National Bestseller * One of the year's most acclaimed works of nonfiction A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: New York Times, Washington Post, New Yorker, Chicago Tribune, Kirkus, New York Post, Fast Company From legendary historian Adam Hochschild, a "masterly" (New York Times) reassessment of the overlooked but startlingly resonant period between World War I and the Roaring Twenties, when the foundations of American democracy were threatened by war, pandemic, and violence fueled by battles over race, immigration, and the rights of labor The nation was on the brink. Mobs burned Black churches to the ground. Courts threw thousands of people into prison for opinions they voiced--in one notable case, only in private. Self-appointed vigilantes executed tens of thousands of citizens' arrests. Some seventy-five newspapers and magazines were banned from the mail and forced to close. When the government stepped in, it was often to fan the flames. This was America during and after the Great War: a brief but appalling era blighted by lynchings, censorship, and the sadistic, sometimes fatal abuse of conscientious objectors in military prisons--a time whose toxic currents of racism, nativism, red-baiting, and contempt for the rule of law then flowed directly through the intervening decades to poison our own. It was a tumultuous period defined by a diverse and colorful cast of characters, some of whom fueled the injustice while others fought against it: from the sphinxlike Woodrow Wilson, to the fiery antiwar advocates Kate Richards O'Hare and Emma Goldman, to labor champion Eugene Debs, to a little-known but ambitious bureaucrat named J. Edgar Hoover, and to an outspoken leftwing agitator--who was in fact Hoover's star undercover agent. It is a time that we have mostly forgotten about, until now. In American Midnight, award-winning historian Adam Hochschild brings alive the horrifying yet inspiring four years following the U.S. entry into the First World War, spotlighting forgotten repression while celebrating an unforgettable set of Americans who strove to fix their fractured country--and showing how their struggles still guide us today.

From an award-winning historian, a stirring (and timely) narrative history of American labor from the dawn of the industrial age to the present day.

"In July 1913, twenty-five-year-old Annie Clements had seen enough of the world to know that it was unfair. She's spent her whole life in the coal-mining town of Calumet, Michigan where men risk their lives for meager salaries--and had barely enough to put food on the table and clothes on their backs. The women labor in the houses of the elite, and send their husbands and sons deep underground each day, dreading the fateful call of the company man telling them their loved ones aren't coming home. When Annie decides to stand up for herself, and the entire town of Calumet, nearly everyone believes she may have taken on more than she is prepared to handle"--

The topics covered in this book can be divided into four broad groups: studies of labour conditions up to the middle of the nineteenth century; studies in the 'new trade unionism' of 1889 to 1914; studies in the late nineteenth-century revival of Socialism in Britain; and more general topics covering a wider chronological span. The common factor in this wide-ranging work is that, unlike much other work of labour history, it concentrates on the working classes as such, and on the economic and technical conditions which allowed labour movements to be effective or which prevented their effectiveness. This work is notable not only for its clarity and incisiveness, but also for the richness and variety of the material, which ranges from Marx to Methodism and from labour traditions to the machine breakers.

The '80s Socialist movement and Labor; the Knights of Labor; Haymarket and May Day; Labor political action; The rise of the AFL; The Homestead strike; Coal creek and Cour d'Alene; American Railway Union; Pullman strike; Labor populism; Labor and the Spanish-American War; Labor and imperialism, more.

"Union membership in the United States has fallen below 11 percent, the lowest rate since before the New Deal. Longtime scholar of the American union movement Stanley Aronowitz argues that the labor movement as we have known it for most of the last 100 years is effectively dead. And he asserts that this death has been a long time coming--the organizing principles chosen by the labor movement at midcentury have come back to haunt the movement today. In an expansive survey of new initiatives, strikes, organizations and allies Aronowitz analyzes the possibilities of labor's renewal, and sets out a program for a new, broad, radical workers' movement"--

"A biography of Samuel Gompers, leader of the American Federation of Labor."--

At a time when many repentant leftists are proclaiming Marxism incapable of explaining the new phenomena of the last quarter of the twentieth century, Ernest Mandel reminds us that Marxism drew from its very inception on the advances of all the social sciences and emancipation movements of its time.In a survey of the multiple sources of Marx and Engels' theory, Mandel identifies the specific contribution of the two friends in the various disciplines to which they applied themselves: philosophy, political economy, social history, revolutionary organization, self-organization of the working class, emancipation movements, and internationalism. Concluding that Marxism "constantly learns from perpetually changing reality" and that it is the conscious expression of the real movement of workers toward self-emancipation, Mandel proposes a formula which provides for a dialectical interaction between innovation and the verification of established tenets.

They have a dream—a dream of a world where everything and everybody can be bought and sold, a world run efficiently by managers, a world where “freedom” means the free market. Maurice Glasman argues that this dream is an unrealizable utopia—or a nightmare if put into practice. He takes the tired old clichés of management-speak of the New Right and New Left alike and turns them on their heads: managers are not efficient, they are barriers to work and production. “Liberal democracy”—which now means the free market and the strong state—should be turned upside down, with democracy at the level of the economy and liberalism at the level of the state. Drawing on the work of Karl Polanyi, Glasman argues that there is no need to surrender solidarity and human rights to the march of the managers and the market. There is another tradition, represented by the labour movement and Catholic Church in postwar West Germany, and Solidarity in Poland before 1989, when statist communitarianism and the New Right took over. Unnecessary Suffering examines this tradition and issues a call that human beings and the environment cannot, should not, and will not be treated like commodities. For all workers drowning in a sea of dogma and management.memos, Unnecesary Suffering is necessary reading.

This text provides a detailed analysis of working class militancy between 1917 and 1923. It stresses the large scale and considerable impact of mass action and labour activism, challenging traditional interpretations that focus on the role of armed groups

Kennikat Press, 1971, Very good., Bright, clean, tight. No dust jacket. American History and Culture in the Twentieth Century. [American History, American Culture, Labor Unions, Political Science] Out-of-print and antiquarian booksellers since 1933. We pack and ship with care.

Samuel Gompers (1850–1924) devoted his life to improving the conditions of American workers through better wages, shorter workdays, and safer workplaces, achieved through common effort, democratic organization, and practical action. His objective was betterment, or, as he often said, "more." His moral vision was grounded in a commitment to social justice and a passion for service. A cigar maker by trade, he became the American Federation of Labor's first president in 1886 and, except for one year, remained its president until his death, guiding it through prosperity and recession, war and peacetime. By the time Gompers died, the AFL was a major force on the national scene and had claimed over four million members. Gompers was a tireless writer and impassioned speaker, and he left behind an immense archive of articles and editorials, addresses and testimony before a variety of audiences, and extensive correspondence with allies and adversaries alike. His correspondents included trade unionists and political leaders, reformers and radicals, captains of industry defending their positions, and workers asking for help or advice. The twelve volumes of The Samuel Gompers Papers, edited by Stuart B. Kaufman, Peter J. Albert, and Grace Palladino, for the first time make Gompers' wide-ranging and complex documentary legacy accessible to scholars, students, historians, and serious readers in the labor movement and among the public at large. This invaluable comprehensive index provides a key to the Gompers volumes. It not only allows quick reference to individual documents but permits scholars to see at a glance the contours and emphases in subject matter and locate the substantive annotations of key individuals and unions, strikes and lockouts, conferences and meetings, and legislation and key concepts in the history of the Gompers era.