods to make way for Modernist housing projects, and anthropologist Susan A. Phillips invites us on a personal journey into "the projects" to meet gang members and their families today. Artist Robbert Flick offers a sixteen-page, full-color photo-essay that takes us on a "drive-by" along Alameda Avenue, architectural historian Thomas S. Hines traces Frank Lloyd Wright's influence on the life and career of photographer Edmund Teske, and film historian Robert L. Carringer examines Los Angeles as a setting for Hollywood feature films.

"'If we have the habit of freedom and the courage to write exactly as we think, ' as Woolf puts it in A Room of One's Own , writing like a woman simply means writing like what one actually is, in sickness and health, richer and poorer, belly and bowels, the consonants and the vowels too. We may have a general sense that women poets are more likely than men, at the present time, to write in detail about their bodies; to take power relationships as a theme; to want to speak with a strong rather than a subdued voice; are less likely to seek distance, more likely to seek intimacy, in poetic tone. But generalization would be foolish here. 'Woman poet, ' like 'American poet' or 'French poet' or 'Russian poet, ' allows--even insists on--diversity, while implying something valuable in common, some shared language and life, of tremendous importance to the poet and the poet's readers." --Alicia Ostriker