From the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend

From the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend
Author: Priscilla Murolo
Publisher: The New Press
Total Pages: 370
Release: 2018-08-28
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1620974495

Newly updated: “An enjoyable introduction to American working-class history.” —The American Prospect Praised for its “impressive even-handedness”, From the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend has set the standard for viewing American history through the prism of working people (Publishers Weekly, starred review). From indentured servants and slaves in seventeenth-century Chesapeake to high-tech workers in contemporary Silicon Valley, the book “[puts] a human face on the people, places, events, and social conditions that have shaped the evolution of organized labor”, enlivened by illustrations from the celebrated comics journalist Joe Sacco (Library Journal). Now, the authors have added a wealth of fresh analysis of labor’s role in American life, with new material on sex workers, disability issues, labor’s relation to the global justice movement and the immigrants’ rights movement, the 2005 split in the AFL-CIO and the movement civil wars that followed, and the crucial emergence of worker centers and their relationships to unions. With two entirely new chapters—one on global developments such as offshoring and a second on the 2016 election and unions’ relationships to Trump—this is an “extraordinarily fine addition to U.S. history [that] could become an evergreen . . . comparable to Howard Zinn’s award-winning A People’s History of the United States” (Publishers Weekly). “A marvelously informed, carefully crafted, far-ranging history of working people.” —Noam Chomsky

Two Nations, Indivisible

Two Nations, Indivisible
Author: Jamie L. Bronstein
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 237
Release: 2016-10-17
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1440838291

While examining the arguments made in favor of egalitarianism, this book debunks the notion that the United States is now or has ever been a nation offering equal opportunity to all. In the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson famously asserted that "all men are created equal." Likewise, social mobility—the idea that any child can grow up to be president—has been key to the myth of what makes America great. Yet the hard truth is that inequality of both opportunity and resulting condition has been a defining feature of America's story. Written by a comparative labor historian, this book combines economic and social history with intellectual history to reveal the major trends of inequality that have been evident in America from Revolutionary times through the present. The book opens with an introduction to the burgeoning issue of inequality in America. The following chronological chapters describe how inequality was manifest in various periods. Each chapter not only provides a full survey of the secondary literature related to the topic of inequality in the particular time period but also examines prescriptions from thinkers who espoused equality, including Thomas Paine, Thomas Skidmore, Henry George, Jane Addams, Upton Sinclair, and Harry Caudill. By assessing these and other arguments relevant to social change, the work helps readers understand the cases made for and against equality of opportunity and condition throughout U.S. history.

The Great Turning

The Great Turning
Author: David C. Korten
Publisher: ReadHowYouWant.com
Total Pages: 394
Release: 2009-02-20
Genre:
ISBN: 1442964480

Although the issues addressed in The Great Turning are global and universal, I have chosen to focus my analysis on the United States. It is the nation among all others that is most challenged by the imperatives of the Great Turning. Few other nations are so accustomed to living beyond their own means, so imbued with a sense of special virtue and entitlement, or so burdened by a political leadership as out of touch with global reality and as incapable of accepting responsibility for the consequences of its actions. Because of its global presence, whether the United States responds to the imperatives with the logic of Empire or the logic of Earth Community is likely to have far-reaching consequences for all nations. Furthermore, the United States is the nation of my birth, the nation I know best and love most, and the nation for whose role in the world I feel most responsible.

Protests and Riots

Protests and Riots
Author: Michael V. Uschan
Publisher: Greenhaven Publishing LLC
Total Pages: 114
Release: 2010-06-11
Genre: Young Adult Nonfiction
ISBN: 1420513060

While no official constitution directly grants the right to protest, it is an exercise that citizens of all nations are granted to express discontent. Readers will evaluate this powerful tool, its strengths, and its weaknesses. They will look at antigovernment events, workers' rights, racial, gender, sexual orientation, and war riots and protests. Lastly, they will evaluate urban unrest.

Radicals in the Barrio

Radicals in the Barrio
Author: Justin Akers Chacón
Publisher: Haymarket Books
Total Pages: 423
Release: 2018-06-26
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1608467767

Radicals in the Barrio uncovers a long and rich history of political radicalism within the Mexican and Chicano working class in the United States. Chacón clearly and sympathetically documents the ways that migratory workers carried with them radical political ideologies, new organizational models, and shared class experience, as they crossed the border into southwestern barrios during the first three decades of the twentieth-century. Justin Akers Chacón previous work includes No One is Illegal: Fighting Racism and State Violence on the U.S.-Mexico Border (with Mike Davis).

Popular Longing

Popular Longing
Author: Natalie Shapero
Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
Total Pages: 72
Release: 2021-02-18
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 1619322358

The poems of Natalie Shapero’s third collection, Popular Longing, highlight the ever-increasing absurdity of our contemporary life. With her sharp, sardonic wit, Shapero deftly captures human meekness in all its forms: our senseless wars, our inflated egos, our constant deference to presumed higher powers—be they romantic partners, employers, institutions, or gods. “Why even / look up, when all we’ll see is people / looking down?” In a world where everyone has to answer to someone, it seems no one is equipped to disrupt the status quo, and how the most urgent topics of conversation can only be approached through refraction. By scrutinizing the mundane and all that is taken for granted, these poems arrive at much wider vistas, commenting on human sadness, memory, and mortality. Punchy, fearlessly ironic, and wickedly funny, Popular Longing articulates what it means to share a planet, for better or more often for worse, with other people.