Life and Labor

Dimensions of American Working-Class History

Edited by Charles Stephenson & Robert Asher

Subjects: American Labor History
Series: SUNY series in American Labor History
Paperback : 9780887061721, 343 pages, September 1986
Hardcover : 9780887061738, 343 pages, September 1986

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Table of contents

A Note to Students

Acknowledgments

CHAPTER 1.
Dimensions of American Working-Class History

CHARLES STEPHENSON AND ROBERT ASHER

CHAPTER 2.
From Artisan to Proletarian: The Family and the Vocational Education of the Shoemaker in the Handicraft Era

WILLIAM MULLIGAN

CHAPTER 3.
Industrial Ecology and the Labor Process: The Redefinition of Craft in New England Textile Machinery Shops, 1820-1860

THOMAS LEARY

CHAPTER 4.
Worker and Community: Fraternal Orders in Albany, New York, 1845-1885

BRIAN GREENBERG

CHAPTER 5.
"There's Plenty Waitin' at the Gates": Mobility, Opportunity, and the American Worker

CHARLES STEPHENSON

CHAPTER 6.
The Dialectics of Bureaucratization: The Case of Nineteenth-Century American Railway Workers

WALTER LICHT

CHAPTER 7.
Industrial Safety and Labor Relations in the United States, 1865-1917

ROBERT ASHER

CHAPTER 8.
The Boycott and Working-Class Solidarity in Toledo, Ohio in the 1890s

GREGORY ZIEREN

CHAPTER 9.
Reforming Working-Class Play: Workers, Parks, and Playgrounds in an Industrial City, 1870-1920

ROY ROSENZWEIG

CHAPTER 10.
Dance Madness: New York City Dance Halls and Working-Class Sexuality, 1900-1920

KATHY PEISS

CHAPTER 11.
Women Workers, Work Culture, and Collective Action in The American Cigar Industry, 1900-1919

PATRICIA COOPER

CHAPTER 12.
Not So "Turbulent Years": A New Look at the 1930s

MELVYN DUBOFSKY

CHAPTER. 13

Fighting on the Domestic Front: Black Steelworkers During World War II

DENNIS DICKERSON

CHAPTER 14.
Life at the Rouge: A Cycle of Workers' Control

NELSON LICHTENSTEIN

CHAPTER 15.
Office Workers and Machines: Oral Histories of Rhode Island Working Women

VALERIE QUINNEY

Notes

Authors' Biographies

Index

Description

Life and Labor brings together the most stimulating scholarship in the field of labor history today. Its fifteen essays explore the impact of industrialization and technology on the lives of working people and their responses to the changes in society over the past one-hundred-fifty years. Focusing on the everyday life of working-class Americans, it discusses such topics as production technology, occupational mobility, industrial violence, working women, resistance to exploitation, fraternal organizations, and social and leisure-time activities.

The essays are written in a lively manner accessible to an undergraduate audience and also provide insights and a solid background for graduate students and scholars in the field of American labor and social history. The book presents the work of members of the generation of labor and social historians who matured in the 1970s and who are now establishing themselves as leaders in their fields.

Charles Stephenson is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Central Connecticut State University. Robert Asher is Associate Professor at The University of Connecticut, Storrs.

Reviews

"This collection is an excellent presentation of recent research in the new labor history. ..I regard the book as central to this field at this time. " — Irwin Yellowitz, The City College of the City University of New York

"This book presents vigorously and with consistency the work of a forceful and important younger generation of scholars. The articles represent the very best that is being done in this area. " — Daniel J. Leab, editor, Labor History